Lakewood -The six fidgety kids seated around a large table know the routine.
On this particular Monday morning, they have 90 minutes to master vowel sounds, consonants, prefixes, root words and a funny thing called a “schwa” – a neutral sound any vowel can make, depending on the letters next to it. That’s not to mention 30 new vocabulary words by Friday.
So when teacher Miranda Chitze launches into an animated, fast- paced series of reading drills, they manage to keep up in a rhythm that’s almost mesmerizing.
“A. Apple. Ahh!”
“E. Ed. Eh!”
“I. Itch. Ih!”
“O. Octopus. Au!”
Ideally, children learn basic reading skills by the third grade. But Chitze is a teacher at Alameda High School. And these six students are ninth-graders who struggle with literacy and the frustration of reading at the level of much younger kids.
Across the nation, secondary schools are treading into territory once considered the domain of primary schools. They are teaching adolescents to read.
In Colorado, from Commerce City to the San Luis Valley, middle and high school students are getting intense reading instruction as administrators acknowledge – and test scores show – that many students are not reading at grade level.
Schools are reporting some success. At Jefferson County’s O’Connell Middle School, for example, about half of the roughly 400 students who were enrolled in a literacy intervention class have moved back into their proper grade-level reading class.
“There has been a lot of focus for early intervention for elementary schools, but we’re realizing now there are many students who wind up in our (secondary) schools who do not have basic skills,” said Joy Perry, director of instructional support in the Fort Morgan Re-3 School District, which is in its second year of offering remedial reading courses to roughly 150 middle and high school students.
Millions of students behind
As many as 6.3 million U.S. secondary school students – those in grades seven through 12 – are reading below grade level, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that focuses on improving high school graduation rates.
In Colorado, 30 percent to 40 percent of eighth-graders are not proficient readers, said Allison Layland, a literacy consultant with the Colorado Department of Education.
“Many of those students would struggle reading the average newspaper or grade-level textbook,” she said.
Back at Alameda High, Chitze flips through flash cards and rattles off literacy facts. Q and U are “buddy letters” because they’re never separate. “Ped” refers to feet – as in pedestrian, and pedicure. And “Y,” she says, “is a nasty little letter”; it makes four sounds – Yuh, EEE, I and Uh, as in “Egypt.”
They laugh at her jokes and tell her she’s “down” – as in hip – a compliment.
She knows her class is the last her students want to take. “It’s awful” when they learn they need reading, she said. “They’re humiliated.”
She keeps the pace fast to keep them engaged, and because there is little time to waste when students are two or more grade levels behind.
“I have this sense of urgency to really help these kids,” she said.
Debbie Backus, chief academic officer in Jefferson County Public Schools, calls the adolescent reading problem a “national issue.”
Students are expected to master the mechanics of reading by third grade. But many have not had good instruction or come from homes where reading skills were not fostered, she said.
Higher expectations
And in the past, reading expectations were not as high as they are today, Backus said. “There are many kids we passed through who were not proficient in reading.”
Now, as schools face sanctions under the federal No Child Left Behind act when students test below grade level in reading, more and more districts are devoting longer periods to reading and expecting all teachers – even those trained to teach science, social studies and other content areas – to integrate reading techniques into lesson plans.
Among content teachers, there is a “gradual, grudging acceptance,” said Steve Houwen, science teacher at Alameda High who said he has seen literacy skills decline among students over the past 15 years.
Whether he’s teaching about mitosis or plant life, Houwen said, he now embeds reading strategies into lessons. For example, he requires students to write down words in their science textbooks that they don’t understand and paraphrase what they’ve read, rather than allowing them to copy text from the book.
“This is the reality,” he said.
For two years, the state Education Department has offered training to administrators in school districts where secondary students are reading below grade level, Layland said. Schools in the San Luis Valley, the Pikes Peak region and the Denver metro area have participated.
There is a particular push for districts to teach what is known as the “five essential components of reading” developed by a national reading panel in 2000. Students must grasp all five – phonemic awareness (the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in words), phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension – to read properly.
When students have gaps in any one of those components, their reading ability suffers, experts say. For example, a student may be able to read fluently but struggle with comprehending what was read, said Rafael Heller, senior policy associate for the Alliance for Excellent Education.
Ashley Garcia, 15, can relate.
“I could read the sentence over and over and still not understand,” she said.
Another issue, experts say, is poverty. Heller said kids who grow up in lower-income homes often come to school with weaker vocabularies, which can hurt their ability to understand what they’re reading.
A 1995 study found that a 3-year-old child growing up in a welfare family may have a 526-word vocabulary, compared with the 749 words a child in a working-class home may have. By contrast, a child in a professional home has 1,116 words, the study found.
Reading at home key
Experts also say kids who read at home bring better reading skills to school.
“Look and see how many books there are in the household,” Heller said. In a low-income household, “often there are none.”
Chitze’s students talk confidently about reading. They see themselves reading faster – rather than haltingly – and understanding words.
“I was afraid to read in front of everybody, and I’m not anymore,” Ashley Garcia said.
Carmen Montaño, 14, said since taking the literacy class, she raises her hand in class to read more.
“I used to read real quietly so no one would hear,” she said.
Student Jeremy Atencio said he used to spend so much time looking at a word he read that he would “forget what I was reading.”
Now the 14-year-old is reading John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” which surprises him.
“I feel like I read better than I used to,” he said.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-954-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
Some tips to help kids broaden vocabularies
Allison Layland, a secondary literacy consultant with the Colorado Department of Education, offers these tips for the parents of struggling readers: