Leading for literacy: Engaging schools and districts in transforming subject-area literacy 

In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., middle and high school students once spent most of their time sitting alone at their desks and taking notes while their teachers lectured about history, math, English, and other subjects. But today, across the district’s 75 secondary schools and in every kind of class, it’s common to see students sitting together and having animated discussions about their own ideas, supporting their arguments by pointing to evidence that they’ve found in primary source documents, science diagrams, literary works, and other materials.   

Since 2011, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district (CMS) — the nation’s 16th largest school system — has seen its high school graduation rate rise by nearly 20%, a gain that district leaders attribute largely to changes in literacy instruction. Calling literacy their North Star, CMS leaders embarked several years ago on an ambitious plan to implement the Reading Apprenticeship model, an instructional framework that we developed more than two decades ago, focusing on student engagement and achievement in subject-area literacy.  

The work began with a long-term effort to build understanding of and buy-in for the approach, first among school administrators and then among cross-disciplinary teams of secondary teachers. Only after spending an entire year engaging principals in discussions, book studies, and visits to other districts did CMS invite teams from all 75 middle and high schools to learn about Reading Apprenticeship and implement it. In short, CMS didn’t just make a symbolic commitment to overhauling its approach to literacy instruction; it actually invested the time needed to do so successfully.