When called upon to read aloud last fall, Anthony Branch slumped in his seat and hid his brown eyes behind a textbook.
In his first week of 2nd grade, the 7-year-old stammered over “again” and “think.”
While his 31 classmates filled their green and blue spiral notebooks with journal entries, Anthony stared out the windows of Room 204 at Dixon Elementary School in Chatham.
Lacking the ability to transform a jumble of vowels and consonants into words does not simply mean that Anthony could not delve into history, enjoy the mystery of science or crack word problems in math.
Experts say a child who cannot read proficiently by 4th grade is destined to a lifetime of educational failures. A child who grows into an illiterate adult faces slim chances for success.
But at Dixon, Anthony has one advantage thousands of youngsters like him do not. Dixon has made a first step toward solving a problem crippling countless other schools: how to teach proper reading skills to those most at risk of failure.
As local, state and federal officials demand more accountability from an underperforming education system, the nation’s classrooms are at a crossroads. In Chicago, even as some schools are improving, many problems resist reform and others are newly emerging.
In coming months, the Tribune will look at the hard lessons to be taken from the failures and successes in our schools. Only from inside the classroom, crammed with desks and noisy with pupils, can these lessons be gleaned, like deciphering half-erased words on a chalkboard.
No issue in education is more critical than reading, the avenue to all other learning.
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As many as 40 percent of U.S. 4th graders do not read at grade level, according to the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally funded test of the core subject areas. Even more disturbing, the numbers have remained static for two decades, despite aggressive and expensive literacy initiatives.
And pupils such as Anthony, who come from low-income, single-parent families, are even more at risk.
In Chicago public schools, where 86 percent of the pupils live in poverty, nearly two-thirds of pupils cannot read at grade level. And a recent study warned that elementary reading scores are flattening and gains are uneven among schools citywide. Predominantly African-American grammar schools are showing the slowest gains.
The National Institutes of Health considers the nation’s reading problem so pernicious, researchers there have labeled it a major threat to public health.
“School dropouts, teenage pregnancy, poor academic achievement, crime, all of these are downstream consequences of not learning to read,” said Reid Lyon, chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch at the NIH, which has studied reading difficulties in children for the last 33 years. “Reading serves as the foundation for other learning and, when people don’t learn how to read, they’ll have a tough time making it in life.”
As Chicago officials search for ways to improve reading scores, they need look no further than Dixon.
Last year, nearly 61 percent of Dixon pupils passed the state’s rigorous reading exam, dramatically outpacing the 41 percent who passed in the Chicago Public Schools system as a whole, and nearly matching the state average of 64 percent. The figure seems even more remarkable because Dixon’s 71 percent poverty rate–which experts say is the biggest determinant of academic failure–is nearly double the state average.
Last year, Dixon was one of 25 U.S. schools–and the only one in Illinois–to win the coveted Exemplary Reading Program award from the International Reading Association. “Each teacher in that building is a teacher of reading, and the reading instruction is based on sound research, which we don’t always see,” said Barbara Vines, chairwoman of the association’s Illinois award selection committee.
Snuggled between postwar bungalows in the black neighborhood of Chatham, Dixon has become a magnet for South Side parents who hopscotch over neighborhood schools to enroll there. Because it draws from a wide area, 71 percent of the 780 pupils come from low-income families, as determined by the federal free-lunch program.
All the children are African-American, and the halls and walls of the school celebrate them. The black, green and red African Liberation flag flutters below the American flag outside. A museum-quality collection of African paintings, sculptures and photographs crowds the corridors and the main office. A third-floor boutique, operated by Dixon pupils, offers African goods and works of art.
Principal Joan Crisler, a lightning bolt of energy packed into a small frame, reigns over the school. She patrols the hallways and peers into classrooms to make sure teachers are following lesson plans.
A native of Chicago’s South Side who spent 12 years in Catholic schools, Crisler became aware in the early 1990s that only 30 to 40 percent of her pupils passed the reading portion of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. (Last year, nearly 60 percent did.)
Crisler and her teachers embarked on a reading program that reaches from teacher to child to parent. They didn’t just create a curriculum, but a culture of literacy at the school.
Every day begins with an hourlong reading class and ends with 45 minutes of silent reading. Each class has a book club. The higher grades have literary circles. Pupils are taught phonics but immersed in great books. Parents attend nighttime seminars to help their children learn to read. And teachers spend at least 2 1/2 days a month working to improve their teaching methods.
“For our younger students, the focus is learning to read. For our older students, the focus is reading to learn,” said Crisler, who had planned on becoming a nun before choosing a career in teaching. “We make reading important to our students, not just something they have to do because they are in school, but something they should do to boost their knowledge and improve their lives.”
