America’s Choice Ramp-Up Literacy
National Center on Education and the Economy
TARGET STUDENTS
Grades 6-12. The program is designed for students who are performing up one to two levels below their grade. It is not designed for students who read below that level.
PROGRAM PURPOSE
Ramp-up to Literacy was designed to accelerate the academic achievement of middle and high school students who read up to two years (but not lower) below grade level. The program is schoolwide in that it works with administrators to put in place systems for spotting students having academic difficulty in literacy and mathematics. For students identified as needing help with reading and writing, the program provides a year-round, double-period program designed to bring students lacking literacy skills up to grade level. Teachers of this double period class and the principal receive professional development. At an America’s Choice school, two trained teachers serve as literacy coaches to ensure that that the reading and writing skills block is implemented effectively. A superintendent may implement the program across a district, or schools may participate on an individual basis. This literacy component is one part of a comprehensive school design. The program grew out of the work of the National Alliance for Restructuring Education (NARE), a New American Schools project funded by the National Center on Education and Economy in 1989. The America Choice school design was created in 1998 when a first cohort of 42 schools began implementing the full literacy and mathematics design.
APPROACH
Philosophy. The program is based on the idea that “teaching to explicit standards is the best strategy for helping disadvantaged and low-performing students.” The program reflects the situated learning perspective that reading and writing not only involve skills, but are meaning making processes that are developed in communities of readers engaged in purposeful learning.
Instructional focus. The program mainly focuses on comprehension strategies, with the assumption that students will have essential reading skills. Consistent with much research on comprehension, it assumes that students need explicit instruction in the strategies that successful readers and writers use to identify vocabulary, make sense of challenging texts, invent strong arguments, and plan and revise their writing. It also assumes that students need to be able to choose the materials they read for pleasure and “create compelling arguments and written texts of their own.”
Instructional components. Structured units and lessons focus on age-appropriate literary texts and embed skills instruction in a reading and writing workshop approach. Lessons integrate teacher modeling of literacy strategies; small group discussion of texts, including students’ own, independent work; and differentiated instruction. Classrooms include 20 or fewer students. Walking into an America’s Choice classroom, you may see three or four students grouped with their desks together discussing a memoir of a girl who grew up in China. Following that discussion, they move back to their own desks to read a different memoir of their own choosing. Later in the period, they begin to jot down ideas about an experience of their own that they might write about. During the class period, the teacher provides them explicit instruction in how to conduct a peer editing session with other students.
The literacy coach is an important part of the program. The program recommends that coaches be a highly-respected member of the school community with strong practice knowledge and have strong people skills. The program argues that while administrators may be reluctant to remove these talented teachers from the classroom, as coaches, these teachers will have an even greater positive impact in the school. The program provides a home-school notebook to increase communication between the teacher and the family.
Setting. A group of 20 low-performing students meet in a classroom two periods each day. This class serves as their English Language Arts class.
Materials. Ramp-Up Literacy materials include daily lesson plans, scripted lessons, classroom activities, homework assignments, and a 500-book leveled library.
Alignment with standards: The program is aimed at helping low-achieving students meet statewide standards and assessments. Students with disabilities are often included in Ramp-Up classrooms.
ASSESSMENT
The program guides schools in using assessment data to identify students needing help with mathematics and literacy skills.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In the first year of a school’s implementation, teachers of the Ramp-Up Literacy course receive nine days of off-site professional development over a year, in three workshops of three days each. In the second year, the literacy coach and an additional English teacher attend a six-day summer institute, followed by two- and three-day sessions. The coaches and principals are also trained to provide on-site professional development in their school. Teachers receive coaching in small groups with the literacy coach. Teachers do not receive special training for working with students who lack essential reading skills.
EFFECTIVENESS
The program had a number of evaluations by organizations external to the program, including the Consortium for Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania, which documented the program in three communities, Rochester New York; Plainfield, New Jersey; and Duval County, New Jersey. The reports from these evaluations are encouraging but not definitive. For example, the research team studied a decades’ worth of Rochester test scores comparing the performance of America’s Choice students with those in the non-America’s Choice schools and found the America’s Choice students outperformed their counterparts, even though the America’s Choice schools had a greater percentage of disadvantaged students. The bottom 25 percent of America’s Choice schools “gained significantly more” than did the lowest performing students in other Rochester schools.A study of 232 school reform models conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Johns Hopkins University found that the effect size for America’s Choice schools was nearly triple that of the average school reform model. On average, an America’s Choice student at the 50th percentile would have moved to the 60th percentile on standardized tests in a single year. Because none of these studies used randomized assignment of schools to America’s Choice versus another comprehensive school reform program, the results are not conclusive.
COST/ADOPTION
The set-up cost is $90K for up to 30 teachers. The cost of curriculum materials for the individual classrooms is $2,000-4,000. In order for the school to be accepted in the larger school reform program, 80 percent of the faculty must accept it. America’s Choice has partnered with over 650 schools, including charter schools, in 16 states.
Contacting Ramp-Up. Website: www.ncee.org/acsd/literacy/index.jsp.
The following website provides a national map with regional offices designated for information:
www.ncee.org/acsd/join/index.jsp.
