Study of a Site-Based University and Probation
Department Literacy Program
Laura Young, Mary Jo Skillings
California State University, San Bernardino
INTRODUCTION
In a 2003 California State government document, the number of illiterate third-graders was used as the reference point for the need for building future prisons (in Carnes, 2006). State educational agencies led by the “No Child Left Behind” Act makes each state accountable for delivering effective literacy education. However, no matter how each state has attempted to implement the policies, the American public continues to hear how badly our students are placing on tests that determine proficiency levels. Especially frightening are the statistics for students who have slipped through the cracks of the educational system. Many of these children are the children of immigrants, and come from low-income families. Frequently they are identified as having learning disabilities. Those children are particularly vulnerable to becoming part of the growing epidemic of students who have reached adolescence and drop out of school.
Secondary students who did not achieve basic skills for decoding new words, learning vocabulary, and developing comprehension strategies to monitor their own learning are part of this problem. Secondary teachers have not been able to keep up with the increasing number of students who cannot process the larger proportion of expository texts presented to them in school.
What happens to a teenager who cannot or did not learn to read? David Broder (2006) reported findings from “The Silent Epidemic” Perspectives of High School Dropouts,” an extensive survey of high school dropouts conducted through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Their statistics indicate that one out of three young people will not graduate from high school. For minorities the rate is almost 50%. Broder continues with, “the losers pay a price all their lives.” On average a high school drop out will earn an average of $9, 200. less per year than a high school graduate and graduates will earn about a million less over their lifetime. They are more likely to be unemployed, wind up on welfare, on drugs, or in prison.
Statistics from, The State of Adolescent Literacy Today, present an even gloomier picture.
- Kids from lower income families are more than six times as likely to drop out of high school.
- More than one in ten students are presently identified as special education students.
- In 2001, 37.2% of students with disabilities had been suspended or expelled from school.
- In 2003, approximately 8 million students in 4th through 12th grade read below
- National Assessment of Educational Progress minimum or basic standard for their grade level.
These students present an enormous challenge to the school system and to society. Any high school student who reads at a fourth grade or below level is society’s problem. There are substantial costs to the American tax payer when students do not graduate from high school (Gottlob, 2006). These individuals cost millions to the public in a public assistance and public services, costs of school remediation, joblessness, and incarceration. The educational characteristics of adolescents who read below grade level and experience chronic educational failure make them more predisposed to the onset, and severity of delinquent behavior, (Leone, Krezmien, Mason, and Meisel, 2005).
The University as a Literacy Hub to the Community
The NASB Report (2006) identified a broad range approach to literacy instruction to insure that future students have the literacy skills they need to be successful. These include: 1) schools connecting standards, curricula, and assessments; 2) developing highly skilled professional teachers of reading; 3) use of data to identify students’ needs and monitor learning appropriately; 4) implementation of district-level literacy support across content areas, and 5) development of organization and leadership to enact the above components.
The vision statement of California State University, San Bernardino, includes the promotion of innovative partnerships with area agencies. The University currently works with school districts and local agencies to implement the NASB Report elements into the teacher education and graduate programs. In 2003, the University began a Literacy Center as a service to area families whose children, grades K-12, needed literacy tutoring. The Department of Language, Literacy & Culture founded the center with the support and donations of a local land developer.
The initial plan was to utilize the CSUSB students who were taking their credential reading methods and graduate reading courses as the tutors. The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing requires that teacher credential candidates have tutoring and field experiences in classrooms. These experiences are invaluable in preparing them for their student teaching. Our reading faculty determined to expand the field experience to include the Literacy Center as an alternative tutoring experience. Required assignments include administering a battery of literacy assessments and to develop appropriate lessons based on those assessments.
The Literacy Center began with 8 children, grades 2-5, and has continued to grow to
accommodate more than 200 children representing about 70 families. Parents or guardians receive orientations to the program along with a packet of materials with suggestions about how to support the child’s reading and writing skills at home. Parents accompany their children to the campus each week and pick them up following their hour of tutoring. Children may continue in the program until such time that the Literacy Specialist and tutor decide that the child is able to keep pace with his/her peers in their class. Those children who are found to be in need of more serious interventions due to a critical learning disability, are referred for a more intensive tutoring with a Literacy Specialist or to a district specialist.
