CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. -- Nancy Chenard’s second-grade classroom is ready for reading: Her library is stocked, the phonics kits are prepared, a colorful bulletin board lists literacy learning activities and the rug is rolled out.
Though the classroom at Veterans Memorial Elementary School may seem like any other, it has one key distinction: Chenard, like other kindergarten through 2nd grade teachers in the district, is part of a rare charter school-traditional school partnership that has led to strong improvements in literacy in this impoverished Rhode Island school district.
“It’s built a community of readers,” Chenard said, referring to the “Growing Readers Initiative” created by The Learning Community, a public charter school in Central Falls, specifically for the school district. “There is so much partner work and partner talk, and reflecting and sharing, and the learning that's taking place … is very, very visible to us.”
The initiative has four components: professional development, quarterly assessments, a safety net run by reading specialists for struggling readers, and the “Reading Workshop,” a model popularized by Columbia’s Teachers College that ramps up peer-to-peer and student-teacher interaction in the learning process.
The Learning Community also provides a crafted curriculum that includes daily teaching points.
The partnership had its beginnings in 2007, after the new district superintendent, Dr. Frances Gallo, learned about The Learning Community’s academic success.
The Central Falls students had low marks in reading, and Gallo, who saw literacy as a key step to improving student performance and helping to end the cycle of poverty in this city near Providence, visited the charter school to see what they were doing to develop strong readers.
She liked what she saw: “I said, ‘Well, I want that success in my schools,’ and we began to build a bridge.”
Test scores chart the improvement since the partnership began: From October 2009 through June 2012, the percentage of K-2 students in the district’s elementary schools reading at or above benchmark on the state’s Developmental Reading Assessment grew from 37 percent to 65 percent.
Though Gallo met some resistance from staff wary of charter schools, she said the process helped to dispel some of the myths about those institutions, including that they simply cherry pick the best students. At The Learning Community, they hold an annual blind lottery.
“We had anticipated a long road of trying to convince superintendents to partner with us because at the time that would be very risky on a lot of fronts and so when she approached us it was … really wonderful because it just helped us to meet our mission of really actively
supporting other public schools,” said Meg O’Leary, one of the co-founders of the charter school.
“Everyone knows that it’s a political hot button to think about charter-traditional school partnership and so some superintendents see that as really risky in terms of them being able to get the support of their unions,” she added.
As Gallo found out, the K-8 charter school had similar demographics to the district: mostly Latino, on free or reduced price lunch, with around one quarter of its pupils being students whose first language isn’t English.
“When our kids come, they haven’t had preschool, they haven’t had books at home, they haven’t had the language at home, it’s like we're already behind,” Gallo said. “We’ve got to catch up.”
A drive through the city’s streets shows boarded up buildings in Central Falls’ roughly one square mile, where 25 percent of the residents live below the poverty line.
The district has weathered some tough challenges: The lone high school came under a searing national spotlight in 2010 as one of the country’s worst-performing schools, and state budget cuts of nearly $3 million in each of the last two years have led to reducing support staff, such as reading specialists.
The city, which filed for bankruptcy last year, does not make contributions to the schools since the area is so impoverished. The state took on full financial responsibility for the schools just over 20 years ago, Gallo said.
The Growing Readers Initiative pilot program began with four classes and now includes all of the district’s K-2 classrooms.
Gone are the rote textbooks that were once staples in Central Falls’ classrooms and still are in others. Now, teachers can choose any literature they think would best fit their students and the daily lessons.
They’re also better able to focus in on the reading ability of each student, by grouping them together.
“We've really made it our own, using The Learning Community’s framework and lessons,” said Chenard.
The school district had paid about $100,000 a year to The Learning Community for the program since 2009 when it went to all K-2 classrooms, O’Leary said.
The district can’t pay that this year, so The Learning Community applied for and received a grant from the state education department to cover the funding and continue the partnership, she added.
The Learning Community said their initiative wasn’t a “solution” to the district’s literacy challenges, emphasizing the constant exchange of ideas between each side.
