Grade-Level Reading COMMUNICATIONS LEADS SESSION

1. Grade-Level Reading COMMUNICATIONS LEADS SESSION June 30, 2012

2. Presentation Overview • Introductions • Core Concepts of Messaging • Audience Analysis • Try it Yourself • Take Aways • Messaging the Campaign • Messaging Community Solutions

3. The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading focuses on the most important predictor of school success and high school graduation—grade-level reading by the end of third grade. Schools cannot succeed alone. The academic success of children from low-income families will require engaged communities mobilized to remove barriers, expand opportunities, and assist parents to serve as full partners in the success of their children.

4. The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading • The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading initially is focusing on three challenges to reading success that are amenable to community solutions: • The Readiness Gap: Too many children from low-income families begin school already far behind. • The Attendance Gap (Chronic Absence): Too many children from low-income families miss too many days of school. • The Summer Slide (Summer Learning Loss): Too many children lose ground over the summer months.

5. Messaging the Campaign: Key Points • Connect to moral imperative: Nothing is more basic, more essential, more foundational and more important to a child’s success in life than the ability to read well. • Connect to bigger problems: Achievement gaps, high school dropout rate, cycle of poverty, economy • Make it seem doable: This is a problem we can solve if we bring the community to bear on the challenges that keep children from reading well.

6. Key Question: Why third grade? • Reading to learn: The curriculum shifts after third grade, and children are expected to read well enough to learn • Cite the research: Children don’t read well by that point they are less likely to catch up, less likely to graduate and less likely to find a good job. • Research on Campaign website--Early Warning and Double Jeopardy—help make the case.

7. Key Question: What about schools? • Explain schools role: Better teaching, better curriculum, need for accountability • Emphasize community role: Schools cannot succeed alone. We need health providers, social workers, community nonprofits, faith-based groups, business and civic leaders and local foundations to help.

8. Key Questions: Why these 3 solutions? Amenable to community help: Clearly these aren’t the only issues affecting student achievement. There is already a lot being done inside our schools to improve teaching and curriculum schools. But when you look at what our local community can do from the outside, it makes sense to tackle readiness, attendance and summer learning

9. Messaging School Readiness • Make the economic case: Return on investment is $10 for $1 spent • Point to educational benefits: Fewer special education students, fewer dropouts, more college graduates • Point to community benefits: Less crime, delinquency, teenage pregnancy, more employment and better wages

10. Explain the problem: Too many children arrive at kindergarten unprepared to learn. There is a school readiness gap. • Avoid the parent trap: Don’t blame parents, but don’t leave them out.  Parents daycare providers, pediatricians and preschools all play a role. • Stress the early years: As early as 18 months, low-income children begin to fall behind in vocabulary and other skills needed for reading. Messaging School Readiness

11. Messaging Chronic Absence

12. Key Messages • It starts early:Most people are surprised to learn that one in 10 kindergarten and 1st grade students is chronically absent. • It matters for achievement: Attendance Works has research showing effects on retention and reading levels down the road. • It’s not all about truancy: In the early grades many absences are excused due to illness, transportation, foreclosure, poverty. • It’s not all about parenting: The community can help get kids to school.

13. Sharing your message on chronic absence • Determine your community ‘storyline’—do you have a district-wide problem, a few problem schools or promising practices • Share a plan to tackle the problem • Stress that your community is on leading edge—you are! • Explain terms: Underscore that this isn’t about skipping school, define terms • Avoid blaming parents, needs to be a community effort • Stress the role in school improvement: all the fixes to curriculum and instruction won’t matter if kids don’t show up.

14. Messaging Summer Learning Summer learning program seeks to close opportunity gap By Emma Brown, Published: July 26, 2011 For many Washington area kids, summer is a footloose season marked by family trips and shuttling from camp to camp. But for poor children, the hot months are often filled with empty time that stultifies learning. The opportunity gap has widened this year as some cash-strapped local agencies have eliminated thousands of summer school slots, leaving needy students with fewer ways to keep pace with their more affluent peers. Battling the summer slide in the District is Horizons Greater Washington, one of a handful of privately funded efforts that seek to turn summer into an advantage — instead of a liability — for children from low-income families.

15. Talk about the research: 100 years worth of studies prove summer learning loss and its effect on low-income kids • Stress the solution: High-quality summer programs is a proven approach • Connect to education reform: It’s all about getting more time on task. But too often summer ends up getting cut. Key Messages on summer learning

18. Handouts

19. Handouts

20. Handouts

21. Materials from the Campaign Logos for the Campaign and AAC contest Bannersfor events and presentations Contact: savila@gradelevelreading.net Templatesfor press releases and op-eds Tipsfor public messaging and the media on website and Ning or contact Phyllis Jordan at pjordan@thehatchergroup.com

22. Questions?