This four-phase process can help schools evaluate their policies and practices for placing students in standalone reading courses.

Schools seeking to attend to the needs of students who have difficulties with reading often turn to standalone reading intervention classes (hereafter “reading classes”). In many districts, curricular mandates require secondary schools to offer such courses, often as part of an effort to improve educational equity by giving students extra reading support that will improve their outcomes in all their classes. Unfortunately, as educators and researchers, we’ve found that standalone reading classes tend not to be an equitable tool for supporting young people’s reading in secondary schools and can, in fact, be sources of inequity (Brooks & Rodela, 2018; Frankel, 2016; Learned, 2016). To mitigate some of the negative consequences of these interventions, we propose a four-phase process to evaluate and revise how students are placed in reading classes.

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