The Progress Report: How 4 Schools Are Teaching Kids to Read – and Seeing Success

Betsy Hall stood at the front of a classroom at Johnson Magnet School in Emerald Hills. She led her pupils, who sat in small groups at circular tables, through chapters of “Uncovering the Logic of English.” The book uses systematic phonics techniques, in part, to lay out simple rules for reading and speaking English. 

Hall spoke about how the suffix “ed,” was added to make verbs past tense and why it made three different sounds. She had her students place their hands to their throats so they could feel how their vocal cords rumbled when they said voiced consonants and how they didn’t when they said unvoiced consonants.  

“What are the four letters English words don’t end in?” Hall asked. 

“J, U, V and I,” the students responded. 

It felt like any other class: a teacher patiently guiding students through curriculum, and the students dutifully participating. The only difference was that Hall’s pupils were teachers themselves – the teachers at Johnson. 

Johnson is one of four schools in southeastern San Diego that have for years worked with the Diamond Educational Excellence Partnership, or DEEP for short. DEEP is something of a resource clearinghouse that partners with various education-focused community organizations to funnel support into four elementary schools that send students to Lincoln High School. Those are Chollas/Mead, Encanto, Johnson and Webster.  

The organization funds programs and advocates for additional funding from San Diego Unified. Hall, for example, is a professional learning coordinator for the California Reading and Literature Project chapter based out of UC San Diego whose work was funded by a combination of district and organization money. 

The organization, founded about 11 years ago, has always focused on research-backed methods to teach kids to read. And over the years, it’s seen success in driving up student literacy rates at poorer schools that had long struggled with low test scores.  

Allison Ohle, the organization’s executive director, said DEEP’s work is proof that “If you provide appropriate support, there is no reason why low-income kids cannot be high achieving kids.” 

Reading by Third Grade 

DEEP’s work can be broken down into three buckets. 

Before children start school: The group works with families and community childcare providers to help kids build pre-literacy skills to prepare them for kindergarten. 

During school: It provides a bevy of resources and supports to aid instruction at its partner schools in southeastern San Diego. Those range from teacher training on systematic, evidence-based literacy practices to developing professional learning communities for the school’s principals. 

Outside of school: The group also works to provide K-3 students with learning opportunities outside of the classroom, like a summer literacy acceleration program for students who’ve fallen behind that’s paired with science and arts instruction. 

These pillars all shoot for one key goal: ensuring kids are able to read by third grade. That goal isn’t unique to DEEP. Research has long shown that whether kids can read at grade-level by third grade is a powerful predictor of future success and opportunities. 

Ohle stressed that those pillars are “not an a la carte menu.” 

“All those things have to be happening,” Ohle said. “Kids don’t learn to read by third grade just because you’re focusing on teaching them how to read in third grade, all this other stuff around them needs to be happening.” 

The program has seen results. 

The four Lincoln cluster schools DEEP partners with have for years performed better on state standardized English tests than many schools with similar demographics. Of the comparable Lincoln Cluster elementary schools, the DEEP schools scored highest on English standardized tests. They also scored high on our Income vs. Test Score metric, which controls test scores for poverty levels.  

‘It’s Not a Mystery’ 

DEEP was founded at a time when many schools were embracing balanced literacy approaches to teach kids how to read. Balanced literacy tended to focus more on simply getting kids to read than actually teaching them the foundational skills they needed to read.  

It also often relied on strategies like the three cueing method that amounted to having kids guess words rather than actually read them. The approach has been widely criticized by researchers and was one of the subjects of the blockbuster “Sold a Story,” podcast. 

“Balanced literacy was saying, ‘we need to have kids exposed to all of these different kinds of books so that they love reading,’ and they were advocating for kids to read books when they didn’t have the decoding capacity,” Gina Gianzero, the founding executive director of DEEP said. “It was denying students the tools to decode the words themselves.”  

Gianzero agreed with some of that approach. She did want kids to be exposed to interesting books and to develop background knowledge and reading comprehension through writing and discussion. But when they were launching DEEP, Gianzero said they consulted data, with community members, with other nonprofits and spoke to many teachers in southeastern San Diego schools.  

What they found was many of those teachers were struggling to teach third and fourth graders basic skills. What those teachers needed was in-depth training on these strategies. 

“You needed to teach kids how to decode words, so that they can focus on the meaning and the comprehension,” Gianzero said. 

So, they partnered with the California Reading and Literature Project, which embraced strategies more aligned with a science of reading approach. That umbrella term refers to strategies developed by interdisciplinary research into how kids learn to read. It incorporates things like robust phonics instruction, but advocates, like Gianzero, are quick to point out it’s not just phonics instruction.  

“It’s true that learning to read is complex,” Ohle said. “But it’s not elusive. We actually know how the brain learns to read. It’s not a mystery. But it is very systematic, and it is very expensive.” 

Helping defray some of that cost and working with parents to help them understand what science says about how kids learn to read are part of what DEEP has long focused on. 

“There are a lot of barriers that prevent folks from being the most productive educational partners for their kids,” Ohle said. 

Some of those barriers may boil down to resources, like a lack of books, but others may be a lack of information about how kids’ brains process information and actually learn to read. 

“We don’t think we’re here to help people be better parents, but we’re here to remove barriers that may get in the way of stressed out very busy parents being the first teacher for their child,” Ohle said. 

As proud as Ohle is of the work DEEP and the teachers at its partner schools have done, she acknowledges they still have a long way to go. Even though the schools they’ve partnered with perform better than other comparable schools, kids still aren’t passing standardized tests with flying colors. This is slow, deliberate work, that requires buy-in from teachers and administrators alike. Luckily, staff at schools like Johnson have worked hard to implement these strategies. 

Ohle believes teachers, by and large, are under-resourced. The success DEEP schools have seen, she believes, is proof of what can happen when those missing resources are connected to a school.  

She hopes that the organization can continue to help bring gradual, substantive growth to the Lincoln Cluster schools they’ve partnered with, but she doesn’t want the growth to be limited to DEEP schools.  

“I want the whole cluster and the whole district to be achieving at a higher rate,” she said. “I would love to work our way out of a job. In a perfect world, organizations like ours do not exist.”