A Tale Of Two Schools

     In the movie A Tale of Two Schools, both were going about revamping their educational programs to something that they felt will benefit their struggling students. Both schools were similar in the aspect that they were behind academically( low state test scores), high poverty rate, and both wanted to set in place programs to help students decoding skills. The two schools introduced in this video were Bearden and Walton Elementary Schools.
      Bearden Elementary School is located in Mississippi and adopted the Project Read Program. The program has students sound out vowel sounds in order to decode words. The teachers at the school, however, have lack of resources and feel unprepared when trying to teach to the program. There is a lack of support at the school to help teachers adapt to the program. There was a women who came in to demonstrate to the teachers how the program was to work and it was clear that the teachers were not adapted to the style of the program. I feel that this program can work with populations of students, however, the lack of preparation and the lack of understanding the teachers have to implement this program has set this program up to fail from the start in my opinion.
     Walton Elementary School is located in Texas and has adopted the Reading Mastery program. The programs focus is to sound out words with the support of symbols. Students use this system to work on decoding of words. All the supports for this system are words with symbols and no pictures are added to the books. The program is scripted and easy to follow for the teachers. I feel that this program seems to have a good response from the teachers and students who are using this program.
     Both of these schools have more strives to go to make their students fluent readers . I believe that both programs need more comprehension skills added in to the programs. The programs focus so much on decoding that they miss the mark on comprehension and fluency skill building. Students spend so much time decoding words, that I feel they do not work on the ability of how they understand what they read and whether they read with proper accuracy, expression, or speed. That being said, both programs are not perfect.  I would say that the program that seems to work best or that I would pick would be the Reading Mastery. All the students seem to like the program and the teachers have the tools they need in order to teach the program. Compared to Bearden, Walton seems to have prepared and adopted their program better. I think this program seems to be effective in teaching decoding skills for reading. I still feel there needs to be more incorporation of comprehension and fluency added to the program as well as picture books. It seems that each school was trying to focus on decoding and with that in mind Walton is the best representation of mastering the skill of decoding to read.