The service was free for all parents until 2006 when the Center decided to charge a small materials fee. Scholarships are also available through the program for parents with more than one child in the program.
The benefits for all of the stake holders in the Literacy Center are many. Overall, parents of the Literacy Center students report that their children have been able to make gains in their reading and feel more confident about their ability to keep up with their grade level peers. The tutors report that they have gained greater confidence in their professional capacity to work with children who pose an instructional challenge, and they feel this will support their professional growth when they have their own classrooms.
Connecting the University to Correctional Agencies
In 2005, the Department of Language, Literacy & Culture was approached by the San Bernardino County Probation Department to consider creating a partnership for the Literacy Center to provide literacy instruction to their incarcerated students, ages 14-18. Students in the county juvenile facilities are incarcerated for a variety of non-violent crimes. About 95% of them have been involved in drugs, and approximately 75% have been active in gang activity. The period of incarceration is usually six months. During this time of confinement, students receive continuing classroom instruction from teachers in the San Bernardino Unified School District. Many of these students have severe reading difficulties that cannot be addressed solely through classroom instruction. These students require more intensive instruction.
ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS TO THE LITERACY PROGRAM
On-Site Tutoring
There are many Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) with correctional literacy programs; however, one of the most important components of the CSUSB program, and unique among others, is the importance of the context of being an on-site program. In Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book, The Tipping Point, he details the research of Judith Rich Harris and the importance of context effects on a child’s life choices. Harris maintains that more important to a child’s success than an intact family is the intact nature of the neighborhood in which the child lives. The program directors believe that changing the context of these young offenders’ lives is critical to helping them change the direction of their lives. As educators, we know how to help them learn to read, but we have to overcome the previous contexts of their lives.
Program Literacy Specialists and Tutors are not privy to probation participants’ last names or the specific nature of their offenses, but we are told that the many of these students have been in and out of foster homes and in and out of many schools. Attendance issues contributed to their lack of success in school. Most of them are from minority groups, Latino and African American, and in interviews, none of them had been on a college campus before. Participants are escorted everywhere on campus, boys with boys and girls with girls. Most of them come with attitude, but none of them has ever given a tutor any difficulty.
An Intensive Model
The creation of a new model for tutoring incarcerated adolescents was necessary. The Literacy Center tutors had primarily been working with children from grades 2-6, and most of the tutors came from the Multiple Subjects Program. The decision was made to use the best prepared tutors, graduate students, themselves classroom teachers, who were participating in the Graduate Reading M.A. Program. These tutors had classroom practice experience with disabled readers, and h developed a significant level of expertise to work with adolescent readers who were reading far below grade level. It was felt that the program would benefit both the students and well as the graduate students. Due to the need for additional tutors, Single Subject interns were included as tutors since they have students in their classes who exhibit the same literacy deficits in reading and writing.
Building Efficacy for Tutors
Pre-tutoring sessions begin with a Literacy Specialist briefing tutors. Informal assessments are taught and potential lesson plans discussed. Doris Durkin (2004) has written about “intentional and unintentional instruction.” Intentional instruction is what each tutor sets as a target objective for the tutoring session, but they must also be prepared and tuned into the “unplanned, unintentional” instruction that comes when something occurs within the tutoring session that becomes an opportunity for instruction. We anticipate that much instruction will be of the unintentional variety since these probation students have already failed at public educational programs.
Tutoring sessions focus on specific individual needs based on assessments and student input related to their expressed literacy learning needs. For example, a student might stumble over a word and that word or word type becomes a vocabulary word for instruction. The tutor then would use this as an opportunity to teach how to break the word up into recognizable parts or root words that will expand the vocabulary comprehension of the student. The tutors attempt to intersect the assessed needs and the expressed needs into a lesson that is gratifying for the student.
Following each tutoring session, the tutors meet with their college instructor for a debriefing analysis of the lesson and next steps. Progress monitoring is important to informing the tutoring sessions; periodically students are reassessed and changes are made in the instruction plans.
