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BEST PRACTICES - STRUGGLING READERS Deputy Superintendent of Instructional Services Los Angeles Unified School District

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In 1999, Ronni Ephraim helped implement a standardized elementary-reading program in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest district in the nation. The program, called Open Court, was met with mixed reviews. Although it provided teachers with a guide to instruct students in English language arts standards, it was criticized for its rigidity and for limiting a teacher’s unique teaching methods. Six years later, the district has seen test scores go up, although Ephraim had expected more dramatic improvement.

Today Ephraim oversees the instruction of more than 400,000 students as the district’s deputy superintendent of instructional services. In addition to Open Court, she has developed and implemented many of the district’s key instructional reforms, including the district’s Secondary Literacy Plan. Talking with Scholastic Administr@tor, Ephraim dissects what works in the programs she oversees, and why she’s in a rush for better results.

What has been the effect of NCLB in the classroom?
NCLB has really put a focus on disaggregated data and forcing harder conversations about equity and access to rigorous curriculum for all students. We still have many people who believe that Open Court is too difficult for English learners. We have politicians who believe that putting English learners into English programs is not appropriate. NCLB has put a focus on us at the central office to communicate much more clearly about the urgency to ensure that all students have access to quality instructional materials and instruction.

NCLB calls for all teachers to be highly qualified, but it defines “highly qualified” as those teachers who have their credentials before entering the classroom. What NCLB fails to understand is that to really address the achievement gap, we have to recognize that teachers need to be expert teachers. That is not measured in years, but in quality.

How do you implement a standardized curriculum?
First, you need to ensure that the curriculum is in line with what you expect kids to know and be able to do. The second piece is to ensure that the instruction is effective. Once you have effective teaching, you have to monitor it on an ongoing basis so that teachers know how their students are doing, and they know whether their teaching is successful. And principals need to know where they have to give teachers more support and where they have to put their efforts into professional development.

How do you assess the effectiveness of this kind of program?
At the end of every unit, teachers administer a periodic assessment to every student in the district. This system helps teachers understand how their students are progressing. When a teacher has taught a unit and has two students who don’t do well, teachers need to intervene with the children. If 20 out of 20 students are at an intensive stage, the principal needs to address the teaching. When the data show that an entire grade level or an entire school has weak periodic assessment results, the district needs to intervene with the principal and discuss professional development plans to address these issues.

What happens when those assessments show poor results?
If the curriculum hasn’t been learned, we need to find out why. We need to find out if it’s because our teachers don’t understand how to teach it or if it’s because teachers just don’t believe in the initiative. Or they don’t believe it’s right for certain students. Or they believe it’s too hard. We need to find out those kinds of things. As leaders in this district, we need to have those conversations and be frank about it.

In a standardized curriculum, where does supplemental instruction come into play?
We have groups of students who still struggle, even with excellent teaching. We need to ensure that supplemental instruction is aligned to the core instruction. I don’t mean it’s the same. I mean that if a student is struggling in comprehension, we don’t put them into an intervention classroom where they’re learning the alphabet.

How does technology support supplemental instruction?
Technology enables us to zero in explicitly on what the student needs. Technology allows us to intervene in a very timely manner because it allows us to link the needs of the students to the supplemental instruction. When students are struggling with fluency, we might need a supplemental program to concentrate on fluency. Our adopted program includes in-class interventions, but some students may need more in-depth support.

How do you choose what supplemental instruction to use?
You have to be purposeful about what you add into the core. When we began our District Reading Initiative in 1999, hundreds of vendors contacted me and told me that they had the piece that was missing from Open Court. All of a sudden, everything was aligned to Open Court because everybody wanted to provide us with supplemental pieces.
My job was to be the gatekeeper of that. I knew that if we were going to add pieces in, we had to make sure that whomever we worked with first understood our core. [Vendors] had to either tailor supplemental pieces for us, or work with us so that we were very clear on where those instructional programs provide added value and coherence.

How do you address literacy at the secondary level?
Secondary teachers should not have to teach reading. If we are successful at the elementary level, our secondary teachers should be concentrating on teaching children how to become literate in the content or in the discipline. In a social studies class, teachers teach the language arts standards through the discipline of social studies. When a teacher assigns a report, she’s linking the language arts standards to her content area. We call that content literacy.

In English class, teachers continue to teach students to read. We need to move away from the idea that in K–3, students are learning to read, and in third on up, students are reading to learn. We are always helping our students learn to read. We do have middle school and high school students who read at or below the third-grade level. These students need intensive intervention. That’s where we use supplemental instruction with technology to meet the diverse needs of these students.

What have the results been since 1999?
At the elementary level we have seen steady growth every year for six years. Every year our test scores have gone up, but not at the rate I would have hoped for. We have outpaced the state’s growth, which is incredible if you think about it—that we have more English learners and more children from poverty in our district than anywhere in the state. But we have a lot more to do. I am hoping for more spectacular growth next year.

Any theories about why you haven’t had the results you wanted?
I’m not patient. I sit here as somebody who’s leading this work, and I ask myself after six years why all elementary schools are not able to achieve NCLB benchmarks. I don’t know whether in 2014 every single student will be proficient or advanced, but I believe that NCLB has attainable targets at this point, and we have not reached those targets in every single school. So I ask myself, what do we need to do, as a district, to resource the schools where the students need the most help?

For instance, we have a coach in every school. Maybe it’s time for us to put two coaches in schools that have the most barriers to overcome. My job is to ask how we are allocating both human and fiscal resources to schools with the greatest needs.

What is your focus for the 2005–06 school year?
We are looking for evidence that the district’s adopted curriculum is in place at every school. We are refocusing our efforts so that every teacher and principal understands the why of the initiative. We have to provide higher quality professional development to engage our teachers and administrators in thinking about why we’ve put these pieces through our system. We need to stay the course and not look for a new quick fix. We have a renewal strategy, not a change strategy.

Photo: ©Ann Summa/Getty Images

 

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