Sacramento Focuses on Grade-Level Reading

I see that State of the ReUnion has been doing some reporting on Sacramento, California, exploring some of the tough challenges facing the community, so I thought I’d mention that Sacramento is joining the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, a national effort to get more low income kids to read at grade level by third grade.

Last month, Mayor Kevin Johnson launched the Sacramento Reads! 3rd Grade Literacy Campaign, one of the largest communitywide reading initiatives in the United States. Currently only about 37 percent of third graders in Sacramento read at grade level. The goal of Sacramento Reads! is for 80 percent of third graders to be reading at grade level by 2020.

Sacramento’s ambitious plan is part of a collaborative effort by dozens of funders and nonprofit partners across the nation known as the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. Other communities that have answered the call include New Britain, Connecticut; Springfield, Massachusetts and Los Angeles, California.

The campaign focuses on three preventable causes of the performance gap between low income readers and other students:
•    The readiness gap: The fact that many low income kids who show up for school are already behind because they haven’t had as much access to books or high quality pre-kindergarten programs that help prepare students to learn.
•    The attendance gap: I’ve already written a blog post about this problem. Research has found that one in 10 kindergarten and first grade students nationwide misses nearly a month of school each year in excused and unexcused absences.
•    The summer slide (summer learning loss): Lots of students lose ground over the summer if they are not reading at home or engaged in enrichment programs.

The National Civic League has also joined this nationwide effort. Our part will be to encourage communities to address the reading gap by focusing the 2012 and 2015 All-America City Awards on grade level reading efforts. Ordinarily, the award programs let communities choose the issue areas they want to present to our jury of civic experts at the annual event. In 2012, we’ll be doing things a little differently.

In 2012, the All-America City Award program will be a little different. NCL is asking communities to develop comprehensive plans that focus on the three critical areas identified by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. Winners must demonstrate capacity to use data, deploy effective interventions, build strong cross‐sector partnerships, and mobilize public will to improve reading proficiency in the early grades.

Since the late 1990s, NCL has asked All-America City finalist communities to list at least one project that benefitted or engaged young people. Consequently, we’ve had more than a few past winners present reading or literacy projects.

For example: Marietta, Georgia, a winner in 2006, touted “Marietta Reads!” program. Participants selected books from approved lists and are tested on reading comprehension. Students earned points on the basis of the book’s difficulty and test scores. Goals were set for students at each grade level in all the city’s schools, and students earned awards by reaching those goals.

Hollywood, Florida, a winner in 2007, presented its “Born to Read” program, which positioned a fulltime librarian at the Memorial Primary Care Clinic, to interact with each family of young children. New families were given an application for a library card, a resource guide and a first book for the child. Families were given instructions on ways to encourage reading and this is reinforced with every subsequent visit to the clinic.

El Paso, Texas, a winner in 2010 has its annual Día de los Niños/ Día de Los Libros to improve literacy and health awareness in the community. The event involves a free giveaway of books and opportunities for young people to sign up for the Summer Reading Club.

Tupelo, Mississippi, a winner last year, featured two projects from the mayor’s task force on education:  “Read Tupelo” which provides a morning of learning for approximately 400 four and five year olds, including art activities, a music demonstration with various instruments, and story time presented by local officials and volunteers. Another initiative provides every baby born at North Mississippi Medical Center’s Women’s Hospital a copy of the book, Goodnight Moon.

Our hope is that more and more communities will do what Sacramento is doing and organize community-based efforts to address the reading gap. (Another difference in 2012 is that the campaign and its partners are offering technical assistance and peer learning opportunities to cities that participate in the award process.) To qualify, communities must submit a letter of intent by October 14.

For more information on the All-America City Grade Level Reading Award, visit the campaign’s website or the All-America City Award blog.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Civic Engagement and Fiscal Innovation in California

Cities everywhere are facing the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, but California municipalities have been at it a lot longer. California was the testing ground for a grassroots tax rebellion that swept the country in the late 1970s and early 80s. A combination of economic volatility—booms and busts—and the lack of a statewide political consensus on fiscal policy has made local governance unusually dicey and difficult.

State government has been having a running budget crisis since around the time that Governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, and one of the strategies of subsequent governors, both Republican and Democratic, has been to exact “take-backs” from localities, withholding tax revenues to lessen the budget imbalance in Sacramento.

Much of the country, I know, views California as a negative role model because of its dysfunctional politics and fiscal paralysis, but it should have another reputation, as a state where there has been a great deal of grassroots civic innovation in spite of or, perhaps because of the dysfunction.

I noticed this several years ago when I was working on a research project for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), a report on local government’s role in promoting civic engagement. One of the problems I faced was finding sufficient numbers of examples in other parts of the country to counter-balance the usual amount of civic innovation I was finding in West Coast, especially the Golden State.

I remember doing a briefing for the PACE board of directors in San Francisco. From where I stool in North Beach, I could drive twenty miles in any direction but west and find a striking example of local government innovation. But it wasn’t just Northern California. It was Chula Vista, Los Angeles, Ventura and Pasadena.

The journalist Carey McWilliams once called California the “Great Exception,” but he could just as easily have called it the “Great Experiment.”

In recent years, Brea, California, a city of 40,000 in northern Orange County, has become a case study in innovative fiscal management. Facing declining revenues and a big deficit, the city’s public managers rejected the top-down approach, opting instead to start a process allowing city employees to come up with ideas for restructuring the budget.

In the spring of 2008, an e-mail went out to all the city’s employees explaining the dire economic conditions facing the city. About 75 employees show up to a participatory budget meeting to develop solutions for the city’s fiscal crisis. The organizers had developed a collaborative process for the meetings. The participants were given a set of open ended questions and asked to meet in small groups to come up with answers.

Each of the groups recording their findings on flip charts and presented them to the larger group. Finally, a consensus would be developed in the larger group and the participants would move on to the next question. Brea city staffers call this the “problem solving model.” No ideas are rejected out of hand.

The next step was to hold two community-wide meetings. About 100 people participated in these meetings, not a bad turnout for a city the size of Brea to discuss priorities and community values to be considered when budget cutting.
The volunteer employee group developed tiered lists of reductions for each city department and used those lists to develop a balanced budget that was then submitted to the council. In all about 50 meetings were held during a ten month period with the average employee attendance of about 30-40.

The end result was a balanced budget elimination of 35 positions (though only about 11 of those resulted in actual layoffs or early retirements). The process was controversial at the time. Some council members reported were distrustful of it, concerned that the city manager had abdicated his responsibilities by giving power to the employees. Some citizens complained about city employees spending their time in endless meetings. The first year, the staff missed its budget deadline by three weeks, resulting in more complaints.

But in retrospect, most people see it as a success. The city has made some tough decisions and put itself in a better position to face the ongoing fiscal crisis with balanced budgets and less disruption than other California communities.
You can read about Brea’s experiment in collaborative budget making by linking here.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.