By Ruth Steinhardt
It’s an ambitious goal: teach 90 percent of all third graders in the city of Vero Beach, Fla., to read at or above grade level by 2018.
But Raymond J. Oglethorpe, the former president and CEO of America Online (AOL), is no stranger to ambition.
“If you establish big goals, it makes people think differently,” Mr. Oglethorpe said of what he called “the moonshot moment.” He spoke Thursday at a dean’s salon hosted by Michael Feuer, dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the George Washington University.
The discussion, which ranged from the practicalities of teaching literacy to successful philosophies of grassroots organizing, included Barbara Hammond and Elizabeth Woody, founders and fellow directors with Mr. Oglethorpe of The Learning Alliance (TLA) , as well as P. David Pearson, co-principal investigator for Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading and former dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ms. Hammond, a former consultant, and Ms. Woody, a learning specialist, both are parents of children who struggled with reading. Their initial intent for TLA was to provide special literacy education tutors for Vero Beach children with learning disabilities.
Soon, however, they realized that the techniques special educators had developed to teach literacy—kinesthetic learning that got students out of their seats and stimulated them on multiple sensory levels—could benefit all children, not just the 10 percent diagnosed with special needs.
And if TLA engaged allies across the community, they could take a holistic approach to literacy that wouldn’t stop at the classroom door. For instance, to stop summer slippage in reading competency, TLA developed a five-week summer program in partnership with the Indian River County public school system and a local nature center. Children visited the center using school-provided transportation and learned words pertaining to the ecology of their own community.
“The results were off the charts,” Mr. Oglethorpe said.
The summer program, which was developed for the “most at-risk kids,” maintained a 95 percent attendance rate and resulted, he said, in a significant gain in reading competency test scores. Such gains are important, he said, because if a child cannot read at grade level by the end of third grade, they have only one chance in seven to catch up by the end of high school.
“That’s not just a moral outrage, it’s an economic outrage,” he said.
Also importantly, the directors said, TLA was developed as a non-mandatory, non-coercive resource that meets communities where they are instead of imposing techniques on a resistant system. Ms. Woody said the organization must continually ask questions such as “What gives children a reason to learn?” and “What is it that teachers need?”
“Nothing gets done from the top down—it has to be grassroots,” she said.
Mr. Oglethorpe, M.S. ’69, who previously served on GW’s Board of Trustees, has brought many of the principles that guided his corporate career to his directorship of TLA, including scalability, narrowness of focus and patience.
“It’s not necessarily where the numbers are at the present time, it’s whether you’re changing the culture,” he said. “That is key. When we started AOL, we didn’t make a dime for over seven years… And then all of a sudden it hit a curve, and we made money. The same thing happens in education. People forget that it takes time, and they expect linear progress.”
The development of the program has been a learning experience for the reformers, he said.
Factors like mobility, teacher turnover and poverty—68 percent of Vero Beach children are on a free or reduced-fee lunch program—have complicated their efforts. But Mr. Oglethorpe and his colleagues said the results they’ve already seen make them hopeful of the program’s success, and TLA plans future “Moonshot Institutes” to address some of those complicating issues.
And for Mr. Oglethorpe, who grew up in what he called “a relatively poor community,” nothing is more important than making good public education available to every child.
“If not for public education, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Education is everything to me.”