A Tiered Approach for Improving Male Middle School Student Outcomes

Brian Bradley • Cahn Fellow 2018

Middles school ages are formative years in the development of young men as scholars and citizens. Educators have struggled to achieve the same literacy outcomes for male students at the same rate as female students (Reardon, Fahle, Kalogridges, Podolsky, & Zarte, 2018). While male students across the country have failed to keep pace with their female counterparts in English Language Arts, the results for boys of color are especially disproportionate (Emdin, 2016). In this paper, we describe a tiered approach to addressing the gap in literacy performance between the male and female students at the Renaissance School of the Arts. The approach focused on three tiers: Book Clubs, Teacher Implicit Bias and Individuating. Thus far our approach has generated positive growth on both reading levels and discipline referrals for the male students at Renaissance School of the Arts.