KINDERGARTEN RETENTION POLICIES and READING RECOVERY

Dr. Noel K. Jones, University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Reading Recovery is short term intervention for children who have had an opportunity to begin literacy instruction during one year of school. It's major effect is to accelerate the learning of 75% or more who have a full program in Reading Recovery. These children catch up with peers who began their schooling much more advanced in literacy knowledge, and because of this they are able to learn from classroom instruction with little extra support. Reading Recovery is not a remedial program. Remedial programs help children to learn at the same pace as their classmates and therefore must continue for several years. A one-to-one intervention, which Reading Recovery is, cannot function as a remedial program because it would be too expensive.

There are several things that have been discovered about learning that underlie and provide the rationale for Reading Recovery standards and practices. These ideas are:

• •Recent developments in brain theory that find that learning produces connections in the brain. This research suggests that the earlier the intervention, the more effective.
• •Given skillful individualized teaching, children who have experienced difficulty learning in groups after one year at school can begin to make accelerated learning progress
• •The children who do make very limited learning progress in kindergarten do so for a wide variety of reasons (and for many children, many reasons). Because Reading Recovery provides individualized teaching, shaped by a skilled, observant teacher who understands early literacy learning, it enables learners experiencing all types of learning difficulties to begin to move forward.
• •Accelerated learning (learning quickly enough to catch up with most of the age cohort) is possible only when the child becomes an active learner, taking initiative to see and understand connections and relationships and developing a high degree of self-regulation.

A retention strategy is based upon different assumptions, most of which have now been discredited. It assumes that learning will be steadily cumulative, and that another year of a grade will solidify learning and provide a strong base for learning in the next grade. Some educators believe that allowing a child another year in kindergarten will provide time for "neural ripening" which will make the child more "ready" to learn during a second year. All of these ideas have been replaced by new studies and new understandings of learning.

One thing that has been discovered is that retention usually works against the kind of accelerative learning that Reading Recovery seeks to initiate. Children who have not been successful in group learning situations will usually not begin to do so without individual intervention. Meanwhile, during their unsuccessful literacy learning years they are indeed learning something. They learn that they cannot do what other children do; they learn that they do not understand; and most important, they become passive as learners. Even though they may be physically active or appear to be hyperactive, their behavior as learners is passive. They habituate mental behaviors such as non-attending, dwelling on irrelevant details, non-responsiveness, etc.

A strategy of kindergarten retentions is not just an alternative to an early intervention strategy, it is actually detrimental to that strategy. In order to establishing an effective intervention strategy, a school system must commit money across schools. The intense professional development (both initial and on-going) required to build the teaching skill for an effective intervention requires financial commitments at the system level.

Reading Recovery has consistently proven to be the most effective intervention strategy available for the lowest performing children. It has done this through program standards that keep the implementation consistent with the conditions that have been found to produce the best results. Reading Recovery has been accused of being expensive; but it can actually provide savings to the district by reducing retentions and reducing referrals and placements in special education.

A retention strategy also is expensive. Every year a child spends in school costs the district a minimum of $6,000 (the cost of annual per pupil expenditure). If retained children drop out of school, these costs are transferred to state and local governments which must provide training services, welfare, and other forms of social support.

Meanwhile, the children who have been retained in kindergarten are no longer prime candidates for an early intervention to accelerate learning. They are harder to teach, and more likely to need long-term support for learning, which is a true form of remediation. They often come to first grade with enough item knowledge (words and letters) that they don't qualify for Reading Recovery service, but by the end of the year, they relative standing in the class has fallen.

Data from Reading Recovery service in one North Carolina County bears out the above claims. The children served by Reading Recovery who have spent two years in kindergarten have done significantly less well than other Reading Recovery children (only one out of 15 such children has been discontinued). Meanwhile, the children who have been served in the first round of Reading Recovery are very largely the ones that would have been retained in a school or system adopting that strategy. The success rate for the current year has certainly not been 100%, but it is very impressive (actually 70%), given that these children were in the bottom 10% of their age cohort on a comprehensive set of early literacy measures when they entered first grade.

A kindergarten retention strategy defeats the purpose of an early intervention strategy to accelerate children's learning. Not only does it add costs to the district, but it is also ineffective. The children who have spent two-years in kindergarten will need continued remedial services through third grade if they are to have any hope of scoring at threshold on end-of-grade tests. Meanwhile, 50% or more of Reading Recovery children have been able to score at or above grade level on these tests with almost no further service outside the classroom.

There may well be a few cases of kindergarten children who may profit from a retention because their opportunities to attend and learn during their first attempt were very limited. But as a strategy for dealing with learning and literacy failure, kindergarten retention is inconsistent with what has been learned and what has been demonstrated as possible in literacy education.

The most effective way to the numbers who succeed lies in two directions (1) strong, intensive efforts to enrich the classroom program for kindergarten children as well as for children in all the primary grades, (2) continued efforts to make Reading Recovery an efficient program for the children served, and (3) the development of systematic approach at the school level for providing services to children to optimize learning.

c:\wpdocs\manuscri\00-01\RR versus K retention