Longstreth's classroom could be a launching pad for the day when all children get the instruction and resources they need to thoroughly master reading skills by the time they leave third grade.
At Finletter and nine other Philadelphia schools, a multimillion-dollar federal grant is giving a Philadelphia nonprofit, the Children's Literacy Initiative (CLI), a chance to show that it can help achieve that goal.
Teachers in the lower grades will get extensive training from CLI in how to teach reading. They also get extra classroom materials.
CLI was one of 49 organizations nationwide to get an Investing in Innovation Fund grant last summer, paid for with federal stimulus dollars. It received $21.7 million, plus $4.3 million in private matching funds.
The grant has allowed CLI to take its program to 39 schools in Philadelphia, Camden, Newark, and Chicago. The program covers only third grade this school year but, over five years, will expand to include kindergarten and first and second grades as well.
CLI was already working in about 20 other Philadelphia schools, mostly in kindergarten and first grade. Research has shown that the program improved reading proficiency by 11 percent in the targeted classrooms.
The plan is to reach a total of 45,600 students in the four cities.
If the program gets the hoped-for results, said CLI executive director and founder Linda Katz, CLI wants to widely disseminate its methods. "We expect our results to inform national policy - to change the way things are done on the ground, in the classroom," Katz said.
Reading well by the end of third grade is a key academic achievement. A report last year from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, for example, stated that after third grade, children should be "reading to learn" rather than "learning to read" and that mastering the skill by then "can be a make-or-break benchmark."
