Maryland’s reading comeback may hinge on $10.9M for teacher coaches

Ecaterina Bittner floats between classrooms, sizing up lessons in real time. Why isn’t the boy in the third seat understanding? Could that lesson have been better if students led the discussion?

She’s part cheerleader, part detective, a 40-year-veteran educator who seems to have distilled to its essence what will help children learn to read. Now she spends hours on her feet every day tweaking teaching at Armistead Gardens Elementary/Middle School. Reading test scores are soaring at the school, which has a large population of low-income students and whose first language is Spanish.

Her formal title is literacy coach, and she is the type of educator that Maryland State Superintendent of Schools Carey Wright wants to put in dozens of classrooms across the state next year — if she can wrangle $10.9 million of state funding. Gov. Wes Moore proposed the investment in literacy and math coaches as part of his budget in January, but it will be up to the legislature to decide whether it survives.

Teaching coaches are key to Wright’s plan to reverse Maryland’s two-decade achievement slide. Once touted as No. 1 in the nation for public schools, the state is now below average on a national test. Wright led a similar turnaround in Mississippi that involved literacy coaches, taking it from last in the nation to outperforming wealthier states.

Wright wants to hire 35 literacy coaches and four regional coaches — in other words, coaches for the coaches — who will work in 90 schools with 1,100 teachers and 34,000 students. Most of the funding will go to literacy coaches, although there will be four regional coaches for math.

Baltimore City Public Schools was an early adopter of literacy coaches in Maryland. Starting in the 2018-19 school year, the city hired 20 coaches paid for with private and public grant funds, then gradually added more each year. Now every prekindergarten through eighth-grade school has a literacy coach.

For the past eight years, the city’s reading scores have gone up in nearly every grade, surpassing growth statewide, though they remain below average. It’s also driven in part by the school district’s return to a research-based approach to reading instruction, called the science of reading.

On a recent morning, Bittner huddled with Darlene Green, an early-literacy tutor, whose job it is to pull a small group of students falling behind out of the classroom and reinforce the skills they aren’t grasping.

The children are tested quickly every other week. The two teachers pull up results on their laptops and identify the problem areas. “We want to work on the deficits,” Bittner said.

One girl needs to practice the “sw” sound and learn to blend it with other letters into a word. Another girl can say 49 sounds, but she taps through each letter with her finger to sound out a word. A third student is moving ahead but having trouble with diphthongs, when two vowels form a single sound.

They plot an action plan that Green will carry out.

Bittner’s approach is based on building relationships with staff throughout the building, from the principal to the teaching assistants. “If you don’t have the trust and the collaboration, I don’t care who you are, it’s not going to work,” she said. She tries to act as a bridge and a sounding board.

Across the hall, teachers are working during a free period. Behind them is a long list of names, each student in red, yellow, green or blue, denoting whether they are behind, on or above grade level.

During a weekly, one-hour block of time, kindergarten teachers meet with Bittner to talk strategy. Isabella Ferro said Bittner makes teachers close their laptops so they can’t multitask through a meeting, forcing them to focus on improving their lessons.

Classrooms become more like laboratories, with teachers sharing ideas and trying them out.

The work of coaching is a difficult balance of helping teachers understand how they can improve without seeming to point out their flaws.

“I don’t look at the teacher; I look at the kids” in order to take the focus off the teacher, Bittner said. At the end of a lesson, she said, she will ask “what can we do differently together to help those kids that didn’t get it? Because, look, here’s the paperwork.”

Rather than a “gotcha” mentality, Ferro said Bittner will work collaboratively, asking teachers to find strategies that work better.

“She is our school mom. I respect her so much, and I always want to grow,” said Ferro, a third-year teacher. “I am not intimidated by her. I go to her five times a day,” she said.

Bittner spent one year mentoring teachers and three as a literacy coach at Armistead Gardens. In those four years, the pass rate on the state’s English test for grades 3-8 has gone from 22% to 42%.

Although 42% reading proficiency may not seem remarkable, the school is nearly at the state average. Statewide, 50% of students can pass the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.

Gains in achievement in other subjects have come because the school has Bittner work with math and social studies teachers from elementary to middle school, said Justin Holbrook, the principal.

Across Maryland, test scores have begun to rise slowly, and Wright, the state superintendent, hopes to see a much more significant increase as she implements coaching in literacy and perhaps math.

Wright said coaches will be sent to schools that are not showing improvement in their literacy scores or have a large number of students who aren’t reading well.

“They’re not there to evaluate a teacher,” Wright said, describing the job as more of a personal trainer for teachers. “Research is showing us, very clearly, job-embedded coaching is the most effective strategy you could have in building a teacher’s capacity.”

The results seem plain to Baltimore City Public Schools Chief Academic Officer Joan Dabrowski. Test scores across the city are on the rise.

“We hear from our teachers that working with their coaches helps them feel prepared for their lessons. That having that full-time expert right down the hall is paying off,” Dabrowski said.

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.