A tutor bent across her desk at Padrón Elementary on a recent November morning and pointed with a pencil to a list of words on a page. She touched the pencil to each word. A second-grader focused his attention and read them back.
“Jugar, horas, somos, libros, ustedes.”
A mile away, at Pillow Elementary, another tutor was teaching letter sounds. “What’s the letter that makes the ‘m’ sound? What makes the ‘p’ sound? Let’s do map: mmm, aah, puh.” After each correct response, she high-fived her young student and praised her. “Great job! You’re doing awesome! One more time, just the way you did it before.”
The kids at Padrón and Pillow were learning the most important thing a school can teach – literacy, the ability to read and write. They were learning it from tutors with Literacy First, a program developed at the University of Texas at Austin which partners with our local elementary schools to provide tutoring in English and Spanish for kids from kindergarten through second grade.
Austin ISD has Literacy First tutors in 24 of its 78 elementary schools. The program’s director, Claire Hagen Alvarado, said the program assesses young students to determine which are having difficulty with reading and what level of instruction they need. Those who enter the program receive daily, one-on-one tutoring until they’re able to read on grade level.
“We’ve developed a proven, systematic, explicit foundational literacy skills curriculum that is also relationship-based,” Alvarado said. “It’s a 30-minute lesson structure, but students work on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension within that 30 minutes and very quickly gain confidence and then are able to move forward.”
Sebastian Wren, Literacy First’s program coordinator, said the curriculum is for students in kindergarten through second grade because that is when some kids begin to fall behind their peers.
“The driving force behind this work is a phenomenon called the Matthew Effect,” Wren said, “which takes its name from a line in the book of Matthew, that ‘the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.’ And in this case, we’re not talking about financial wealth, we’re talking about academic wealth.
“What we find is that some children come to school at the beginning of kindergarten and they have a slight advantage over other kids. They know a few more letters, they have a little bit more phonological processing skills or vocabulary. The gap is pretty small at kindergarten, it’s pretty easy to bridge if you intervene when they’re young. But starting in first grade, that gap opens up tremendously.”
Wren has helped develop Literacy First’s in-house curriculum and its data systems, which compare the progress of students who enter the program with those who are eligible for it but don’t participate. The data also allows a weekly analysis of a child’s progress. Alvarado said the results show that 80% of the kids in Literacy First make significant and accelerated progress toward reading on grade level.
“Equity is all about giving resources to people. It’s not giving everybody the same, it’s about saying, ‘Okay, who needs extra?’” – Arati Singh, Austin ISD Board of Trustees President
The ability to prove the effectiveness of the program is one of the reasons AISD Trustee Arati Singh is enthusiastic about Literacy First. Singh has been a fan since she first encountered the group’s work. “When I watched it for the first time, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s how I taught my kid to read,’” Singh said. “You just sit with them in a safe, loving environment, and you focus on that kid. And you go through the material, you have them decode, and you check for their understanding. It’s really not rocket science. It’s the kind of stuff that parents often know intuitively.”
Literacy First’s tutors see eight to 10 students a day and teach 15 or more students over the course of a year. Most of the students are from households where resources, including emotional resources, are tight. The tutors use positive reinforcement and develop a sense of safety and trust with the kids they teach. In some cases, that sense of safety must be developed before any actual learning can take place.
“That tutor may be the one adult that the student sees one-on-one for 30 minutes in their entire day,” said Sara Tapia, Padrón Elementary’s assistant principal and the campus’ Literacy First coordinator. “It’s this beautiful moment. You’ll see our students look at the clock – they know when their tutor is going to come and they’re sitting and waiting. And we’ve seen an increase in attendance from these students, because they are typically struggling and maybe have had attendance issues in the past. But knowing that they are going to have that one-on-one adult attention and reading intervention, that’s their moment to shine and be with that adult.”
The close attention allows some kids to quickly catch up with their peers. Tapia said she has seen kids who entered Literacy First this October that are already close to graduating from the program.
Alvarado said the group’s data shows that some AISD campuses would benefit from having more tutors. Singh would like to see such an expansion. “Literacy First, to me, is how you operationalize equity in reading instruction,” she said. “Equity is all about giving resources to people. It’s not giving everybody the same, it’s about saying, ‘Okay, who needs extra?’”
Literacy First’s research also suggests that getting kids to read effectively before third grade saves money on remedial instruction, a powerful idea at the current moment, as AISD faces a budget deficit that is making administrators rethink how they provide education.
“I hate to use business terms, but we have to make sure that every dollar we spend is going to get a really high return,” Singh said. “And this is one of the things that I’m 100% confident works.”
This article appears in December 6 • 2024.
