In schools across the country, about one-third of students are behind grade level in reading, demonstrating the need for literacy interventions. Even in Massachusetts, which consistently ranks at the top of various education metrics, this crisis plagues students and educators. While there have always been students who struggle, the COVID-19 pandemic widened existing gaps and made it harder for many to catch up.

We saw this play out at Boston Collegiate Charter School, which serves a socio-economically and racially diverse population of 700 students in grades 5 through 12, as more and more students struggled to stay afloat in their English Language Arts classes. Many students were entering our school without foundational reading skills, and our typical approaches — leveraging rigorous curriculum and scaffolding grade-level texts — weren’t yielding the usual results.

We needed something new, and the strategies we tried and refined this year revealed a lot about our students, our instruction, and what could work for other schools grappling with the same challenges.

The issues with reading have become most acute in our upper grades. We accept new students every year through grade 10, and we’ve found that older students tend to be even further behind in their reading than those entering in fifth or sixth grade. For example, in our 10th grade English class, we have some students reading Antigone, forming thesis statements about the nature of power and loyalty, while others are struggling to decode the meaning of most of the words on each page.

In response, last year we launched a Literacy Working Group made up of interested teachers and school leaders. Our goal was to figure out how to meet the needs of our adolescent students, especially those significantly behind grade-level. As we explored existing research and strategies, we found plenty of literature on how to teach reading to elementary schoolers but saw substantial gaps when it came to older students.

We started by diving into frameworks like the Reading Comprehension Blueprint, Scarborough’s Reading Rope, and materials from Keys to Literacy. These models emphasize that literacy is multi-faceted: Phonics, background knowledge, vocabulary, syntax, and comprehension all work together to create strong readers. We identified the key areas we should be working on with students and then pulled in the broader school community to help with literacy interventions.

Read the full article about literacy interventions for high schoolers by Alice Quarantello at The 74.