A Force Field Analysis of My Situation...'cuz...DANG!

I just want to share what I'm up against. I don't think anything before this activity has really made me articulate it in one sitting before.  A brief Force Field Analysis of my topic follows:

1. The current situation is that a large number of students on our campus (between 40% and 50% of students in each grade level) cannot read at nationally-normed benchmark levels according the Winter 2011, Spring 2012, and Fall 2012 Universal Screens administered with Renaissance Learning’s STAR Reading assessment. This is the root of a vast number of issues on our campus including, but not limited to, the following: difficulty with core curriculum, discipline referrals, low-performance on STAAR assessment, student apathy, and growing classroom management issues. Up until this year, a real Tier II intervention has not been available for these students.
2. The proposed change back in the late spring of 2012 was to redistribute my class loads of eighth grade English language arts students by assigning most of those students to the other two eighth grade ELA teachers and open up four sections of Reading Improvement. These sections would be open to students in all three grade levels, as they would be fully differentiated and instruction would be available to each child at his or her point of need regardless of grade level. The proposed interventions for this class were the following: (a) forty minutes per day for the first four days of each week students will read audio books selected at levels based upon a slightly modified Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as determined by the STAR Reading Universal Screen, (b) students will maintain a summary bookmark for each book made from an accordion folded full sheet of notebook paper allowing them to chunk the book into eight sections and summarize each section as they read, (c) students will take Accelerated Reader (AR) Reading Practice quizzes over each book that they read, (d) students struggling with vocabulary (as determined by the Istation Indicators of Progress (ISIP) assessment) will also take available AR Vocabulary Practice quizzes to track understanding of Book Level vocabulary, (e) remediation from the available Vocabulary List report and "Vocabulary Boxes" worksheets will be given to children who perform poorly on these, (f) Progress Monitoring will be conducted weekly on the fifth day using the STAR Reading assessment, (g) Progress Monitoring and Diagnostic Testing will be conducted monthly using the ISIP assessment, (h) students will engage in differentiated practice on the Istation platform on the fifth day following Progress Monitoring assessments, (i) parents will be notified by letter and by email (as available) of how to download Istation components to their home computers so students can continue remediation practices at home, (j) all work in the Istation platform will be monitored bi-weekly to assess progress and inform tutorial instruction time.
3. If no change occurs, based on the last three Universal Screens, we will see either a continuation of or worsening of the noted trend. Up until now, we have always gotten children who are reading below grade level when they’ve entered the sixth grade. We have always worked hard, especially at the seventh grade level using tutorial sessions to implement portions of the Read 180 program and encouraging the use of audio books for regular AR reading for low-level readers.  The result of this, thus far, has been that the fifty percent of sixth graders not reading on grade level drops to about forty-five percent by seventh grade and to about forty percent by the eighth grade.  If no change occurs, we can expect to continue to remediate around ten percent of our student population leaving forty percent unprepared for the rigors of high school.
4. The forces driving the proposed change are manifold. My personal desire to institute an authentic RtI paradigm on our campus is one driving force. The fact that we are seeing more and more children reading at lower and lower levels when they arrive at the sixth grade is another. The rigors of the STAAR test demand that students not only be able to read on grade level, but that they be able to think critically about topics that should be mastered within their grade level by the time of the Spring Assessment windows. This requires the students to be able to function in their core classes while working to bring their reading ability up to par. The rigors of high school have become even more daunting since the advent of the STAAR End of Course (EOC) exams. Since students now need to pass twelve EOC tests to graduate, it has become more imperative than ever that they be fluent readers before they leave middle school.
5. The forces resisting the change are also many. The greatest of these might be that by the sixth or seventh grade, many students who have not been able to function on grade level for many years have simply given up on the hope of ever being able to perform adequately in an academic environment; their day is filled with simply passing the hours, attempting mischief, and often dealing with discipline issues. Another force resisting the change is the sheer number of students at risk versus the lack of adequate resources to serve them all.  I cannot cram forty-five percent of an 840 student population into four fifty-minute classes.  The circumstances call for something more along the lines of three reading interventionists (one per grade level) each holding four daily class sessions and two periods of pull-out remediation for students with lesser and/or more specific needs.  This would enable a true distinction between Tier II and Tier III students.  This would mean that instead of working with seventy-two students, we would be working with 216, and that would still be only half of the students who need help (but it would be all of the most urgent cases). The force resisting this change is purely economic. The other force resisting this change is time. By the time we identify these students and begin remediation, they are already behind. We have only three years to take students reading on second and third grade levels and bring them up to eighth and ninth.  Time is a daunting factor.
6. The proposed change, while inadequate for our campus’s actual need, is viable and is a sound starting point for our program.
7. A number of things are needed for implementation: parent buy-in for the at-home or extra-curricular tutorial remediation using the Istation platform, continued campus spending on licenses and subscriptions for STAR and AR, campus spending on equipment to support the audio book intervention program, campus spending on equipment to support administration of the ISIP and implementation of the Istation Reding platform, and continued support by the administration to defend the use of a full-time faculty position for this purpose.  I will also need to reduce the strength of the student opposition to this change – their hopelessness and apathy. I hope to do this through the simultaneous implementation of a teacher-student mentor program begin launched by one of my colleagues. As this is the biggest obstacle at this point to individual students finding success given the tools that the campus, the district, and the state have all made available to us this year, I hope that by taking some of these students who have almost completely withdrawn from academic existence and pairing them with a coach who can be the caring adult so many of them are missing in their lives, they will be able to find and summon the will to improve, to take these tools, seize the opportunity, and thrive for the first time in years.