Like many of the low-income youngsters who walk through Dixon’s doors, Anthony had a slow start at reading.
When his mother, Rashaunn Brown, gave birth to her daughter Keyanna 14 years ago, she was enrolled in nursing school at Chicago State University. Brown lived with her mother, who worked at a bookstore and brought home armfuls of books for her granddaughter.
Keyanna attended preschool and knew how to read when she entered kindergarten. The talkative and energetic teenager has been an honor student ever since.
By the time Anthony was born, however, Brown had dropped out of nursing school. She was working full time as a saleswoman at Lady Foot Locker. She was living with, and taking care of, a sick grandmother. Money was scarce and Brown couldn’t afford preschool for her young son.
“I had so much on my plate it was hard to focus on helping Anthony,” Brown, 35, lamented.
But two years ago, Brown made what she termed “the toughest decision of my life” and moved out of her grandmother’s home into a two-bedroom garden apartment in Chatham. There, she hoped, she could concentrate on raising her children.
Still, when Anthony entered 1st grade at Dixon he struggled mightily, especially in reading. The soft-spoken youngster knew his ABCs. But his reading skills were rudimentary.
On a 1st-grade reading assessment, Anthony didn’t know the words “they” and “went.” Every time he saw the word “it” he said “to.” When he saw “get” he thought it was “got.”
His reading problem stunted his learning abilities. He brought home report cards filled with C’s and D’s. He got F’s on his spelling tests.
The normally well-behaved youngster had difficulty getting up for school. He came home exhausted and didn’t want to complete his homework. He was moody and withdrawn.
“My baby hated school,” Brown recalled. “He was eager to learn, but he couldn’t because he couldn’t read. He got so discouraged he about gave up.”
So a determined Brown scraped together $50 a week and found her struggling son a summertime tutor. She spent every night listening to Anthony read. She insisted that Keyanna take her brother to the library.
Still, when Anthony walked into Maureen Gallagher’s 2nd-grade classroom last September, he was reading only at a mid-1st-grade level.
He didn’t know how to employ reading strategies, such as using the context of a sentence to figure out a word, or decoding a word by breaking it into smaller, more recognizable ones. When he came upon a word he did not know, Anthony would sheepishly look to his teacher for help.
His confidence in his reading abilities shattered, Anthony cowered when Gallagher sought a student to read aloud.
On Sept. 6, Gallagher asked pupils to describe in their journals how they looked that day. Anthony wrote: “I look nis I have on a yellow thut and I have a RACO pese and I have blak here and bran sene I sees and I have bran ess. And it mas me happy whie sose.”
Dixon teachers sent Anthony to the lower reading level.
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“I tried my best,” the youngster recalled, casting his eyes to the ground. “I felt like I couldn’t read.”
Learning to read is not an instantaneous event. It’s not as if a light bulb goes off. It’s more like turning up a dimmer switch.
And when Room 204 staged its annual morning-long read-a-thon last month, it was clear Anthony’s dimmer switch had been cranked way up.
Sprawled on an aqua blanket, the reserved and quiet youngster quickly worked his way through a half-dozen books drawn from the white crate before him. He deftly corrected a classmate who stumbled over “whispered” and “squirmed” as the two read “Miss Nelson is Missing.”
And when Gallagher sought a volunteer to read aloud, the always perfectly groomed Anthony shot his hand into the air and jumped from his seat.
Standing before 31 classmates, the once-poor reader confidently made his way through “Five Silly Fishermen,” effortlessly sounding out the words “together,” “climbed” and “drowned,” peppering his oration with lively inflections. He never once glanced to Gallagher for help.
Today, the unmotivated student has become a fully engaged learner.
Anthony was one of the first in his class to land on the “25 Book Club” list. He dashes into class every morning and pins his homework to the board. He raises his hand, even if he doesn’t know the answer. He happily volunteers to read from personal journal entries that have become legible and lively.
Two weeks ago, Gallagher asked pupils to finish the sentence, “The weather today is…”
Anthony wrote: “Today is very very very cold outside. I think it is wendy outside because when I what outside the wend almost blow me down. The wendy wend almost blow my eyes out.”
Not perfect, but certainly an improvement. After two years of struggling, two years of laboring over the simplest words, Anthony had finally cracked the reading code.
“I’m better at it now,” he says proudly, with a dimpled grin.
Darting from the back doors of Dixon last week, Anthony rushed up to his mother, report card in hand. Together, the two nervously plucked the paper from its manila folder.
This time, it was filled with A’s and B’s. The reading grade had jumped from a C to a B. So, too, did the grades in grammar and spelling. Under the heading of “Books Read,” the number skyrocketed from 25 during the first quarter to 65 this quarter.
Brown stifled tears.
Her elated son jumped up and down.
“This is my best year,” he said.