After almost three decades of being a junior and senior high school English teacher in Texas public schools – 23 of those in Katy ISD – I have now retired. However, I have not retired from my commitment to help parents help their children develop a full range of academic skills that will serve their future efforts in higher education or the work force.
That’s what Middle School Literacy Up gives me a chance to do – help you and your children.
So many children reached my junior high school or 9th grade classrooms with seriously deficient skills in one or more areas that dramatically affected their ability to master reading comprehension. So many others come to junior high without a basic grasp of grammar, usage, and punctuation.
Sadly, the public education system has de-emphasized effective, rigorous instructional strategies at the elementary level. Tragically, so many students fall behind by the time they reach middle school. A failure to close these skill gaps at a credible grade-level standard in the middle school, means so many students never catch up.
Often, even students with otherwise strong academic skills still pay the price by not genuinely mastering the full range of ELA skills in middle school. How? It is when they take their college entrance exams or hit those higher education freshman courses where a lot of reading and writing is demanded and grades start really counting.
It is common knowledge among classroom teachers that the STAAR tests in ELA and math grossly distort the academic credibility of standards that assert PASSING the tests or achieving ACTUAL GRADE LEVEL performance. For instance, when the passing standard of 2025 8th grade STAAR English Test is 36% content mastery and grade level is 57% content mastery, the system has gone terribly wrong, and your child is both the target and the victim. Even if your child crosses the Grade Level threshold, what does it really mean?
The brutal reality is that so many classroom teachers are assigned classes of students with a wide range of actual academic skills. I can tell you after almost 30 years in these situations, low performing students don’t get all the instruction they need and neither do the higher performing students with skill gaps.
Classroom teachers don’t get magic wands. Neither do parents.
Our Middle School Literacy Up mission is to find a way to help you help your child:
- By helping you with direct advocacy efforts and consulting as requested.
- By making my instructional lessons of my career available to you targeting the full range of students who are below grade level OR ones with serious but targeted skills gaps OR advanced students have the ability to take their performance up a notch.
Our website will give you all the details. Our focus to begin involves the parents who send their children to elementary or middle schools, with 9th grade students still in our focus of service.
I have retired. But I haven’t quit.