September/October 2004
Adolescent Literacy
Are we overlooking the struggling teenage reader?
By Robert Rothman
Beginning this fall, students entering ninth grade in Worcester, Mass., can take a new course. Called "academic literacy," the course uses a variety of texts-from Malcolm X essays to mathematics books-to engage students who have low grades and test scores and teach them strategies to enhance their reading skills.
Although the district has, on average, demonstrated relatively high performance on state tests, school leaders recognized that they needed to do more to help all students reach proficiency, according to Lisa Dyer, a teacher and district literacy coach for the Worcester Public Schools. Dyer and others also agreed that a course to help struggling readers improve their skills would enable the lowest-performing students to do better in all their content-area classes.
"The rationale is to help kids master a rigorous high school curriculum," Dyer says. "[The students in the course] need extra help to read content-area texts."
The new course is just one of a number of initiatives Worcester is undertaking to help improve literacy skills among the city's middle and high school students.
The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter.
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insights Performance vs. Attainment The double standard for accountability in American high schools
By Richard F. Elmore
It was a fairly standard high school visit. I met Kevin, the principal of Belle Glade High School, in his office at 7:15 a.m. and spent most of the day visiting classrooms. Kevin is an experienced high school administrator in his second year at Belle Glade. Belle Glade enrolls students from a suburban community with one of the highest median family incomes in its region. The school is surrounded by well-appointed homes on multi-acre lots; its student parking lot is populated by late-model SUVs with roof racks and elliptical stickers with mysterious letters on them. More than 90 percent of the students at Belle Glade go on to college.
At the end of the day, I presented what has become a fairly standard set of observations .
The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter.
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for discussion The "N-word" and the Racial Dynamics of Teaching
By Wendy Luttrell and Janie Ward
It is the first day back at school and students greet each other after the long summer break. Racial, gender, and sexual slurs-all spoken without apparent malice-punctuate students' dialogue as they hail each other. One teacher bristles every time she hears the n-word. A guidance counselor calls out, "Hey, watch your mouth." Two teachers exchange glances, and one says to the other, "You have to pick your battles." A new high school year has begun.
How do high school teachers contend with students' use of offensive racial and sexual language? What wells of emotions are tapped as teachers wrestle with their decisions about what "battles to pick" in their everyday interactions with youth?
The rest of this article can be found in the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter.
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