Assessments
Dell Computers donated ten computers to the Literacy Center, and all students are assessed through Renaissance Learning (STAR) computerized testing program. This program automatically adjusts the level of difficulty when students cannot respond correctly. The program provides the tutors and Literacy Specialists with a computerized readout on each student’s ability to decode new words, vocabulary, fluency, and links reading and writing concepts. A printed copy is provided to the student’s parents and teachers for information on the child’s progress and what steps are being taken to address each identified area of need.
A computer technician works with the Literacy Center, operates the computers and assists the students in becoming comfortable with the technology. Assumptions that all children, especially adolescents, are familiar enough with computers to work a mouse or move a cursor have proven to be incorrect. This is just another way the students in this program have fallen behind their peers in learning. Students who do not demonstrate a basic understanding of the workings of the assessment and using the computer are given a game-like session to first familiarize them with the procedure. They are then given the assessment during a second session in another room. All efforts are made to maintain a level of comfort for the student.
In addition to computer assessments, tutors administer informal assessments throughout the quarter. It is necessary to learn what reading and writing skills the student has mastered that can be used in the teaching-learning process. Typically, students are also given practice in completing some life skill, such as completing sample job applications, gas and electric utility application forms, apartment rental forms and to write simple sentences about subjects they have selected.
Reading Materials
Periodicals, along with Power Up readers published by Renaissance Learning, provide high interest/low readability materials for this age group. A variety of periodicals offer opportunities for the students to discuss, write about popular culture subjects, and to demonstrate their oral reading proficiency.
Rapport and Trust Building
Critical to the success of the program is the development of trust between the tutor and the student. These probation students, primarily boys, already know they have reading problems. The ten week quarter system is very short and trust can’t be built quickly. One thing that has contributed to the development of rapport between tutors and students, is the welcome and orientation to campus they receive. All students, regardless of age, are greeted as CSUSB college students. Tutors, faculty, and Literacy Specialists make every effort to help them adjust to a campus atmosphere. Upon completion of a ten week period, students are given a tee shirt with the college logo on it. During the early sessions, probation students are shown around the campus and given a glimpse of college life, the cafes, dorms, game and athletic areas. Fraternities and sororities on campus are invited to use the Probation Literacy Program as a service opportunity and to visit the Center and talk to the students. The probation students are particularly eager to talk to these young people and hear them speak about their own difficulties in school.
Tutoring Session Components
Tutoring sessions are for one hour of intensive instruction. Every session has some form of the following elements and are modified versions of those proposed by Cunningham in Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write (1999).
- The tutor reads aloud to the student a short selection from a trade book or a periodical while the student follows along in his/her copy. The student checks any word or phrase that they did not understand for discussion.
- The student reads aloud, or sometimes silently, from some text they have chosen and again mark or note any word, phrase or concept for discussion. The tutor may or may not model a “think aloud” for students to practice or do a guided reading/thinking activity.
- Students dictate or write a group of vocabulary words that are hot topic words, words that they want to know for their own reading and writing.
- Tutors work on a mini-lesson such as teaching how to write a topic sentence and supporting detail sentences. Students practice.
JOE – A CASE STUDY
Joe is a Hispanic male of medium height and slight build. He has a growth of mustache and a nervous smile. When introduced to the researcher at the first session, he told her he was 15; however, at the end of the program he confessed to being 18. He was a returning student who had participated the previous quarter.
Joe indicated that he knew how to use the computer, but when he began the assessment session, he had difficulty making a decision. It became apparent to the researcher that his technology experience was limited. He quickly went through the assessment just selecting randomly from the possible answers which his tutor said, “he just clicked through.”
Joe’s was assessed at reading at a 1.4 grade level. This is appropriate for a first grader in the fourth month of school, hardly appropriate for a student in the 11th grade. Joe was allowed to retake the test, and scored approximately the same the second time. His confidence in his ability to process text is very low.
