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Support for the ongoing professional development activities of SLI, including its documentation of student outcomes, was provided by The Stuart Foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the W. Clement & Jessie V. Stone Foundation, the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, the Flora Family Foundation, the Times Mirror Foundation, and The Stupski Family Foundation.

Based on SLI's Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework, as well as the inquiry-based professional development model, SLI began offering professional development services to diverse networks of teachers in secondary classrooms, in the greater Bay Area as well as around the state and country. During the 1999-2000 school year, two partnerships offered an opportunity to see how Reading Apprenticeship, integrated into diverse subject-area classrooms, might impact student reading achievement. The data below present summaries of student outcomes in these networks as measured by a standardized reading comprehension test.


Secondary School Literacy Project

Beginning in the 1999-2000 school year, the Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools (BAYCES) invited the Strategic Literacy Initiative to create a hybrid professional development network – the Secondary School Literacy Project – that would combine the system-level reforms supported by the Coalition with the classroom-based reforms supported by the Strategic Literacy Initiative. The network drew subject-area teachers, in teams, from seven different Bay Area middle and high schools.

Of the 478 students tested by their teachers in the BAYCES/SLI Secondary School Literacy Project network, 42% were initially scoring at or above the mean (50) on the normal curve. At the end of the year, 57% of these students were scoring at or above the mean as the following graph indicates.

As the following graph shows, when these students were divided into performance quartiles based on their fall scores on the DRP, the most rapid increases in achievement occurred among the two lowest scoring quartiles of students (those who were in most need of instructional support to build literacy proficiencies). This finding demonstrates that students in classrooms where teachers are implementing Reading Apprenticeship accelerate their literacy learning when compared to a national norming population of grade-matched peers.




Los Angeles Unified School District Humanitas Network

Also during this year, the Los Angeles Education Partnership (LAEP) and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) invited SLI to work with teachers in the Humanitas network, a network of teachers who had worked to create academically challenging, integrated curricula for students in seven Los Angeles public high schools.

In the Los Angeles network, across all seven network schools, matched fall and spring DRP scores were available for a total of 394 students. In this group, average independent reading levels on the DRP rose from 47.02 in fall to 52.85 in spring, a gain in independent reading level of 5.83 units. Expected growth at the high school level is between one and two units; this group of students exceeded an expected year's growth by more than three units. Students started out ranked at 40.18 on the normal curve in the fall compared to their national age-mates. By spring they had made statistically significant gains, moving up to 45.57, an average growth of 5.39 points on the normal curve.

Read the full study (PDF)