Until three years ago, teachers could get in trouble for teaching the alphabet in some Brownsville schools, said Aida Montanaro, a first grade teacher at Southmost Elementary School. At that time, reading was taught through literature, and explicit focus on the mechanics of reading was discouraged. But when nearly 60 percent of elementary children failed the reading section of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills in 1995-96, the school board and administration knew they had to make a change. The change was radical they decided to retrain all their reading teachers. The Brownsville Independent School District was influenced in its choice of a new teaching method by a task force of parents and education leaders called Brownsville Reads.
Conventional wisdom says that it takes three years to judge the effectiveness of a program.
But there s already a drop in the number of children needing special services for dyslexia, or severe reading problems. Last year the number dropped to 40. The Language Enrichment program was implemented in the fall of 1997 after 27 first-grade teachers were trained that summer. Bilingual teachers who had received the Language Enrichment training were trained in Esperanza. So far no standardized testing of children taught to read by the new methods has been done.