Joe was encouraged to select a book from the many books of high interest-low readability or from a periodical. He selected The Indian in the Cupboard by Banks (1981), a book from the bookcase. He probably made this selection because one of the other students had just picked up the book. The tutor and Joe did a modified “picture walk” but instead of pictures, the tutor modeled how to use the cover illustration, title page, and table of contents chapter headings to begin to establish a hypothesis about the story. This was a modified “think aloud strategy.” Joe and his tutor had identical books, and Joe followed along as his tutor read parts of the selection aloud. Joe would attempt to read every other page.
Following the reading of a selection, the tutor asked questions similar to a directed reading thinking activity. They would discuss, read to find out, and then read some more, always making personal connections to the hypothesis and what in the story either confirmed or refuted what Joe thought would happen next.
Joe stopped every time he came to a word he couldn’t immediately pronounce. He waited until the tutor gave hints. He frequently said under his breath, “that’s not right.” The tutor and researcher continually encouraged and prompted him.
Important to the session, was the development of Joe’s intentional vocabulary, the vocabulary words that are important for him to develop for his own use. A multi-faceted approach is used with these students because of the shortness of time, and the fact that they need to see that they have learned something useful out of the time they have spent with a tutor.
Joe reported that this was the first time he had been with a tutor who just specifically worked with them. In talking about himself as a reader, Joe confessed that he had “bullied his way” by having others do his work for him. When asked by the researcher/observer what he wanted to accomplish or what he wanted to do when he left school, he was unable to respond. He was unable to express a vision for anything for his future.
Joe will be released before the spring quarter begins. He left the program still reading approximately at 2nd grade level on his word attack skills. He did leave with a better view of himself and with the encouragement of the tutors and the researchers who worked with him.
SUMMARY
Holloway and Moke (1986) investigated the levels of education among a randomly selected group of high school graduates who had received their degrees inside or outside of prison. Their findings indicated that recidivism was lower as educational levels increased. Another study by Anderson, Anderson and Schumacker (1988) investigated detainees who received vocational training while incarcerated and those who did not. Those who received no educational training had the highest recidivism rates. A report by the Congressional Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency (in Literacy, Criminal Activity, and Recidivism by Hendricks, Hendricks, and Kauffman) estimates that when juveniles are involved in quality reading instruction programs, recidivism can be reduced by 20% or more (Bruner, 1993).
Our program is working toward the task of reducing recidivism in our region through intensive on-site literacy training. The program is in its infancy with only one full year of operation. Since it is run on the CSUSB academic calendar, it can only provide short term tutorial assistance to the students in the San Bernardino County Probation Department programs.
Limitations
The program needs to have longer and more frequent sessions with the students as well as a commitment of time from long-term tutors. Due to the fact that tutors are themselves students, tutors have to be retrained each quarter. To be more effective, the program needs to have a longer commitment of time from the same tutors. Pre and post assessments are too close together to give us a true estimate of what progress is being made. Exit interviews with the students reveal they have benefited from the following: study skills, vocabulary and comprehension strategies.
Since the participants are juvenile offenders, the researchers do not have the capacity to do longitudinal studies unless they choose to return when they are released from the correctional facility. The Literacy Coordinators have worked toward obtaining bus passes for any student who chooses to return following release. Many of these students; however, do not live in the immediate area so they are less likely to return for tutoring, even if it is offered for free.
Additionally, the probation students are usually in the facilities for six months. Their time of incarceration does not usually allow for students to return for a second quarter. Joe was an exception, and he did choose to return.
Strengths
Most of our probation students come from areas of high poverty schools where there are shortages of resources, high rates of truancy, and high turn over rates for the qualified teachers. One of the most important aspects of our program is that it is on a college campus. The connection to the life of a campus through the interaction of college students and campus events allow these probation students an opportunity to change their vision of the future.
We plan to continue and expand the work through a summer program and offer resources and a mentor to students who leave the immediate area. These off campus connections will support the students when they return to their homes. It is our hope that we will also make important connections to the junior colleges for expanding the tutoring pool and possibly provide scholarships for students who complete high school and transfer to a junior college. There are rich research possibilities for this program. We hope to stem the tide of the high school drop out rate and the rate of recidivism in the prison system. Our vision is to support the young people who have not shared equally in the educational system. Society will have to endure the consequences of young adults who cannot read and write and who will drain the public assistance coffers and who will not be able to make a contribution to society.
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