$9-Million Reading Effort Proposed by HISD Superintendent
This article has been updated to reflect the HISD Board of Education's approval of this plan on April 10.
The HISD Board of Education has approved a $9 million plan to begin funding a new intensive literacy program, “Literacy Leads the Way,” designed to significantly improve the overall literacy skills of Houston students.
Superintendent of Schools Abelardo Saavedra also asked trustees to approve $1.25 million for a summer-school effort to challenge Houston’s best and brightest students.
Board members reviewed the proposals on March 7 and approved them on April 10.
The new prekindergarten-through-twelfth-grade literacy effort has been months in development by a committee of educators that has been studying how to improve reading, writing, and speaking and listening skills.
The plan includes intensive reading programs at the middle-school level designed to ensure that by the end of the eighth grade, all students are reading on grade level and are well-prepared for the subject content they will face in high school.
HISD will also work with the Texas Education Agency this summer and in the summer of 2009 to provide intensive training for middle-school teachers through Texas Adolescent Literacy Academies. There, teachers will be trained in how to use diagnostic assessments to spot the reading strengths and weaknesses of students. In addition, a rigorous training effort will be started in partnership with Neuhaus to create experts in reading instruction throughout the district.
In the new program, all teachers at all grade levels will be asked to spend a minimum of 20 to 25 percent of their time in every class teaching literacy, including reading, writing, and speaking and listening skills. This spring, for the second straight year, HISD will mail home to parents the reading “Lexile” scores of their children to help parents understand what their children’s reading level is and how to help them select books to read to improve their skills.
As part of the effort, Dr. Saavedra also wants to launch a summer reading program in partnership with Houston Public Libraries, encouraging HISD students to read one million books collectively over the summer break.
“Everything begins with reading,” Dr. Saavedra said. “If we can teach our children to read well, they’ll do well in everything else in school and have a much greater chance of success in the adult world. We have too many children in Houston, especially at the middle- and high-school levels, who do not read well enough. We’ve got to change that.”
In addition to the $3 million to support the new literacy effort, Dr. Saavedra asked the school board to set aside $1.25 million for new “enrichment” programs at HISD schools this summer. The programs would send children back to school this summer and give extended learning opportunities to students who have been identified through testing, and calculated by the HISD ASPIRE program’s “value-added” analysis, to be high-achieving students who could benefit from more challenging school work.
“Traditionally, for more than two months in the summer we allow our children to stay home, out of school, many of them looking for something do to. And we do that just because we’ve always shut down school during summer,” Dr. Saavedra said. “It’s time to change that. With these new summer reading programs, and with this new effort to academically challenge our highest-achieving students this summer, we can stop this needless summer brain drain and keep our children’s minds engaged like they ought to be.”
