How Reading Recovery Implementation Fails African American Students

November 20, 2012

Reading and literacy programs help many students catch up to their grade level.

But the way some programs are implemented can unintentionally discriminate against certain students.

UW–Madison education professor Catherine Compton-Lilly says that broad views of program effectiveness can overlook inequities that affect a program’s success. 

The widely used Reading Recovery program is designed to reduce the number of students who have extreme difficulty learning to read and write. It’s a 20-week term intervention of one-to-one tutoring for low-achieving first graders. Reading Recovery has been implemented in Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, and the United States, where it has operated for about 25 years.

While serving as a Reading Recovery teacher in a high-poverty school, Compton-Lilly became aware of consistent inequities in the ways the program met the needs of various groups of children. Her concerns focused on children whose life circumstances prevented them from taking full advantage of the program.  Due to life circumstances, the generaleffectiveness of an intervention program is not the same as the effectiveness of that program for particular groups of children, she emphasizes.

It’s necessary to look closely at who is counted, who obtains access, and who faces life situations that limit equitable access.

As a UW researcher, Compton-Lilly had the opportunity to carry out that close look. She examined a school district in the Midwest with a student population of more than 24,000. In recent years the percentage of European American students in the district decreased while numbers of students of color increased. Yet, of the 37 Reading Recovery teachers in the district, only one was African American, one Latina American, and one Asian American.

Compton-Lilly’s findings show what happens when policies are developed to serve the needs of children in dominant groups without considering how these policies affect other groups of children.

Many African American students were not well served by Reading Recovery. Some did not receive complete interventions, and some were hindered by policies that disadvantage children who bring diverse experiences to the classroom.

The good news is that African American children who complete the program do almost as well in reading and writing skills as their European American counterparts. When she lookedonly at children who completed the Reading Recovery program, Compton-Lilly found that success rates of both African American children and European American children were statistically comparable, although a gap remained between the two groups.

However, the rate of incomplete programs for African American children was more than twice the rate for European American children.  Incomplete programs occur when children move out of a school prior to completing the program or the school year ends before they have a chance to complete a full 20-week program.

As a Reading Recovery teacher, Compton-Lilly knew firsthand the stories of children such as Keisha, Shonda, and Walter who slipped through the cracks. The cultural diversity these and many other students brought to the program often went underappreciated. They also tended to disproportionately suffer from poverty, high mobility among schools with disparate reading programs, and inconsistent classroom experiences. These children did not easily fulfill the expectations of the 20-week reading intervention.

In her study Compton-Lilly made three related discoveries.

• Those African American students who did complete the program spent almost two more weeks in the intervention than did European American students.
• They attended almost four more sessions, on average, than did European America students. 
• African American students were absent from school 2 ½ more days than European American students. High mobility is an expected effect of poverty, but it appeared to differentially affect the 126 African American students compared to the 27 low income European American children in Compton-Lilly’s sample.

Implications for Program Implementation 
When Compton-Lilly counted only the children who completed the program, disproportionate numbers of African American students were removed from the sample, giving a skewed result. That’s in part because more African American than European American families move, and the children are unable to complete Reading Recovery.

Compton-Lilly says her findings suggest that the current implementation of Reading Recovery is unfair to African American children in Wisconsin. While African American children who complete the program do almost as well as their European American counterparts, too many African American children do not complete the program for a range of reasons, and so their needs are not met.

But Reading Recovery implementation can be made more equitable. Compton-Lilly offers these suggestions.

• If a student moves to a new school in the same district, former teachers could continue to provide Reading Recovery services to the student at the new school. Alternatively, transportation could be provided to enable the student to stay in the former school after the family moves.
• The tasks used at Reading Recovery entry and exit were created in the 1960s. They represent a narrow range of literacy abilities that reflected criteria generally acceptedat that time for reading competence in schools for students of the dominant culture. Today’s students bring to their classrooms more diverse cultural backgrounds and funds of knowledge, which teachers and programs should consider. These children bring alternative experiences to school and are likely to find the Reading Recovery tests challenging. Entry test scores differences may not be due to children’s deficits; rather, they highlight the mismatch between children’s experiences and the program tasks.
• Compton-Lilly says, once we recognize that children bring different experiences to classrooms, and that existing assessments may represent extra challenges for some groups of children, we must provide children with the opportunity to learn the things that are associated with school success. Efforts must be made to locate or create texts that resonate with the experiences of all children.
• Llarger social issues must be addressed, including social policies that impact children and families. Policies related to health services, employment, housing, and social services are systemic and relevant to the lives of children. They also disproportionately affect African American students. 
• Compton-Lilly says, “We must continue to ask ourselves how can we learn to see what is not seen and learn to count those who are not counted.”

More about Compton-Lilly’s work is available here.