Castle Park High School Chula Vista, California School Solution Two Castle Park 9th graders faced a classic high school challenge: Contrasting the protagonists of two novels, Holes and Monster. Huddled over a big sheet of white cardboard, they produced two long columns of adjectives. Later in the class, the two 9th graders at Castle Park High School, a sprawling, 2,300-student campus near the Mexican border in Chula Vista, California, presented their work to their classmates. The exercise was not exceptional, but for the fact that the most advanced students in the class read at a 5th-grade level at the beginning of the school year -- four grades below average for their age. Yet, based on Castle Park's past record, struggling 9th graders were expected to close at least half the gap by year's end. That is because Castle Park, a school serving many low-income Latinos, places many incoming 9th graders in an America's Choice course known as Ramp-Up to Advanced Literacy, a year-long, double-period program designed to catch-up students lacking the literacy skills they need to be successful in school. It is an important part of the America's Choice School Design's system of safety nets for struggling readers. And it works. The percentage of Castle Park 9th graders in California's two lowest achievement categories -- "far below basic" and "below basic" -- dropped from 52 percent to 36 percent after a single year of Ramp-Up work. Most high schools do not teach reading at all. Students in the America's Choice Ramp-Up program learn and practice effective reading strategies at least 90 minutes a day. The carefully choreographed classes begin with a session called Read-Aloud/Think-Aloud, where teachers make explicit the comprehension strategies expert readers use every day. That is followed by approximately 20 minutes of independent reading in books calibrated to every student's reading levels (students are assessed regularly during the school year and the difficulty of students' books is adjusted based on the testing results). Fluency instruction, writing, genre and author studies, book talks, and studentto- student tutoring in elementary schools are among the other elements of the program. Importantly, Ramp-Up creates an environment that engenders student success. "A lot of these kids have been at the bottom," says Castle Park Ramp-Up teacher Lynn Baer, a 30-year veteran who also teaches 12th grade English honors courses. "With two periods a day, they get to know me, they feel secure." Indeed, the prospect of self-conscious adolescents with very weak reading skills regularly making classroom presentations to their peers would be improbable in most high schools. But Ramp-Up has changed many student's perspective on reading. One student admitted: "I didn't like to read. Now, we're in the habit of doing it every day." Back to Results