Urban Literacy Institute
The knowledge and skills to teach urban children to read already exist. The Urban Literacy Institute will put the necessary state-of-the-art materials and skills in the hands of Dayton elementary teachers to improve the literacy proficiency of one thousand children, in four schools, over four years. The Dayton Public Schools superintendent supports and will be directly involved in making this effort a success. Each of the four schools must apply and must demonstrate that the principal and ten faculty are committed to this effort. The institute will ensure that best practice experts and expertise are available to these forty teachers in four schools. The project director will develop and oversee the necessary procedures to assure the successful acquisition of improved literacy for these one thousand students over the four years. There will be clear pre- and post-institute testing data to concretely demonstrate the successful acquisition of high performance literacy proficiency of the participating one thousand students. The institute will demonstrate how the proven results are replicable and scalable for future practical applications to children in wide varieties of educational environments.