Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource
Palo Alto Unified sorely needed to improve.
Despite ample resources and a reputation as one of California’s top districts, we were dramatically failing high-need students in education’s most fundamental subject: reading. For me, as a school board member, that was a tough pill to swallow.
But we have started to turn around our long-term problem as borne out by the results for our district on the state’s CAASPP/Smarter Balanced tests. Our students and teachers raised third grade reading scores for underserved groups from among the worst in the state to one of the best.
Even better, any district can follow the approach we used; it did not rely on big spending or complicated new programs. Early literacy is a “solvable crisis” for California’s schools.
Like most districts in California, we were struggling to teach reading to low-income and historically marginalized students. For…
