At City Springs Elementary, where phonics ruled instruction last year, first-graders sounded out words in twice-daily reading classes, drilled relentlessly with a teacher and an aide and took ,, weekly tests.

At Lyndhurst elementary, children memorized lists of words and read aloud from storybooks; their classrooms had no aides and some teachers rarely gave diagnostic tests.

While the reading instruction at the two schools couldn't have been more different, their students' results on citywide tests released last month, it turns out, were equally mediocre.

The first-grade average at both schools was 1.4, which means the children finished the year six months below second-grade level (2.0). The schools also were a month behind the lackluster city average of 1.5.

Testing experts warn against drawing too many conclusions from standardized tests given to very young children. But the experiences at both schools seem to underscore what reading experts have been saying for years: Neither phonics alone nor a literature-rich program can give young readers everything they need.

Children need both, in the proper order -- phonics first, then literature.

The phonics drills at City Springs and the word-memorization at Lyndhurst took students only halfway to their mutual goal -- reading on grade level. The average first-graders at both schools reached the same middling mark, but they arrived at it from opposite directions.

"At the end of the year I had some kids who couldn't read what you just put in front of them, but they could read the words we knew," says Lyndhurst first-grade teacher Garrison Brodie, whose students scored in the low to middle range on the test. "I think they needed more phonics."

The two schools, threatened with state takeover and striving to raise abysmally low reading scores, had set out in September 1997 on what each hoped would be the road toward academic redemption. City Springs undertook its second year with the boot camp-tough Direct Instruction program, funded by the Abell Foundation and supervised by the Baltimore Curriculum Project. Lyndhurst rewrote its school improvement plan to stress teacher training but opted to continue reading instruction with whole-language texts, much as it and other city schools have done for the last decade.

Encouraged by progress

Though their students' scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, given in May, were not what either school had wanted, each was encouraged by the progress the children achieved.

"I had hoped we would do better," says City Springs principal Bernice Whelchel, whose students' reading scores on state tests two years ago were among the lowest in the city, "but just reaching the city average is a big accomplishment for City Springs."

Lyndhurst principal Elaine Davis retired at the end of the year and declined to be interviewed. But teachers at the West Baltimore school stressed that they believed their children benefited from the school's emphasis upon building vocabulary.

Classroom walls of the school were covered with words and children memorized lists for spelling tests each week.

Importance of variety

Like the other first-grade teachers at Lyndhurst, first-grade teacher Betty Pierce expected her students to glean the meaning of new words from the context of the stories they read. But Pierce, whose students' scores were the highest at Lyndhurst, also recognized that her students needed to learn how to "sound out" words to be able to read fluently.

A veteran of 30 years, Pierce used a homemade kit of plastic animals and cardboard letters to teach phonics until mid-year when phonics books were purchased for first-graders.

For Pierce, variety was important. "Different children learn in different ways," Pierce said. "With the variety I gave them, every child got something that would help them."

Poverty's effects

Lyndhurst, like most city schools, this year will use the phonics-based Open Court curriculum to teach reading. Brodie and Pierce say they welcome the new program's formalized training in phonics, but they worry that its structure doesn't leave enough time for their free-form vocabulary lessons.

"Last year what I did was 10 percent to maybe 20 percent phonics," says Brodie. "This year is like 90 percent phonics. I love the new phonics program, but I'm not sure how it will affect the children to not have the vocabulary."

City Springs, by contrast, relied almost exclusively on phonics, teaching its students to recognize letters, then words. The drills were stripped down to the essentials to avoid confusing young readers. Lessons built one upon the other.

The vocabulary, too, was purposefully constrained, as students were introduced to words only after they had mastered the sounds they comprised. In this way, even the weakest students learned to decipher simple sentences.

But as Whelchel and teachers now recognize, their children -- who are among the most impoverished in the city -- needed more help to develop their limited vocabularies. Although almost three-fourths of Lyndhurst's students are poor enough to qualify for free lunches, the depth of poverty at that school is not nearly as severe as it is at City Springs, where almost all the children come from some of the city's worst housing projects.

"Our children are coming to school with vocabularies of less than 2,000 words and so we're definitely working at a disadvantage," says Whelchel.

City Springs teachers, who will continue using Direct Instruction, this year are reading aloud more and by giving the children more 'fun' books to bolster vocabulary development, Whelchel said.

The methodical progress of Direct Instruction, which allows students to move to a higher level only after they have mastered their current work, is widely hailed as one of the program's strengths. But at City Springs, the progress for many students was too slow, Whelchel and Direct Instruction experts say.

About two-thirds of the children at City Springs began first-grade unable to read at all, and then didn't move through the early books quickly enough to learn everything they needed to know to perform well on standardized tests, Direct Instruction experts say. Only the top class finished the material Direct Instruction experts say children should complete by the end of first grade.

The goal now, at City Springs, is to teach children to read by the end of kindergarten, as many Direct Instruction schools do.

"We always said there wouldn't be results this year [on standardized tests]," says Muriel Berkeley, director of the Baltimore Curriculum Project which is helping City Springs and 14 other schools implement Direct Instruction. "Until we get the children into the higher levels on the DI program, [their progress] is not going to show on standardized tests."

Range in skills

At both schools, there was a wide range between the highest and lowest test scores. Harriet Brown's class at City Springs and Pierce's class at Lyndhurst delivered averages almost on grade level, 1.9 and 1.8 respectively. Within each class were groups of stellar performers.

Fourteen of Brown's students, or more than half the class, scored above grade level, including one child with a third-grade score. Several of the students also did exceptionally well on the vocabulary portion of the test, recognizing words that third-, fourth- and fifth-graders are expected to know.

Pierce had eight students who scored above grade level, including one with a third-grade ranking. Brown had a few poor performers who brought the class average down while Pierce had more students in the middle range.

The middle classes -- two at Lyndhurst and one at City Springs -- also performed roughly the same at both schools, with scores that ranged from 1.3 to 1.5.

Then there were the bottom classes. Their failures were forecast last fall when new teachers at both schools were overloaded with the most difficult students.

Each classroom, handicapped from the start, gained only four months of learning, and both ended the year below first-grade level on the test.

"The big difference between [high- and low-scoring] classrooms is an alarm bell," says Marilyn Jager Adams, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and an author of the Open Court series.

Both schools, Adams says, should "look at these scores and be disappointed and try to figure out what they should do -- not just to smooth out the average but to move the bottom of the distribution up."

No easy answers

Standardized tests are good tools, Adams notes, to assess the general progress of a classroom and "to let schools know how far they have to go." But she and others say these same tests are too imprecise and broadly drawn to diagnose individual strengths.

Children who can recognize lots of words but may not be good readers can perform well on such standardized tests, says Robert E. Slavin, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University and creator of the "Success for All" education program. Likewise, children who have weaker vocabularies but are more proficient readers may do poorly.

The best way to determine how well children actually can read, Slavin says, is to have them read aloud and then test their comprehension.

And as Adams notes, there are no quick fixes to be found in the scores of standardized tests.

"Every test score should be looked at as one noisy little data point to be interpreted against everything else," says Adams, adding. "The basic point? Beginning to read is very complex."

Pub Date: 10/03/98