catalyst-chicago.org

It's mid-morning at Prosser Career Academy, and English Department Chair Judy Kane is outlining a list of reading strategies in a reading/writing workshop, a freshman requirement that has helped this Belmont-Cragin school post some of the largest reading gains in the city. "We're going to work on previewing," says Kane, who designed and, along with three other colleagues, teaches the workshops. "These are steps you can take before you read newspaper articles, textbooks or expository material, and they will help you to read faster and better."

The steps are outlined on a sketch board...

Word of the Day is a practice that trains several spotlights on one new vocabulary word each day. Done Chicago-style, the principal reads it, defines it and uses it in a sentence over the public address system. Teachers post it in their rooms. Schools administer monthly quizzes on the words and give prizes to the highest scorers. Even when schools do all this, Word of the Day has both detractors and advocates among the ranks of reading experts.

"Teaching one word at a time out of context is the worst way of teaching vocabulary, with rapid forgetting almost guaranteed," asserts Frank...

Four years' reading growth in half that time. That's what Nebraska's Boys Town Reading Center has achieved with unruly older adolescents in the Boys Town residential facility. When the center's courses were replicated in 34 public schools around the country, the schools reported the same gains, about one year per semester of instruction. The ingredients are small classes (8 to 10 students each), teacher training with follow-up, diagnosis of individual students' problems and a four-semester sequence of courses based on the six stages of reading identified by the late Harvard University...

Ready or not, like it or not, many Chicago high schools are adding reading instruction to their curriculum.

Under the School Reform Board's accountability policies, they have little choice. Schools with less than 20 percent of their students reading at or above the national average are put on probation, which can lead to the dismissal of the principal and even teachers. While many probation schools have made significant gains in math, only 6 of the original 38 have raised their reading scores enough to shed the designation.

Further, the School Board is introducing end-of-...