The Disconnect of Poor-Urban Education: Equal Access and a Pedagogy of Risk Taking (original) (raw)

From Best Practices to High Leverage Early Literacy Practices in Urban School Contexts

Teachers College Record, 2016

Moving away from best and evidence-based literacy practices, this commentary offers a conceptualization of high leverage literacy practices (HLLP) based on ongoing critical ethnographic research in high performing urban schools across the nation (Madison, 2011). We define urban schools as social and geographic contexts characterized by human resilience, agency, and racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity (Hollins, 2011). Best and evidence-based practices in literacy have been consistently critiqued for their lack of reliability and validity in urban schools and inconsistency in accounting for the role of students’ and schools’ social and cultural contexts (Davies, 1999; Hlas & Hlas, 2012). However, the research base surrounding these types of practices has been slow to respond (Al Otaiba, & Fuchs, 2006; Hollins, 2015a; Nash, 2013; Piña, Nash, Boardman, Polson, & Panther, 2015; Troia & Olinghouse, 2013; U.S. Department of Education, 2009). In 2015, only 36% of fourth grade students attending urban schools scored at or above proficient in reading compared to 41% of their suburban peers (National Council of Education Statistics, 2015).