Literacy Coach Program Costly

North Carolina will spend $10,000 each to train 100 literacy coaches that Gov. Mike Easley called for in the fiscal 2006-7 budget.

The cost would have been nearly twice as much had a key lawmaker not intervened during late budget negotiations. But the official in charge of the training insists that it’s necessary, and vows to “document every penny” spent on the training to prove the point.

The budget for public education contains an appropriation of $4.7 million for Easley’s literacy coaches program. This program, along with an average 8 percent pay increase for teachers, was the centerpiece of the governor’s public education agenda during the short session of the General Assembly.

Under the program the State Board of Education will identify the 100 schools with the lowest-performing eighth grades, measured by end-of-grade reading tests over the last three years. Those schools each will select one teacher to receive training from the North Carolina Teacher Academy as a literacy coach. The North Carolina Teacher Academy is a professional development program established and funded by the legislature through the UNC system.

A separate line item in the budget for the UNC system allocates $1 million dollars for the North Carolina Teacher Academy to design, develop, and implement both on-line and face-to-face training for the selected teachers. Once trained, the literacy coaches will work with their principals and fellow teachers to develop and implement a plan for improving reading at their schools.

Although literacy coaches may also work directly with schoolchildren, their primary duties will involve working with other teachers to help them incorporate literacy skills training into their lesson plans. Ideally, the coaches will show other teachers how to integrate reading activities into their specific content areas, no matter what they are, with a goal of strengthening students’ overall reading skills. It is hoped that this will also boost student test scores.

During conference committee negotiations over the budget in late June Rep. Rick Glazier, D-Fayetteville, questioned the line item for training of the coaches. At that time the request was for $1.9 million. Noting that the figure worked out to $19,000 per teacher trained, he asked why the training would be so expensive.

The governor’s chief education advisor, J. B. Buxton, was present in the room but was unable to explain the request when called upon. No representative of the Teacher Academy was present. Glazier then asked the committee to reduce the figure to $1 million.

Contacted for this story, Julia Kron, director of the Teacher Academy, said that training a literacy coach was a much more complicated task than simply conducting on-site workshops. In addition to the direct costs of training, there are significant costs involved in developing the curriculum and administering the program, she said.

While the final curriculum is still being worked out, prospective coaches will be required to attend 12 to 16 days of training. The training will be conducted over the course of the school year and will involve teachers having to travel to training sites on some weekends, and trainers having to travel to schools during the week. Part of the money will be used to cover the travel and lodging expenses.

Years of experience training teachers have shown that a series of weekend training events produces better results than a single two-week “cram course,” Kron said. Another advantage of splitting the training up is that the teachers, who have other duties at their schools in addition to literacy coaching, will not miss time from class.

Still, critics of the program note that $10,000 is enough to pay for a year’s tuition, books, and board at most UNC system schools. Even taking into account curriculum development and administrative costs, and travel and lodging expenses, the $1 million cost seems excessive to some. Kron insisted that the amount is appropriate, given the type of training being provided.

Critics also note that there is no provision in the law requiring teachers to continue serving as literacy coaches after receiving the training. If the program is to continue year after year, new literacy coaches will have to be trained each year to replace those who leave.

Apart from concerns about the cost, many educators have been cool to the concept of literacy coaches. While the use of literacy coaches in middle schools is a growing trend in the United States, there seems to be little hard data on the effectiveness of the approach.

A study in Boston showed that content-area teachers were often reluctant to accept assistance from literacy coaches assigned to help them integrate reading instruction into their lesson plans. Subject teachers often are comfortable with the techniques and lesson plans they have used for years and bridle at the idea of having to change, especially to accommodate priorities outside their field, the study showed. Teachers of math and science must prepare their students for end-of-course (and other) tests, and might resent having to spend some of their limited class time teaching reading comprehension and other literacy skills that students should have mastered years earlier.

For the program to work as intended, teachers selected for training as literacy coaches must have excellent leadership and collaboration skills, and be recognized by their peers as outstanding teachers, Kron said. The Teacher Academy will not make the selections of teachers to be trained; that task will be the responsibility of the schools and school districts from which they are to come. But the academy will work closely with school districts to ensure they understand the qualities that successful literacy coaches must have.

The academy will recommend that each teacher selected for the program commit to at least three years of service as a literacy coach, and that districts make this one of the criteria they use in making selections, Kron said. The academy is also working on a suggested job description for the districts’ use.
“We will spend every penny on training, and we will document every penny spent,” Kron said.

Jim Stegall is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.