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Dear friends,

We are very pleased that the materials we developed for the REFINE/Roma Education Fund project, "Academic Success for Roma Children," are now in your hands. This has been a wonderful project so far, ably led by Maria Kovacs, and carried forward by a capable and hard-working team of educators from six countries (seven, counting us Yankees). We expect great things from it in the second year of funding, and beyond.
You know, when the RWCT project began a decade ago its authors (Kurt Meredith, Jeannie Steele, Scott Walter, and I, Charlie Temple, with a lot of guidance and support from Liz Lorant), aimed it, deliberately or not, above the level of basic education in reading. Later, Liz asked us to keep the focus of RWCT above fourth grade, to keep from overlapping so much with Step by Step, which was intended for preschool through fourth grade. But from the early days we have been involved in basic literacy projects for Roma children--especially projects that produce "little books" for children to read, and share tutoring methods for their teachers to help them. With a grant from REFINE/REF it was possible to do a more significant project on beginning reading for children in the first three grades who are at risk of failing to learn well. Many of these are Roma, of course, but they include other children who, for example, may not attended kindergarten.
Thus this new program has a strong teaching component—for teachers of whole classes or for tutors of individual children. The project and the guidebooks also have a very strong assessment component, so teachers can see exactly what the children know and what they need to know. We believe both parts will be useful. The assessment devices have been created by the team members in their five different languages. It is likely that in some of these countries, these will be the most comprehensive reading assessment devices yet available. (They should be valuable, in other words).
What does this mean to people in the RWCT consortium? Here is our thinking: With the advent of the PIRLS and PISA tests, certainly the ministries of education in the region are paying more attention to reading. Since UNESCO has declared a Decade of Literacy (along with Education for All) and the World Bank has announced a Decade of Roma Inclusion, we would expect that new programs will be starting in your countries to help less well prepared young children, especially Roma children, learn to read. If that is the case, we encourage you to think of developing projects along these lines, and to adopt this program if it appeals to you. We would remind you, though, that this project is being carried out very much in the spirit of RWCT; and that means that if you do want to set up a project like the one described in these guidebooks, you will want to recruit people who have already been trained in it (over 100 hours of training, so far) to help you think through and start up your own projects. By the way, this project has been offered both to RWCT and to Step by Step. You should think of possible collaborations with Step by Step if you contemplate going forward with a project based on "Academic Success for Roma Children."
So, many thanks to Liz Lorant, for backing this project from the beginning; to Maria Kovacs, for writing the proposal and managing this thing; to Monica Robotin, our on-site coordinator in Cluj and to Levente Salat at the EDRC in Cluj for giving us an institutional home; and to the absolutely terrific educators from Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia who worked so hard and so cheerfully to make the program a reality. And best wishes to all of you, from partly cloudy Geneva, New York, and very hot Los Angeles.

Charlie Temple, Alan Crawford, and Codruta Temple

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