“It's more than just the actual tools that we shared. It’s more about the collaboration and the work from teacher-to-teacher and the reflections and figuring out ways to help whenever there are obstacles,” said Christine Alves, The Learning Community’s director of external professional development. “I know for a fact … that's where the heart of it all lies, in the collaboration.”
The charter school will expand its work with Central Falls this year to cover standardized test taking, as Rhode Island gears up for the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a set of educational standards adopted by 45 states that goes into effect in 2014. The work has invigorated Central Falls teachers, who can see the reading program already positively filtering into the students’ learning in other subjects.
“They seem to, for the most part, have more of a love of reading and wanting to read,” said Cheryl Thurber, another second grade teacher at Veterans. “Not wanting to read because I said so, and not wanting to read, because it’s a punishment. They enjoy reading. I genuinely believe they enjoy it.”
A version of this story also appeared at NBCNews.com.
“We had anticipated a long road of trying to convince superintendents to partner with us because at the time that would be very risky on a lot of fronts and so when [Gallo] approached us it was … really wonderful because it just helped us to meet our mission of really actively supporting other public schools,” said Meg O’Leary, one of the co-founders of the charter school.
“I think it's all about building relationships,” Gallo said of the Growing Readers Initiative. “And I
think we started out in a very careful mode to honor what’s going on in every classroom because the teacher is the main agent of change and if we want to then change the teacher and
move with teaching strategies, then that happens over time through relationship building. And I think that’s exactly what The Learning Community has done with one-on-one support,
with right-there presence support, and with a very amiable sharing of materials, not like, ‘Here’s your silver bullet, swallow it.’”
“From the very beginning, everything seems to be coming into place,” said Heather Clark, who is a reading specialist that has worked with the Growing Readers Initiative since it began. “It seems very cohesive now. The kindergarteners now, by the time they are hitting second grade, you can see the skills that they have learned in kindergarten being reinforced and mastered and built upon.”
The engagement aspects of the reading program get “to a lot of the 21st century skills that are coming about with the Common Core, where students need to be communicators and they need to know how to have discussions and take turns with partners and things like that.”
“Some places assess student performance at the beginning of the year and then at the end of year, and that’s just really to put in your file,” Alves said. What we brought to Central Falls was specifically doing this one kind of assessment called the DRA (the Developmental Reading Assessment) four times a year. And that assessment gave the teachers a whole lot of information … on how their children were performing in comprehension, in accuracy of reading and also fluency..”
“The teachers have this great knowledge right there about their student, and they can make changes to how they are going to teach for the next two months” or quarter, she added. “They can actually target, ‘What am I going to teach these kids specifically to help them move from this level to the next level.'"
“From the very beginning, everything seems to be coming into place,” said Heather Clark, who is a reading specialist that has worked with the Growing Readers Initiative since it began. “It seems very cohesive now. The kindergarteners now, by the time they are hitting second grade, you can see the skills that they have learned in kindergarten being reinforced and mastered and built upon.”
The engagement aspects of the reading program get “to a lot of the 21st century skills that are coming about with the Common Core, where students need to be communicators and they need to know how to have discussions and take turns with partners and things like that.”
“They seem to have, for the most part, more of a love of reading and wanting to read,” said Cheryl Thurber, a second grade teacher at Veterans Memorial Elementary School, of her students. “Not wanting to read because I said so, and not wanting to read, because it’s a punishment. They enjoy reading. I genuinely believe they enjoy it.”
“From the very beginning, everything seems to be coming into place,” said Heather Clark, who is a reading specialist that has worked with the Growing Readers Initiative since it began. “It seems very cohesive now. The kindergarteners now, by the time they are hitting second grade, you can see the skills that they have learned in kindergarten being reinforced and mastered and built upon.”
The engagement aspects of the reading program get “to a lot of the 21st century skills that are coming about with the Common Core, where students need to be communicators and they need to know how to have discussions and take turns with partners and things like that.” The Learning Community
These interviews were conducted by NBC News’ Chelsea Clinton.
