Author Description

The San Diego Unified School District, the nation's eighth-largest, launched an ambitious program of literacy reforms in 2000 aimed at narrowing reading achievement gaps. Known as the Blueprint for Student Success, the program ran through 2005. The reforms succeeded in boosting the reading achievement of students who had been identified as lagging behind at the elementary and middle school levels. The key element that seems to have driven this success was a significant amount of extra student time spent on reading, with a possible collateral factor being widespread professional development for district teachers. The combination was neither cheap to implement nor a magic bullet. But in elementary and middle schools it demonstrably worked. In high schools, with one exception, it did not. This study summarizes the statistical evaluation of all of the Blueprint reforms over the five-year period, drawing lessons for educators about why some elements of the Blueprint succeeded and how they could be implemented elsewhere. (Contains 8 figures, 2 tables and 24 notes.) [For the technical appendix, see ed515650.].