Mission Possible: States Take on Adolescent Literacy

Abstract

IN October 2005, the National Governors Association published Reading to Achieve: A Governors Guide to Adolescent Literacy, asserting that poor readers in elementary and middle school are likely to struggle in high school and are most at risk of dropping out before graduation. The report argued that the eight million struggling readers in grades 4-12 needed extra support and that governors were uniquely positioned to raise awareness of the adolescent literacy problem in their states. The NGA recommended five strategies to improve achievement in adolescent literacy: 1) build support for a state focus on adolescent literacy, 2) raise literacy expectations across grades and curricula, 3) encourage and support school and district literacy plans, 4) build educators' capacity to provide adolescent literacy instruction, and 5) measure progress in adolescent literacy at the school, district, and state levels. By the end of the 2006 legislative sessions, a few states had enacted policies that addressed the quality of reading instruction across all grades. Florida's H.B. 7087 represents a continuation of the A+ education reform begun by Gov. Jeb Bush in 1999, but it is sometimes difficult to know whether these new policies resulted from gubernatorial proposals or from legislative leadership. They are not the first policies to address the quality of reading instruction, nor will they be the last. Some, however, appear to include components that parallel the strategies recommended by the NGA. Strategy 1. Build support for a state focus on adolescent literacy. Section 8 of Florida's H.B. 7087 creates the Just Read, Florida! office within the department of education to provide a state focus that includes adolescent literacy. The office is charged with training reading coaches who are highly effective and hold proper credentials, creating multiple designations of effective reading instruction, and training K-12 teachers and school principals on effective content-area-specific reading strategies. For secondary teachers, the emphasis is to be on helping students learn to read technical texts. The bill requires local boards to adopt policies in a number of areas, including establishing procedures for placing and promoting students in grades 6-12 who enter Florida schools from out of state or from foreign countries; devising alternative methods for students to demonstrate competency in required courses, with special support for students who have been retained; designing applied, integrated, and combined courses that provide flexibility for students to enroll in courses that are creative and meet individual learning styles and student needs; creating credit recovery courses; and providing intensive reading and math intervention courses to students whose performance on state assessments is below par. Strategy 2. Raise literacy expectations across grades and curricula. The Just Read, Florida! office is required to offer parents information and strategies to enable them to help their children in reading in the content areas. The Florida bill also creates an annual district allocation to provide comprehensive, research-based reading instruction to students in grades K-12. Funds may be used to pay for highly qualified reading coaches, professional development that includes strategies to teach reading in content areas and emphasizes technical and informational text, summer reading camps for students who score low on the reading assessment, and supplemental instructional materials that are grounded in reading research. Kentucky's S.B. 130 requires a great deal of reporting across the grade levels. For example, parents must be given information on their fifth-graders' readiness in reading and math. There must be a report for each student who takes a high school or college readiness exam, and that report must provide test data and a judgment concerning whether the student has met expectations for each standard assessed. …