Comprehensive School Reform with a focus on literacy

Within the past years of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR), educators have begun to be innovative and employ strategies to support teaching and learning by incorporating high standards and inspiring high performance. Unfortunately, student achievement is not increasing and the achievement gap is continuing to widen. The next step for schools is to utilize programs that have been researched and have proven to accelerate student learning. Research has determined that schools that have implemented a Professional Learning Community (PLC), Response to Intervention (RTI), and Lindamood-Bell (LMB) reading programs have obtained increased levels of student achievement. This case study targeted an elementary school that developed and implemented a CSR model to include the PLC, RTI, and LMB components within a framework. This CSR model was examined by analyzing student achievement results and focus group interviews to determine impact on student learning.;Student achievement in reading was measured by two formative assessments the California Standards Test (CST) and the Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE) Skills Assessments. Retrospective data from the assessments from the selected and a comparison school was analyzed to determine the impact the CSR model had on student achievement. Narrative methodology was also utilized to analyze interview responses from teachers in an exploratory study on Professional Learning Communities.;The findings indicate that a CSR model utilizing LMB, RTI, and PLC can significantly improve student literacy. A school's ability to increase the mean CST scale score, the SCOE Reading Comprehension raw score, and the percentage of students moving into higher performance levels within a three-year window of CSR implementation is very significant.;The case study also indicates the importance of having key leaders at the school site that have been influential in developing the CSR model and have continued to implement the framework as designed. The consistency of personnel and its importance is indicated through the narrative responses of the teachers within the focus interviews conducted as well as the student achievement outcomes represented in the assessment analysis.;This study's CSR model exemplifies how a very concerted effort at a school site can impact student achievement in literacy.