Young Learners: Success For All

Like many other economically challenged and academically suffering public schools in the United States, Harriet Tubman Elementary School (located in central Harlem directly behind the famed Apollo Theater), adopted Success For All (SFA) as part of an initiative to promote literacy among inner city school children. The school is part of the New York City public school system’s Chancellor’s District – a "distinction" placed on schools in danger of losing local administrative control to the state.

I participate in the implementation of this phonics-based reading program with young native and non-native speakers of English, tutoring and mentoring six-to-eight-year-olds who fail to progress through SFA’s literacy-building regime.

While the adoption of SFA was well-intended, my observations as an educator, as an ESL professional, and as a graduate student of language education is that SFA is a uniquely inefficient means of literacy instruction. As part of the philosophy behind SFA, its founder, John Slavin, separates the act of reading from the act of comprehension. But language has evolved specifically for the purpose of human communication. It is a basic premise of language education that successful communication only occurs as the result of comprehensible input. As one of the four key modes of language, reading also requires that the language student understand what is being read. The tenet of comprehensible input is vital to the instruction of both ESL and native speakers of English. Once comprehension is separated from language in any of its four modes, language loses its purpose and meaning.

Although it can be argued that phonics based instruction has its value, SFA uses phonics as the sole medium for reading instruction. The identification of certain sounds and sound blends takes precedence over coherent, logical reading material. In the short illustrated stories written for SFA, words containing a specific story’s target sound or sound blend are preferred to commonly occurring English words and natural language use. As a result, the stories written for SFA frequently make little or no narrative sense.

For ESL students in SFA, this use of awkward syntax provides only unnatural input, which either serves to contradict their growing knowledge of the spoken language (as it does with their native English-speaking peers) and/or reinforces the use of problematic language. I frequently experience students substituting a more commonly heard word or phrase for the awkward one SFA employs for the sake of phonic continuity when reading the SFA stories aloud. As a language professional, I recognize such utterances to be signs of genuine language acquisition and development despite the conflict with SFA. In such instances, the students’ utterances are technically incorrect according to the SFA rubric. By attributing greater importance to students’ knowledge of English phonics than to a more naturalized acquisition of language, SFA hinders students’ ability to develop their literacy as an extension of their spoken language skills.

SFA employs the reading aloud of its stories by students and choral repetition as the key modes of instruction to develop students’ reading skills. Independent silent reading is only introduced as the Roots, or beginning level students prepare to graduate to the Wings, or advanced reading level. Reading aloud certainly is a vital part of reading instruction, but it is also a basic premise of literacy education that performance anxiety can often be a debilitating factor in students’ success.

Students want to succeed; they want to garner the approval and praise of their teachers and mentors, and, accordingly, they want to "succeed" at reading aloud. In my experience with the low performing students I tutor at Harriet Tubman Elementary, those in the lower levels of SFA tend to memorize the stories they are working on in class as purely auditory input. When asked to read any of the words or phrases contained in a given SFA story in another context, they are unable to do so. Memorization of sounds, not true literacy has most often been the result of this method. The last thing such motivated yet low-performing students need is instructional methods that inherently provide room for students to circumvent the lesson at hand with such coping mechanisms.

Another problematic aspect of the SFA program is the content of its stories. I have found them to be extraordinarily ethnocentric and geared towards a suburban middle class audience. Many feature children flying kites, playing in their backyards, going on class field trips to farms, and enjoying other experiences unfamiliar to the urban students I teach. The Harlem neighborhood surrounding the school is filled with many abandoned and dilapidated buildings, homeless shelters and housing projects. The two-parent nuclear families (who rarely encounter any significant problems or difficulties) featured in the SFA stories are not a realistic or familiar example of family units for these students. Many of the native English speaking children I work with at Harriet Tubman Elementary School have significantly reduced language skills, and the ESL students are likewise struggling to succeed. Comprehensible input is one of the few resources language teachers have to help such students access language and literacy. SFA’s inappropriate subject matter serves not to entertain, but only to further reduce the potential effectiveness of its problematic methods.

I realize that many troubled schools adopt SFA to improve their literacy scores and are compensated by state and local governments for such adoption. I believe that its phonics, rather than comprehension, based approach is both alienating and inappropriate for ESL and native English speaking students.

Because assessment is built into SFA, the program appears to be greatly successful. My experience with students at Harriet Tubman Elementary School contradicts this claim. Regardless of what we may want to be true, Success For All is not a panacea for troubled schools despite the good intentions of educators and administrators who choose to adopt it.