Sounding Out Success

Photograph of Dan Goodrich

In libraries, classrooms, and community centers across most of New York City, older students tutor younger ones to improve their reading skills. Through the Reading Excellence and Discovery Foundation, a five-year-old nonprofit group, some 2,000 students in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade have received reading help.

Program participants are recommended by their teachers because the children have had reading difficulties. The charity finds volunteer tutors by soliciting applications from students in grades 7 through 12 who have solid grades and can commit to tutoring two children for half an hour each, four times a week, for 13 weeks. Tutors who do well are offered a paid job in the group’s five-week summer session.

All students come from low-income families and attend either public or parochial schools.

The tutors receive five hours of training and teach their young charges by using short booklets that focus on mastering a few short words and sounds at a time, a process that studies have shown to be the most effective way to teach reading. After the students learn the short sounds and words in isolation, they then practice reading them in stories. The booklets allow the group to track results: on average, students gain one grade level in reading after completing the after-school or summer program.

The older students benefit from the experience as much as the youngsters, says Anne Adler, the charity’s president. “They feel powerful when they can help somebody else,” she says. “Here’s a kid whose life they have changed.”

A little more than half of the group’s $1.2-million budget comes from foundations, with most of the rest from corporations and individuals, and less than 1 percent from government grants.

Here, a first-grade student reads one of the short booklets to her 10th-grade tutor.