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“Bye, Jose, I’ll see you Monday. Have a good weekend. Go Dodgers.”
That’s my standard weekly sign-off to Jose Hernandez, the third grader I tutor at Jackson Elementary in Altadena, a Title I school near where I live.
To say he’s a huge Dodgers fan doesn’t quite capture it, and, like most of the world, he loves Shohei Ohtani. In fact, he made it to the recent Jackie Robinson Day at Dodger stadium and was pretty excited to show up to school the next day with his new Dodgers cap with Ohtani’s name emblazoned across it.
He’s not always the chattiest, but I’ve learned if I happen to say the right thing, all kinds of information comes pouring out. So I learned he’d been to the game because we happened to be reading a book about Robinson in one of our sessions. It was part of the 10 minutes of read-aloud I do at the beginning of our 45 minutes together.
“Ohhhhh,” I said, “that’s why your usual Dodger cap suddenly upgraded to this special Ohtani one.”
“Yeah,” he explained, “it was Jackie Robinson Day, and he was playing. And that was cool.”
I’ve been doing two reading sessions with Jose a week — Monday mornings and Wednesday afternoons — since October, before I started this job as CEO of EdSource. The synchronicity wasn’t deliberate, but it has turned out to be a really helpful window into what’s happening on the ground in California’s public schools. And what it takes to help a kid who’s at least a grade level behind make a dent in the gap.
It took me a while to get the hang of tutoring. My kids are now 16 and 20, and teaching them to read is but a distant memory. I’m not sure where I’d even start, but luckily I haven’t had to figure it out myself. I’ve been volunteering through Reading Partners. They use an evidence-based curriculum, based on the science of how children learn to read.
It’s very structured — I write an agenda on a small white board, we start with 10 minutes of me reading while he follows along, then it’s his turn. We work our way lesson by lesson, Jose reading and filling out the worksheets that reinforce his comprehension.
Sometimes we work on breaking unfamiliar words into identifiable parts, which quite frankly often makes me think about how illogical English is.
“Well, so this time -ch sounds like sh, but yeah, you’re right, in that other word it was ch”.
Other times we advance through comprehension skills, like how to pull out the author’s main point or how to identify main characters. Some come more easily than others to Jose, but he hangs in there, and I’m often surprised at how much he understands from a story he seems to be struggling through.
Six months in, I felt like we were both getting in a groove and couldn’t believe the school year was coming to an end. Then came the email, a surprise this past Sunday at 8:30 pm.
No warning.
I suppose we should have seen it coming — in mid-April, the Trump administration targeted some 400 million dollars worth of federal AmeriCorps grants for elimination, but it wasn’t clear how that might affect Reading Partners, one of their programs. When we talked about it at tutoring that week, my amazing coordinator, Kaiya, seemed to think we were OK for the present. Now, a dozen states have filed lawsuits to block the overall AmeriCorps cuts, but confusion reigns.
The writing, as they say, is on the wall.
Reading Partners targets kids up to fourth grade who are reading anywhere from six months to 2.5 years behind their grade level. The research shows what a difference one-on-one help with reading can make in closing the gap. So what of Jose and the 54 other kids getting help with their reading at Jackson Elementary? Or of the nearly 800 kids across Los Angeles?
These kids from Jackson have already had more than their share of challenges this year. Jackson was one of the schools closed for several weeks after the Eaton fire in Altadena — the structure was fine, but had to be cleaned top to bottom to get rid of smoke damage. Jose’s family was displaced for even longer, so he was arriving at school late for several weeks, presumably while his parents navigated a new morning commute from the hotel in which they were staying. But the fire also meant most of the kids at Jackson also lost the midyear assessment that Reading Partners does to track whether the tutoring has been making a difference. End-of-year assessments were supposed to start this week, so with the hit to AmeriCorps, that all gets a lot more complicated.
As of this writing, it looks like some of the Reading Partners coordinators will be coming back, but not as AmeriCorps, and we will get a few more tutoring sessions after all. Whiplash. I can’t help but wonder how much the kids know about all of this.
I hope Jose improved in the months we worked together. I don’t think I was the greatest tutor, but I tried my best. I’d like to think it made a difference.
The books we were reading got harder. He kept advancing in the lessons. He got better and better at sounding out unfamiliar words with less prompting from me.
But I know reading was a struggle for him, and I can’t say I imparted a love of reading in him. He seemed to enjoy our time together, and once, when I picked him up at the after-school program at the school, a couple of his buddies asked how they could get tutors. I’ll take that as a sign of something.
Meantime, he and I were a few chapters into “James and the Giant Peach” at our last session. We may never get to the happy ending at the book’s conclusion, but now, with the reprieve, perhaps we can get far enough to at least see the hideous aunts perish.
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Deborah Clark is CEO of EdSource.
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