School boards can improve adolescent literacy
At a Sunday session, Elizabeth Partoyan, director of research, training, and member services at NSBA, and Suzanne Helms, president of the Madison City school board in Alabama, shared eight steps local boards can take to improve adolescent literacy:
• Identify students' literacy needs.
• Make adolescent literacy a districtwide priority.
• Extend time for literacy. This can be done by embedding literacy throughout the curriculum, providing intensive interventions, and offering tutoring programs in the summer.
• Provide effective professional development to help teachers deliver literacy instruction across the curriculum.
• Find and support "literacy leaders." The superintendent, principals, and teachers should support the goal to improve literacy, and the curriculum should be aligned with state literacy standards.
• Align the district's resources to support scientifically proven literacy programs for both high-achievers and low-achievers.
• Evaluate programs and assess performance continuously. Teachers should use data to make sure their instruction meets students' identified needs.
• Develop community support for literacy from preK through the 12th grade.
These recommendations are from a guidebook published by NSBA in 2006, The Next Chapter: A School Board Guide to Improving Adolescent Literacy, which features best practices from 14 school districts. NSBA had received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to develop the guidebook and put together an advisory group to help with the project, including representatives from the Minnesota and Illinois school boards associations, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the National Governors Association, and various education groups.
Partoyan cited a 2005 report on reading from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that found 71 percent of eighth-graders scored below the level of "proficient" and 20 percent scored "below basic."
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