Literacy for All Students in San Francisco
SFUSD Literacy
Empower your Child’s Reading Journey
The full guide to grade-level reading for SFUSD elementary parents SFUSD has room for improvement with teaching children to read at grade level. For example, in 2021-22, only 55% of students met or exceeded grade-level standards on end-of-year state tests. Thankfully, SFUSD has recognized that their current approach is failing too many children, and they are in the process of piloting new literacy curricula that will hopefully help improve student outcomes. In the meantime, SF Kids Can’t Wait. At SF Parent Coalition, we are dedicated to making sure parents and caregivers have the information they need to support their students’ learning now. This guide is intended to help parents and caregivers assess their students’ reading progress, find ways to support their students’ reading development, and understand whether their students are receiving evidence-based reading instruction in the early grades.SFUSD uses a few different assessments, some of which are new for the 2023-24 school year:
| Grades | Assessment Name | Subject | Considerations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grades K* | Assessment Name Star Early Literacy** | Subject Early literacy skills, including phonemic awareness and decoding skills | Considerations Families will receive score reports that identify each student’s performance level. This assessment is new for the 2023-24 school year, so we’ll share more information about how to make sense of assessment results when more information is available. You can also check the district’s assessment info page here for updates in fall 2023. |
| Grades 1-8 | Assessment Name Star Reading** | Subject Reading comprehension, fluency, and other skills | Considerations Families will receive score reports that identify each student’s performance level. This assessment is new for the 2023-24 school year, so we’ll share more information about how to make sense of assessment results when more information is available. You can also check the district’s assessment info page here for updates in fall 2023.This assessment is replacing the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System (F&P BAS), which is not backed by science. |
| Grades 9-10 (optional in 11-12) | Assessment Name Reading Inventory | Subject Reading comprehension | Considerations Students are considered at or above grade level if they score 4 (Advanced) or 3 (Proficient). Students are considered below grade level if they score 2 (Basic) or 1 (Below Basic). Students are also assigned a Lexile score, which helps identify what kinds of books students can read on their own. You can find more information about the Reading Inventory from SFUSD here. |
| Grades 3-8, 11 | Assessment Name Smarter Balanced (SBAC) | Subject Reading comprehension | Considerations This assessment is required by the state. Students are considered at or above grade level if they score 4 (Standard Exceeded) or 3 (Standard Met). Students are considered below grade level if they score 2 (Standard Nearly Met) or 1 (Standard Not Met). |
In some instances, children struggle with reading because of an underlying learning challenge. In other instances, children struggle with reading because they are not receiving effective instruction. Sometimes, children experience both. Ideally, your school can help you determine what is causing your child to fall behind. In the meantime, you can support your child’s reading development with the resources listed below.
Work with Your Child’s School
- Request a “Student Success Team” (SST) meeting from your principal to get more support for your child.
- Before the SST meeting: Be prepared to talk about your concerns and observations at the meeting. Bring your own data, including results from the at-home assessments suggested above, a recording of your child reading, and/or writing samples.
- During the SST meeting: Ask your child’s teacher about what they’ve observed in your child’s literacy development. Is there anything specific my child struggles with, such as sounding words out or understanding what they’ve read? Ask to see writing samples from class.
- During the SST meeting: Ask about what kind of support your child is receiving. Many schools have literacy specialists or ARTIFs (Academic Response to Intervention Facilitators) who meet several times per week with small groups of children who need extra help with reading.
- During the SST meeting: If your child is receiving support from a literacy specialist or ARTIF, ask what intervention programs or curricula the literacy specialist/ARTIF uses. Two popular programs, Fountas & Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) and Reading Recovery, are based on discredited theories about how children learn to read. If your child is not yet on track to read at grade-level (see next bullet about asking for data), ask what additional programs might better support your child’s reading development.
- During the SST meeting: Inquire about “progress monitoring” and ask to see data. According to the state-adopted Multi Tiered Systems of Support framework, regular progress monitoring assessments should be administered to determine if a student is making gains as a result of intervention provided by a literacy specialist/ARTIF.
- If you suspect your child may have a learning disability, you can request an assessment for special education services.
Work with Your Child at Home
Sometimes kids struggle with sounding out words, sometimes they struggle with comprehension, and sometimes both. If your child is struggling to sound out words, you can try these resources at home:
- Read Not Guess (free!)
- Cox Campus (free!)
- Open Source Phonics (free!)
- Online Decodable Phonics books (free!)
- Reading Rockets (free! And in multiple languages)
- Reading Simplified (e.g., free Switch It game, additional free games)
- How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
The early grades, especially kindergarten and first grade, are a critical time in students’ literacy development. This is the time when students should be developing “foundational reading skills” (for example, the ability to identify individual sounds in words and the ability to match letters to the sounds they make) – skills that lay the foundation for students to become proficient readers who can draw meaning from grade-level texts. Decades of research have identified important practices that ensure students develop foundational literacy skills in grades K-1. Unfortunately, discredited practices are still used in some SFUSD classrooms today.
In your child’s K-1 classroom, look for:
| This! 🙂 | Not this! 🙁 |
|---|---|
| These research-based practices will help your child learn to recognize words. | These practices have been discredited by research. |
This! 🙂
Decodable books, while students are learning basic spelling patterns, because these books allow students to practice the spelling patterns they’ve been taught during phonics instruction. These books should include spelling patterns that children have already been taught.
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Not this! 🙁
Leveled or predictable books, while students are learning basic spelling patterns, because these books teach students to guess using pictures, not the letters in words. Using pictures to guess words is an ineffective habit used by older struggling readers. These books often have a level assigned (e.g., A, B, C), and they typically have spelling patterns students have not yet learned. The lower level books often have repeated patterns (see example below).
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This! 🙂
Encouraging students to use phonics knowledge when they read – which is easiest to do in decodable texts when students are first learning to read. One way to do this is to prompt students to “sound it out” when they come across an unfamiliar word.
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Not this! 🙁
Encouraging students to use guessing strategies that don’t focus on the letters in the word (for example, using the picture and the first letter of a word, or skipping a word and coming back to guess based on meaning). Some of the reading curricula used in SFUSD encourage guessing strategies, also known as “three cueing.”
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This! 🙂
Talking about spelling patterns when teaching students sight words, so that children can connect their phonics knowledge to the spelling of new words – including words that are used frequently in text (a.k.a. sight words).
It’s okay to use flash cards to practice sight words – as long as instructors help students identify spelling patterns when a word is first introduced.
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Not this! 🙁
Memorizing lists of sight words, disconnected from phonics instruction. Research has demonstrated that this approach is ineffective.
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This! 🙂
Having students apply phonics knowledge when they practice spelling. Spelling and word reading go hand in hand. If your child is given spelling lists or spelling tests, look for words that are similar to the types of words your child is learning to read.
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Not this! 🙁
Regular spelling tests that are disconnected from phonics instruction – for example, if a kindergartener is learning how to read short, three-letter words but their spelling list has words that are much longer. Requiring students to memorize words for tests is unlikely to help them improve their decoding or spelling skills in the long term.
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