» School works to make the grade

Whittier Elementary in Southeast Albuquerque has about 500 students. For about half of them, the primary language at home isn’t English. Nearly one-third are habitually truant. And the school received an F grade under the state’s new report card system.

Principal Cindy Bazner tells me all that with the steely practicality of someone who knows that public elementary schools are designed to take whoever comes in the door and teach them, regardless of the hurdles.

I was spending time at Whittier to see where the rubber meets the road in the state’s efforts to improve the reading skills of third-graders. Whittier is one of 10 schools in Albuquerque Public Schools with a full-time state-funded coach to help teach teachers how to teach reading.

Teacher Michelle Contreras’ little band of kindergartners was spread out across the room and rotating through four work stations during their reading hour. One group was spelling out three-letter words with letter tiles with the help of a volunteer grandparent. Another, with the help of an educational assistant, was squaring off in a race to find words on a bulletin board. Another was drawing pictures associated with rain and copying a simple sentence from the board on their own. Another group sat in fours and fives facing Contreras as she led them through some vocabulary words.

” ‘This’ is our brand-new word this week,” Contreras said and waited for each of the students to pick the letters for “this” from a pile of letter cards on their desks. When they all had the word on their desks, Contreras spelled it aloud for them and pronounced it, then asked the kids to do the same. Little fingers pointed to their cards: “T … H … I … S.” “This.”

Teacher Michelle
Contreras reads to her kindergarten class at Whittier Elementary in Albuquerque. (Pat vasquez-cunningham/journal)

Across the room, five kids were trying to spell out “pen.” One quickly pulled the correct letters from the pile of tiles, another got to the correct answer by repeating the letters several times, two others spelled out “pin” and one student put together the letters “dle.”

Contreras has 18 students and, as the “pen” exercise showed, their early language skills are all over the map.

Students are not separated by skill level – the idea is that struggling students benefit from working with students with higher-level skills – except in the small reading groups with Contreras. One of her groups was reading from a text filled with three- and four-letter words, while another group’s book had words like “icicles” and “thermometer.”

Sarah Kaer, Whittier’s instructional coach for reading, said a classroom like Contreras’ might employ a range of reading materials and techniques: from kids going to individual listening stations to listen to books through headphones; to the entire class listening along as the teacher reads to small groups; to “whisper reading” (which is just what it sounds like); to one-on-one pullouts with the teacher.

“There is no typical classroom,” Kaer told me, “because you’re looking at the group of students that you have and providing for their needs.”

Across the school campus, Brian Miner’s third-graders were talking about the benefits of community gardens when I dropped in on their reading lesson.

Around the room hung students’ descriptions of the various kinds of writing: fantasy, biography, nonfiction, historical fiction, myth, etc. Other displays on the bulletin board talked about how to find “textual evidence” in a piece of writing and how to compare and contrast two pieces of text using the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram.

The jump from kindergarten to third grade was obviously immense – and principal Bazner told me it needs to be. By the time students go on to fourth grade, they’re expected to be able to read on their own and pull out of texts the information they need for all their subjects.

Miner filled me in on the trajectory of the community garden lesson. He had started with a story from the textbook on community gardens. Students had read the piece, then read it again with him in small groups, then pulled vocabulary from the text and talked about word meanings, then moved on to identifying key points. Then Miner gave them a news article about school gardens, a more challenging piece than their textbook, and they went through the same process with that.

They were now comparing the texts by placing their key points on a Venn diagram on the front board: What pieces of information were unique to either article and what information was found in both?

Next, the 22 students would compose their own essays of a couple of paragraphs summarizing what they had read.

Mastering those skills puts a student in a much better position to handle the academic workload in higher grades and to navigate through life. What to do about students who don’t master those skills by the end of third grade is at the core of the two-year political argument about retaining more third-graders.

Last year, APS held back 49 of its 7,301 third-graders. Across the state, it was 287 of 25,738. Under the governor’s retention proposal the number of third-graders who are retained would be expected to jump to between 1,000 and 4,000.

The retention bill failed to win the support of lawmakers for the fourth time this month. The governor’s request to increase funding for in-school reading instruction coaches from $8.5 million to $13.5 million was trimmed to $11.5 million by lawmakers, which means there will be more money for more coaches like the one at Whittier in more schools next year.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal