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Board reviews third-grade literacy progress; kindergarten cohorts show promising gains
Summary
SFUSD staff reported winter progress on the board—s third-grade literacy goals. Kindergarten cohorts of African American and Pacific Islander students posted noteworthy fall-to-winter growth; staff recommended scaling targeted interventions and differentiated site supports.
The San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education received an update on progress toward its third-grade literacy goal, including fall-to-winter assessment results, case-study findings and recommended next steps.
Staff said overall district progress showed improvement compared with the previous year on two interim goals (1.1 and 1.2) and highlighted particularly strong early gains among targeted kindergarten cohorts of African American and Pacific Islander students. For interim goal 1.3 (English learner progress) staff said they did not meet the winter interim, and they flagged the need for stronger supports and measurement for multilingual learners.
Wen Hak Kim (inquiry, evaluation & research) and Devin Krugman (Curriculum & Instruction) summarized a mixed set of results from a school-improvement framework. They presented four case studies: an exemplar school where intervention scheduling and a fifty-fifty bilingual pathway produced strong gains; schools with high implementation but uneven outcomes that need differentiated supports; and schools with gaps between instructional designs and classroom practice.
Staff recommended expanding differentiated site supports, scaling case-management approaches used successfully in exemplar sites, strengthening school-based tier 2 intervention models, and improving English-language development pathways and assessment for multilingual learners. They said some tools such as Amira showed strong results when used at recommended dosage and could be scaled.
Board members asked for clearer alignment between the district—s theory of action, guardrails and measurable interim goals; more student-level growth measures that account for reclassification of English learners; and evidence tying pilot-funded tutoring or grants to improved outcomes. Staff said the theory of action was a working document developed across departments and agreed to refine it and surface additional measures in future reports.
The board chair and members also emphasized the need to monitor implementation fidelity, scale professional learning for coaches and principals, and ensure any budget decisions preserve core intervention and coaching capacity.
Staff will return with implementation plans that include a networked approach to differentiated site support and clearer interim measures for English learners.
