CFK reports from: Dirksen Senate Office Building
Event: High School Achievement Forum: The Alabama Reading Initiative at Buckhorn High School
Organized by: Alliance for Excellent Education
Where/When: Washington, D.C., July 13, 2005

Report by Sunny Xiang

The Alliance for Excellent Education's second breakfast forum on high school achievement featured the Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI) at Buckhorn High School, a racially and economically diverse school in rural northwest Alabama.

Alabama initiated ARI in 1998 with the goal of using research-based strategies to achieve 100 percent literacy in the state's K-12 schools. Buckhorn, located in New Market, Ala., applied for the program in 1999 when the standardized tests consistently showed reading as the school's lowest-scoring subject area.

"It was the single most important thing we've done at Buckhorn," said Sarah Fanning, the school's Curriculum and Instructional Assistant.

Buckhorn's incorporation of ARI techniques into the classroom yielded almost immediate results. Sustained improvements of test scores have made the school's program a model on a state and national level, Fanning said.

Buckhorn's class of 2003, the first graduating class with four years of ARI instruction, demonstrated a 100 percent passing rate on the Alabama High School Graduation Exam, according to a PowerPoint presentation from Fanning and Tracy Wilson, who chairs the English department. In 1999, 32 percent of this class's students had been identified as "struggling." Fanning, however, later noted that Buckhorn does have an 18 to 19 percent dropout rate, and those students are not included in the 100 percent pass rate.

Wilson prefaced her presentation with a poem about a "pretty good student" in a "pretty good school." Buckhorn's improvements represent its efforts to replace "pretty good" with "great" through the active intervention, Wilson said.

To integrate ARI components into the classroom, Buckhorn teachers instituted direct and intensive reading instruction in 96-minute blocks, promoted literacy across departments, provided professional development opportunities for all teachers and learned from student assessment and data analysis.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, in his opening remarks, praised Buckhorn's achievements since the school became an ARI site. ARI, he said, is "one of the most exciting things I've seen in education." In fact, Sessions said he'd told Alabama Governor Bob Riley he would not spend money on anything else until all Alabama schools were ARI sites. He also noted that ARI students have made a 10 percent gain in reading since the 2003-2004 school year. Such marked improvements have prompted the state to craft initiatives similar to ARI for science and math, Sessions said.

Alliance for Excellent Education President Bob Wise and Senator Richard Shelby put Buckhorn's implementation of ARI within the larger context of reforming high school education. Adolescent literacy, they said, is critical to protecting children from unemployment, crime and other social ills and to ensure that they achieve adulthood.

Both stressed how federal policies and dollars are necessary to bring about the classroom tools, instructional training and other resources needed to cultivate thriving programs such as Buckhorn's.

Wise also expressed strong support for Striving Readers, a two-year-old federal initiative that provides demonstration grants to model programs and promotes using research-based intervention for struggling middle and high school students. President Bush's FY 2006 budget proposed funding Striving Readers at $200 million, a $100 million increase from his FY 2005 request for the program. Last year, Congress funded Striving Readers at $24.8 million. This year's House bill recommends $30 million for the program.

Shelby, who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the success of local programs such as Buckhorn's hinges on the actions of policymakers in Washington.

"I can't think of a better thing to do with (federal dollars) than teaching people to read," he said.

More information on Striving Readers is available on the U.S. Department of Education's website.