THE SETTING
Ben Bronz Academy is a school for learning disabled students in grades three through twelve. The school provides remedial programs in reading, writing, mathematics, language, study-skills and cognitive problem-solving techniques, together with content courses in science, social studies and literature where these basic skills are applied. The goal of the school is to help students attain skills needed to return to normal progress in public or private high school and college

THE POPULATION
Students come to Ben Bronz Academy because they have not succeeded in other schools. Most are identified in first grade, but they seek help outside the public schools in later grades, when it becomes clear that their needs are not being met. Although the students are of average intelligence, they all have been formally diagnosed as seriously learning disabled, primarily in the area of language processing.

THE READING CURRICULUM
The reading curriculum is described in detail elsewhere. Briefly, it consists of the following components:

• A special adaptation of Bloomfield and Barnhardt's Let's Read textbook series taught in classes of eight students or fewer, following the general classroom procedures of Direct Instruction, e.g. choral responding and other procedures that maximize on-task time by all students
• Lessons in Decoding and Comprehension published by Science Research Associates also taught by the methods of direct instruction. These lessons expand vocabulary and sentence comprehension skills and provide exercises in reasoning and inference.
• A common set of procedures for facilitating reading comprehension and practicing study skills, e.g. the use of graphic organizers to capture memorable information from texts and lectures. These are uniformly applied in all content courses and all writing activities.
• Daily practice in speed reading aloud from practice sheets derived from high-frequency "sight words" and the SRA Decoding lessons.

• Additional instructional time: all students ordinarily have two and a half hours of specialized reading instruction per day in addition to the standard reading-comprehension activities that take place in the content courses. This may be substantially increased for students who are not making sufficient progress.
• Supplementary exercises: these involve additional instruction and practice on subcomponents of the curriculum in which the students are placed.
• Curriculum extensions: when several students encounter the same problem, or when a particular student presents very severe problems, additional materials and techniques are discovered or invented to extend and revise the curriculum to meet their needs.

Periodically, teachers discuss individual modifications of the curriculum with their supervisors. Useful, generally applicable modifications are then discussed in faculty meetings, and, if they are approved, all teachers put them into practice. Everyone thoroughly understands that improvements are encouraged, but no one may make a change unless it is approved, and then everyone must make the change.

The staff strives for common procedures, not only in the remedial reading classes, but also in the content classes, so that students encounter consistency of methodology and expectations across the subject-matter areas. Wherever a student is confronted with print, the methodology of instruction in decoding and comprehension is the same.

All teachers are also trained in common and consistent classroom management techniques. These are designed to insure:

• Consistent and frequent attention to positive, on-task behavior
• Conscious self-management by all students
• Frequent attention to individual targets for self-improvement
• Simple, standard procedures for handling misbehavior

In general, the model for teacher training is one of apprenticeship to a set of standard procedures, followed by collegial cooperation in systematically improving those procedures. This ongoing evaluation and improvement of instruction is supported by a computer system that enables collection of a wealth of daily data about the daily performance of the students.