Adolescent Literacy

For years, Mary Manning, principal of the Collins Middle School in Salem Massachusetts, has seen children come into her school unable to read at grade level. After three years, many failed to catch up before moving on to high school. “After a few years of saying ‘isn’t this terrible,’ and wringing our hands, we decided to get some training and see if we could tackle this problem,” says Manning.

Determined to make improved literacy skills the focus of a schoolwide improvement effort, Manning assembled a Reading Improvement Team that includes staff from every department across the school. Under her leadership, the school is collaborating with EDC’s Supported Literacy™ program leaders on a schoolwide effort to address literacy at all levels, with a special emphasis on the most challenged readers.

Mary Manning is not alone. Across the country middle school administrators and teachers have been confronting the fact that significant numbers of their students cannot read well enough to meet increasingly rigorous high school subject matter and graduation requirements. In fact, results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress show that only about a third of adolescents across the country are reading at a proficient level.

“This is not a new problem,” says Catherine Cobb Morocco, associate director of EDC’s Center for Family, School, and Community and a leader of the Supported Literacy team. “Teachers have always known about this group of struggling adolescent readers. But with the new federal testing requirements it is plain for everyone to see exactly who is and is not reading.”

The groups most at risk for reading failure are the same groups at risk for school failure in general: students with disabilities, English language learners, and students who live in poverty. “The students who struggle with reading are struggling in their other classes as well,” says EDC’s Andrea Winokur Kotula, who works closely with the staff at Collins. “The math teachers, the science teachers, everyone knows who the poor readers are—they are their students too.”

Supported Literacy provides two levels of instructional support for literacy: classroom comprehension instruction for all students and additional, targeted reading instruction for students whose standardized reading test scores are below the 25th percentile. The schoolwide classroom level prepares teachers to improve all students’ reading, writing, and discussion skills as they work with complex texts. The program and materials emphasize integrating comprehension and writing skills into thematic curriculum units with diverse and age-appropriate themes. A major focus of the program is developing student ability to support an interpretation of text with evidence, an outcome emphasized in content area assessments.

While developing the Supported Literacy approach in partnership with diverse schools across the country, Morocco and her colleagues discovered that despite the best efforts of accomplished teachers and the EDC team, there remained a certain segment of students who could not read well enough to participate in a program based on comprehension and interpretation.