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Collaborative Mission: Literacy Opportunities for All Children
Bringing all children to literacy in the first years of schooling will
not be an easy task. It will require collaboration among
professional educators about good classroom teaching and about
safety nets for children who need additional literacy support.
Reading Recovery professionals want to work with colleagues who are
acting in the interests of children.
The safety net known as Reading Recovery represents a partnership --
a concentrated, continuous, united effort in which teachers,
administrators, parents, and policy makers work together to change
the status of low-achieving children in literacy. In an ongoing
process of educational redesign, Reading Recovery partners will
continue to evaluate the program by collecting data on every child
served and to analyze program strengths and make recommendations for
improvement.
In his book on redesigning education, Nobel Prize-winning physicist
and educational reformer Kenneth G. Wilson uses Reading Recovery as
a model for the process. He comments: "Reading Recovery offers
United States education its first real demonstration of the power of
a process combining research, development (including ongoing teacher
education), marketing, and technical support in an orchestrated
system of change."89 He
suggests that in three ways, Reading Recovery can encourage the
process of educational redesign.
- It proves that a well-designed educational program can be
replicated among teachers and schools across a wide array of
locations and cultures and still yield uniformly superior results.
- It indicates that investing money and effort in educational
design can earn dramatic rewards -- if it's made in a properly
researched and designed program that offers thorough teacher
training and support.
- It shows that when educators find a program that meets these two
criteria and proves that it can earn a good result, schools are
willing to make its adoption a budget priority.
Reading Recovery is the best evidence yet of the direct link
between good design and educational excellence.90
All educators acknowledge that change is hard work. Anything that
tackles the complex problems of today's literacy education is going
to be difficult. It means that the educational community must work
together to solve problems in a constructive way, collaborating
across groups and with all stakeholders to build broad ownership in
a shared goal -- literacy opportunities for all children. Reading
Recovery professionals welcome the challenge to make these literacy
opportunities a reality by building partnerships with all who share
this goal.
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