What if every child in America could read at grade level or better? What if the number of students in special education for learning disabilities, or retained in grade, could be cut in half?
What if students who become behavior problems or give up on learning because of nothing more than reading difficulties could instead succeed in reading and no longer be frustrated by failure?
Today these kinds of outcomes are only pipe dreams. Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars directed toward remedial and special education, reading levels have barely increased. Gaps between middle class and economically disadvantaged students remain wide, as do gaps between ethnic groups. We’ve done so much, you might think, and nothing has really worked at scale.
Yet today we have many solutions to the problems of struggling readers, solutions so effective that if widely and effectively implemented, they could substantially change not only the reading skills, but the life chances of students who are struggling in reading.
How do I know this is possible? The answer is that the evidence is there for all to see.
This week, my colleagues and I released a review of research on programs for struggling readers. The review, written by Amanda Inns, Cynthia Lake, Marta Pellegrini, and myself, uses academic language and rigorous review methods. But you don’t have to be a research expert to understand what we found out. In ten minutes, just reading this blog, you will know what needs to be done to have a powerful impact on struggling readers.
Everyone knows that there are substantial gaps in student reading performance according to social class and race. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, here are key gaps in terms of effect sizes at fourth grade:
|Gap in Effect Sizes|
|No Free/Reduced lunch/
These are big differences. In order to eliminate these gaps, we’d have to provide schools serving disadvantaged and minority students with programs or services sufficient to increase their reading scores by about a half standard deviation. Is this really possible?
Can We Really Eliminate Such Big and Longstanding Gaps?
Yes, we can. And we can do it cost-effectively.
Our review examined thousands of studies of programs intended to improve the reading performance of struggling readers. We found 59 studies of 39 different programs that met very high standards of research quality. 73% of the qualifying studies used random assignment to experimental or control groups, just as the most rigorous medical studies do. We organized the programs into response to intervention (RTI) tiers:
Tier 1 means whole-class programs, not just for struggling readers
Tier 2 means targeted services for students who are struggling to read
Tier 3 means intensive services for students who have serious difficulties.
Our categories were as follows:
Multi-Tier (Tier 1 + tutoring for students who need it)
- Whole-class programs
- Technology programs
- One-to-small group tutoring
- One-to-one tutoring
We are not advocating for RTI itself, because the data on RTI are unclear. But it is just common sense to use proven programs with all students, then proven remedial approaches with struggling readers, then intensive services for students for whom Tier 2 is not sufficient.
Do We Have Proven Programs Able to Overcome the Gaps?
The table below shows average effect sizes for specific reading approaches. Wherever you see effect sizes that approach or exceed +0.50, you are looking at proven solutions to the gaps, or at least programs that could become a component in a schoolwide plan to ensure the success of all struggling readers.
Programs That Work for Struggling Elementary Readers
|Multi-Tier Approaches||Grades Proven||No. of Studies||Mean Effect Size|
|Success for All||K-5||3||+0.35|
|Enhanced Core Reading Instruction||1||1||+0.24|
|Tier 1 – Classroom Approaches|
|Cooperative Integrated Reading & Composition (CIRC)||2-6||3||+0.11|
|Tier 2 – One-to-Small Group Tutoring|
|Read, Write, & Type (T 1-3)||1||1||+0.42|
|Lindamood (T 1-3)||1||1||+0.65|
|SHIP (T 1-3)||K-3||1||+0.39|
|Passport to Literacy (TA 1-4/7)||4||4||+0.15|
|Quick Reads (TA 1-2)||2-3||2||+0.22|
|Tier 3 One-to-One Tutoring|
|Reading Recovery (T)||1||3||+0.47|
|Targeted Reading Intervention (T)||K-1||2||+0.50|
|Early Steps (T)||1||1||+0.86|
|Reading Rescue (T or TA)||1||1||+0.40|
|Sound Partners (TA)||K-1||2||+0.43|
Key: T: Certified teacher tutors
TA: Teaching assistant tutors
PV: Paid volunteers (e.g., AmeriCorps members)
1-X: For small group tutoring, the usual group size for tutoring (e.g., 1-2, 1-4)
(For more information on each program, see www.evidenceforessa.org)
The table is a road map to eliminating the achievement gaps that our schools have wrestled with for so long. It only lists programs that succeeded at a high level, relative to others at the same tier levels. See the full report or www.evidenceforessa for information on all programs.
It is important to note that there is little evidence of the effectiveness of tutoring in grades 3-5. Almost all of the evidence is from grades K-2. However, studies done in England in secondary schools have found positive effects of three reading tutoring programs in the English equivalent of U.S. grades 6-7. These findings suggest that when well-designed tutoring programs for grades 3-5 are evaluated, they will also show very positive impacts. See our review on secondary reading programs at www.bestevidence.org for information on these English middle school tutoring studies. On the same website, you can also see a review of research on elementary mathematics programs, which reports that most of the successful studies of tutoring in math took place in grades 2-5, another indicator that reading tutoring is also likely to be effective in these grades.
Some of the individual programs have shown effects large enough to overcome gaps all by themselves if they are well implemented (i.e., ES = +0.50 or more). Others have effect sizes lower than +0.50 but if combined with other programs elsewhere on the list, or if used over longer time periods, are likely to eliminate gaps. For example, one-to-one tutoring by certified teachers is very effective, but very expensive. A school might implement a Tier 1 or multi-tier approach to solve all the easy problems inexpensively, then use cost-effective one-to-small group methods for students with moderate reading problems, and only then use one-to-one tutoring with the small number of students with the greatest needs.
Schools, districts, and states should consider the availability, practicality, and cost of these solutions to arrive at a workable solution. They then need to make sure that the programs are implemented well enough and long enough to obtain the outcomes seen in the research, or to improve on them.
But the inescapable conclusion from our review is that the gaps can be closed, using proven models that already exist. That’s big news, news that demands big changes.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action
This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.