A federally funded pilot program aimed at helping students improve their reading skills has proven to be a huge success in Washington, D.C.
The program targeted primarily low income and African American students who traditionally had the lowest test scores in reading — and significant improvements were seen at all grade levels.
Antoinette Mitchell, D.C.’s state superintendent of education, is thrilled with the results.
“The kids did so well that they actually shrunk a third of the achievement gap that exists in our schools today between those students who participated in this grant and those that did not,” Mitchell said. “So we are over the moon in terms of the outcomes of this work.”
The superintendent’s office just released the report, which details the results of the 5 year program funded by a $16 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education, called the Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant.
That grant is aimed specifically at improving literacy rates among most disadvantaged students.
The findings are impressive across all ages.
“We saw results with our youngest learners having increased in language usage,” Mitchell said. “We saw growth at the third grade level, at the eighth grade level, in high school. We saw 54% more growth in the students who participated in this grant than their peers. We saw 60 to 70% growth in four-year-olds’ language growth skills.”
Mitchell tells News4 the program focused on the teachers and staff at schools, helping them to rethink how they teach reading.
“The school districts then did an incredible amount of professional development, ensuring that teachers really understood the science of reading, structured literacy, tons of professional development that helps teachers really internalize the idea that phonics and phenomic awareness is important and has to be taught,” Mitchell said.
The professional development also focused on the importance of vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
“So once teachers deeply internalized this, they then had the time and the space through this grant to meet on a regular basis to review student data in terms of their reading comprehension, and other things, and then to structure instruction based on data,” Mitchell said.
She said that the time the grant gave to teachers to focus their lessons was part of why it made such a large impact.
“That was a huge, huge part of this grant, is giving teachers the space to analyze and then the skills to go and teach those students, along with having great curricula and materials,” Mitchell said.”
The program also utilized Saturday classes, after-school tutoring and outreach to the students’ families.
The pilot focused on 17,000 students in D.C. charter schools. Mitchell said it’s being expanded next year to an additional 25,000 students, including some in traditional public schools.
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