Reading research to be done in county
By Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writer

As a parent, Cinthia Haan knows the frustration of a helping a child who has trouble reading, and she knows the joy of success.

As a foundation co-founder in California, she wants to see that reading success isn't a matter of luck or money.

To accomplish that, the Haan Foundation for Children of San Francisco and its supporters are trying to develop scientific evidence of which intensive remedial reading programs can turn around poor readers and can do it in 100 hours.

They will study 800 children at 40 schools in Allegheny County in what researchers say is the largest study of its type.

Called Power4Kids Reading Initiative, the three-year study is expected to cost nearly $9 million, including $4 million from the federal government and help from some other foundations including the Heinz Endowments.

Working with the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, the group will choose 40 schools representing a variety of income levels and other demographic characteristics.

Third- and fifth-graders who are in the bottom 20 percent of readers will participate.

Of those selected, 480 will receive one of four intensive reading strategies during the coming school year. The other 320 will be in a control group and will receive whatever reading instruction the school already provides, including any individual help and special education.

The program comes partly from Haan's own difficulty in trying to find assistance for her son.

Four years ago, when her then nearly 10-year-old son was diagnosed with dyslexia, Haan and her husband learned how hard it was to find the right help.

" Being two successful business people, we tackled it as we would any business venture," she said.

" We started running around the country to all the major universities -- Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Tufts, the University of Texas and Florida -- meeting with the key neuroscientists and reading researchers to find out what would be best for our son as far as remedial reading instruction.

" We put him through [about five] programs that helped him a little bit but didn't close the gap," she said.

It took about 2 1/2 years to find the right answer. She said that once he had the right program, he "soared."

She declined to name the program, saying, "We haven't decided which learning programs work best for which kids. I would hate to send parents off on a wild goose chase."

In the local experiment, each of the 44 participating teachers will be trained in one strategy and will work with children in groups of three.

The foundation's scientific advisory board is still narrowing the list of reading strategies. Haan, who is chairman of the initiative, said some of the programs are available only in clinics where eight weeks of instruction can cost $11,000 or fees can run $40 to $90 an hour.

While startup costs such as teacher training make the first year expensive, she hopes that the cost in schools will be below $500 for each struggling student.

After the foundation began looking for an urban area, Haan said, Allegheny County was chosen in part because her husband, Ron, has an "open heart" for the area. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University about 30 years ago.

The schools, which will be randomly assigned a reading program, have not been selected, but Quaker Valley is among those that have applied.

Deborah Deakin, coordinator of instruction in Quaker Valley, said the study will provide extra help for students and training for teachers who can then train others.

" It's been very difficult to understand why some kids can and some kids can't get it," she said.

For the study, third grade was chosen because it is the earliest at which one can be sure that a child who is reading poorly is unlikely to recover using current methods, said Joseph Torgesen, the principal investigator. He is professor of psychology and education at Florida State University and director of the Florida Center for Reading Research.

" If you're a poor reader in third grade, the chances are vanishingly small that you'll ever be reading at the average," Torgesen said.

Looking at fifth-graders helps to see whether the same improvements can be made two years later in what is usually their last chance in elementary school.

The study includes follow-up testing one year and two years after the reading intervention to see whether the improvement lasts.

The use of random assignments and a control group is different from many education studies. But as the demand for scientific proof of success increases, Torgesen said, this type of research is the wave of the future.

George Bohrnstedt, senior vice president of research at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., said randomized trials often weren't done in education in part because it's hard to get permission to place teachers and students into random groups. And, he added, there are concerns about withholding the experimental programs from some children.

But, he noted, "no kids are going to get less than what they would have gotten in their standard classroom." Bohrnstedt will study how well the reading programs are put in place.

Torgesen has been involved in smaller studies that showed dramatic growth with three programs used with children who have failed to read by third to fifth grade. All three of the programs had a heavy phonics emphasis.

The children were able to move from the bottom group to the average in 60 to 100 hours of effective instruction, he said.

After the intervention, Torgesen said, one-third of the children continued to improve, becoming above average readers. One-third stayed around average; and one-third slipped, but not as far back as where they started.

After getting results from Allegheny County, the Power4Kids study will phase in at three other locations.

At the AIU, Rosanne Javorsky, local coordinator for the initiative, said she gets calls from teachers looking for reading help for students, but there isn't enough knowledge about which programs work best.

" This study will help us decide which intervention is most effective for the kids who, despite our best intentions, continue to struggle with reading," she said.

Eleanor Chute can be reached at echute@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1955.