So What Are Those Red Flags?

Yesterday I began blogging about a reading intervention called Reading Recovery.  So…What is RR? It is an intensive reading intervention intended for first graders who have been identified as “at risk” in reading. RR was developed by Marie Clay in New Zealand over 30 years ago!    A little dated don’t you think?

(RR) provides intensive, one-to-one, daily reading intervention time for first graders (no other grade) who are having trouble in reading. Students who are targeted for RR are the lowest performing students in the school as determined by the program’s Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (which, mind you, is not a norm referenced test…) Ah! So…the red flags are raising!

There are daily 30-minute intervention sessions that each highly trained RR teacher conducts with one student at a time (those of you budget conscious tax payers, DO THE MATH…this is a one-to-one intervention). AND the highly trained teacher must continue to train to keep the RR instructor status (this takes time and money)…another red flag!

What goes on during RR? Well, the teacher carries out a number of activities (reminder, they were designed 30 years ago) that are related to texts selected for the student’s reading level. These activities, such as: re-reading one or more previously introduced texts, identifying letters and words writing a story, hearing and writing sounds in words, cutting the story up and then reassembling and reading it, introducing a new book, and reading the new text are all skills that are hard to do if the student’s deficit is phonemic awareness)….red flag again!

Well, what about the data? Students are discontinued from RR when they are able to read texts that an average reader in the child’s class can read (remember this is not a standardized measure), can write a few sentences, and are “predicted to make progress without further individual instruction”. Predicted by whom? And what happens if the prediction is incorrect?...FINAL red flag!!

You can read for yourself the reviews.

Here’s a link to the WWC – the What Work’s Clearinghouse. Educators use this website to determine many things such as how good interventions are compared to others. In the VERY first sentence of the report, it states that RR has had positive effects on GENERAL reading achievement. But while most literature focuses on that, they usually inflate the fact that RR only has “potentially” positive effects on the other areas of reading.

http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/interventionreport.aspx?sid=420

From the Report - Reading Recovery® was found to have positive effects on general reading achievement and potentially positive effects on alphabetics, reading fluency, and comprehension for beginning readers.

Reading Recovery® 21 (+) 46 (+) 14 (+) 27 (++)
Sound Partners       21 (++) 19 (++) 21 (++) 9 (0)

http://www.readingrecoveryworks.org/pdfs/Reading_Recovery_Proven_Success.pdf

In examining the data in another chart, in comparison to other programs, one will find that while RR does have the highest rating in terms of general reading achievement potential, the others may have more potential in the other areas. For example, take Sound Partners (which I used as a principal in my first grades AND had much more success) which has POSITIVE(++) results across the board for all areas except general reading achievement – Let’s be honest here…What’s to recover anyway if the kids can’t read in the first place?

In the next blog, I will write about what you can do, as a parent, to advocate for your child if you feel as if your child is in an intervention such as RR and is NOT making progress.