Education
Georgia gets $25.6 M and Pennsylvania gets $38M for innovative birth to 12th grade reading and literacy programming. They are recipient of funding from the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program competition, which was targeted to help states to pursue a comprehensive approach to improving literacy outcomes for all children — birth through grade 12, including limited-English-proficient students and students with disabilities.
The program requires states to use at least:
- 15 percent of their grant funds to serve children from birth through age 5,
- 40 percent must go toward supporting students in grades K-5,
- 40 percent for middle and high schools with an equitable distribution between the two, and
- 5 percent can be set aside for state administration of the grants.
The program will be known as the Effective Teaching and Learning Literacy Program. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “Supporting children’s reading skills can help students build a lifelong love of learning”. He added that, “These grants will increase access to strong literacy instruction through innovative approaches by providing states and districts the flexibility they need to identify the literacy programs best suited to meet their students needs.”
Library/media specialists; parents; literacy coaches; instructors of adult education, representatives of community-based organizations providing educational services to disadvantaged children and families, family literacy service providers, representatives from local or State school boards, representatives from related child services agencies are expected to be included.
Under the administration’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal, reading and literacy programs would be administered under a new effort to be known as the Effective Teaching and Learning: Literacy program. It would provide competitive grants to states alone or in partnership with other entities (such as nonprofit organizations and institutions of higher education) in order to support comprehensive state and local efforts aimed at improving literacy instruction, especially in high-need schools for children and youth from preschool through grade 12.
The program would build on the progress the Department seeks to achieve with 2010 funds for the revised Striving Readers program, which consolidates reading programs segmented by grade level. The program would strengthen education for literacy by ensuring that all the elements of a comprehensive literacy program are embedded in state and local strategies, by strengthening performance expectations, and by supporting the identification and scaling-up of innovative methods of teaching reading, writing, and language arts.
Contact: Press Office , (202) 401-1576, press@ed.gov
For more information on the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program, visit: http://www2.ed.gov/programs/strivingreaders-literacy/index.html.