CC: Did the fact that the literacy curriculum was coming from a charter school increase your skepticism?
NC: The programs we were using before taught to the middle kid. It was geared and tailored and published for that middle kid sitting in front of you. And here, I mean you have 20 kids in a reading group and you have 20 individuals who learn differently. And with the Growing Readers' Initiative we do have that judgment to tailor our lessons to the kids who are in front of us. We're not following a scripted manual. We're not being told what to say, how to teach it, when to teach it. You have that freedom - your ability to use your professional judgment, what's best for those 20 kids in front of you. And it goes to the kids who are in the middle, it goes to the kids who are ready to thrive and it goes to the kids who may need a little remediation.
CC: Christine, how has the program evolved over the last few years?
CA: I saw hard working, dedicated, talented teachers to begin with. But in lots of districts they're giving teachers a script, literally expecting nothing more than teachers reading out loud from a book, leaving no room for their expertise, like you were saying, and no room for the different various needs of the children in your classroom. But now what I see are talented professionals who are empowered to plan curriculum, use targeted data and work together to really bring forth what's best for the students in their class so they make sure they are all learning.
CC: Could you break down exactly what happens in the classroom and what these different smart student strategies are that all of you use to such good effect?
CA: We begin reading class by sitting on the rug. The teacher gives a very targeted, specific lesson. It's a strategy that she knows will reach all the learners in the class, so everyone has access to it. For example, the lesson that Jill did today was that smart readers can use the heading in non-fiction texts to locate specific information. So no matter what level you're reading, if you're reading a non-fiction book you can use that strategy to locate information, answer a question that you have. So after we do that lesson, everyone goes off to their tables to read independently while the classroom teacher pulls small groups. And that's when the real targeted reading instruction happens. In addition to the small group, the teacher also will do some conferring. That's the one-on-one instruction. Once that core time is done, we return back to the rug to share and reflect on our learning for the day.
CC: Can you all talk a little bit about the effects that you see of the reading program beyond reading?
CT: I think that this reading program has given these kids a voice - to voice their opinion, to voice what they're learning. I have a student in my classroom, he's one of several brothers, and I think to be heard at home he's gotta be loud, he's gotta be heard and I notice when you sat down with him he was kind of the loud one in there but he knows that his voice will be heard here and it will be validated and we will give him that recognition that he deserves and I think our reading program gives him that chance to have his voice heard and his thoughts and his ideas validated.
CC: I've heard all of you talk about “smart students.” Is that part of setting expectations?
JC: I think it's building confidence. Teachers have a number of jobs and a number of hats to wear and one of 'em, no matter what community you are working in, is to build confidence. And you want them to take ownership over their learning. And I feel like our language, how we treat students and how we talk to students, helps foster that independence. So by calling students smart every day, I mean they believe they're smart. And they are. I think our words are more powerful than most teachers realize. So, I feel like I consciously do call them “smart” because I think they're smart and I want them to know that they're smart.
Central Falls has paid about $100,000 a year for The Learning Community program since 2009, when the Growing Readers Initiative was extended to all K-2 classrooms in the district.
The district was hard-hit this year by budget cuts and couldn’t afford to pay for the program. To cover the funding and continue the partnership, The Learning Community applied for and received a grant from the state education department, according to Meg O’Leary, the charter school’s co-director.
The Growing Readers Initiative has four components: Professional development: Consulting teachers from The Learning Community watch district teachers instructing and then provide feedback. They also teach lessons while district teachers observe. Use of the “Reading Workshop” (a technique made popular by Columbia University’s Teachers College) as a model for instruction that teachers use but have also adapted to their classrooms.
Data as a tool: Students are tested against national benchmarks quarterly, rather than once or twice a year. The information is used to troubleshoot problem areas and pinpoint pupils who may need help from a reading specialist.
Safety net: Reading specialists run safety net groups for struggling readers.
