SFA here I come!  I read the gushing article in today's NY Times that praised Success For All. Well, I am happy (really!) to report that I will soon be working at a Success For All school! 

Four years ago, I worked half time ESL, half time Reading Recovery. Our head of Special Services (my supervisor) attempted to remove half of my RR slots. In addition, ESL teachers were prohibited from being trained in RR. Of course, they were allowed to do SFA tutoring. So, I was and still am the only ESL teacher to be RR trained. They didn't feel it was cost effective.

Well, yesterday, I got call from the head of Special Services. She said she was groveling, that they have a third grade child in special ed who is two years below grade level in reading, yet his testing showed no discrepencies. They are willing to pay me contract salary (almost double the normal teacher extra hourly rate) to work with him. In addition, I will be allowed to set up an area at this SFA school as a Reading Recovery area and work with the child there. I'll probably zip over there during my lunch. The school is on the list of inadequate schools and there are teachers who really want to dump SFA. I think of setting of an RR area there as gaining a beachhead. I have a feeling there are a lot more kids who are in special ed because this scripted phonics program failed. Gee, weren't they saying that about WL a few years ago? Here's my point- these scripted programs are nothing more than a shiny coat of paint on an old car.

Eventually, it will collapse from the inside. At the last book adoption meeting, the teachers from the SFA schools joked about how horrible it was. Special Services hates SFA. Now, the parents are catching on. Yes, the schools still have the glossy posters on the wall, but they will soon join my old Simmons mattress at the landfill. We are now at the point where the district is sending trained, BL teachers to work inside the scripted SFA schools to clean up the mess that SFA has created. Inside out, I say....

November 2002

SFA sounds so good because its author is an excellent writer and grant getter—if grant-getter is a word. Robert Slavin has received over $38.1 just this year in a 5 year grant to 'research and disseminate' SFA out of CRESPAR at JHU. He has been doing this since 1988, at least. He writes well. But SFA is the most stilted, spiritless, boring program a school can get. It is also the most costly. (Plan on over $260,000 per year, per school, to implement SFA the way SFA says it should be implemented.) It sounds good but it simply doesn't work. You need to check out the www.alt-sfa.com site for research on this program, and for teacher opinions on this program, who have been there and tried ever so hard to do it. (I lasted one week trying to follow the script and the timing, and then I went back to my way. I lasted 3 months in that school and then retired early. There is no room for non-conformity to the pattern in an SFA school. Go to the alt-sfa site for discussions on this program. This is a site started by teachers who couldn't believe their District bought into the hype. Dr. Slavin has no degree in reading, and one year experience in teaching, back in 1973. The rest is research for JHU. SFA is really a separate foundation apart from JHU now, as JHU has its own Reading Excellence Center. Dr. Slavin and SFA are not part of the JHU Reading Excellence Center. That should tell you something. 

August 2002

I visited an SFA classroom yesterday. What I concluded from the objectivity of retirement, and three years out of SFA, is that SFA is a very, very teacher-centered activity. It goes on constantly for 90 minutes, non-stop. It is "word-centered", "sound-centered", but not meaning-centered. I'd say that 60 of those 90 minutes are all about words, and sounds. There's a 5 minute group reading thing with these books of dubious quality and some incorrect information. Yes, the kids say the words well, but new words, like "vegetables" that they have to surmise, sound out--yeah, right--I remember sounding out that word as a kid because it couldn't be done, and saying "ve get table" which helped with the spelling, I think.

The opening of the lesson is this part called: STAR. The paraprofessional aide reads from a book from the library. It was called: THE SEVENTH SISTER, I believe about a Chinese myth. It seemed a bit too long for these kids who seemed about first and second graders and it had too much cultural detail, unless they were studying a unit on China, for understanding. It takes 20 minutes or so to "go through" the SFA steps involved in reading this books. Everything seemed to have a ritual to it, the SFA ritual. The child didn't seem to matter; the program certainly did. That the program went through its paces seemed very important.

One part where incomplete sentences are taken from the book, written on a paper strip, and words are blocked out, and it is placed on the board, for the children to sound out anew, was a good example where last year's preparation didn't work for this year. Since these "books" are consumable, and are ordered anew each year, one word had changed over the year. The last year sample sentence had "sources" covered up so as to be sounded out first, and the new book had "idea" to be sounded out. Since you do the same thing year after year, the teacher didn't check the books first to see if there were any changes. Anyway, the little boys at the table next to me, kept seeing that "d" as a "b" and sounding it out that way. Then they added in an "n" that wasn't there. The word, of course, made no sense to them, try as they might to sound it out. The teacher never knew they were doing letter flip-flops, because, as I say, this is teacher centered and the program goes on, no matter what. Just think what would happen to the program if the teacher paid attention to each and every child! Oh lord! Down the tubes with the program pacing.

We roll onward in SFA, whether or not the child is with me, we just assume he or she is with me, as teacher. 

I think that is why I hated that program so much. I start paying attention to how each child learns from day one and I hate ability grouping as a matter of principle. There just was no way in hell that I would teach such a teacher-centered program; it is so far away from the real child. But Programmers love programs. So there really was no base for discussion, only argument.

Georgia Hedrick, Reno NV
 

April 2002