Page 2 - System 44 EL in Research Paper

Dear Educators,
A major impetus of the national push for more rigorous state standards is the continuing decline in the performance of college-bound high school students on college entrance exams. Because this decline has been tied to a progressive simplification of school reading materials over the years, a central goal of rigorous standards initiatives has resulted in increasing the levels of text complexity that students must read. For too many students, however, the ability to comprehend texts to the level of complexity recommended by the new standards is currently out of reach.
There is a great need for all students to develop the capacity to read, comprehend, and respond to more complex texts—the sorts of texts they will face in college, the workplace, and their day-to-day responsibilities and opportunities beyond high school. Their lives depend on it. By raising the bar, rigorous standards force us to reexamine expectations and lessons to which we have become accustomed. They force us to ask what else we can and should do to better assist our students. This is the challenge before us, and it is a critical one.
Toward meeting this challenge, it has been my great pleasure to work with the Intervention Solutions Group in bringing the findings of seminal theory and empirical research to the aid of struggling students as we have revised and expanded System 44. System 44 Next Generation, launched in 2013, focuses on providing explicit instruction in phonics, reading comprehension, and writing for the most challenged readers. It is designed to help these students acquire decoding automaticity alongside the linguistic strengths and metacognitive skills on which their literacy growth depends.
To date, System 44 has been implemented in thousands of schools across the United States. The profiles in this book are part of a larger body of evidence indicating that System 44 can improve the learning trajectories of even our most challenged readers. Moving forward, we will continue to build off this positive momentum toward ensuring that the literacy levels of all students are ready for college, career, and life upon high school graduation.
Sincerely,
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams
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