Fort Worth ISD is looking to move money to reading programs. How will it be used?
Weeks after naming literacy its top priority, officials in the Fort Worth Independent School District are looking for ways to put money behind programs they hope will boost students’ reading scores.
In a five-year strategic plan approved last month, the district’s board directed school leaders to reallocate money to support reading programs. As districts across the state work on budgets for the next school year, leaders in Fort Worth ISD are looking for ways to shift more money toward those priorities.
At a time when school budgets are tight, that means both hoping for more funding from the state and making better use of the money it already has, said Mohammed Choudhury, the district’s deputy superintendent for learning and leading.
FWISD looks to use money smartly while hoping for more
School leaders across Texas are hopeful that state lawmakers will increase the per-pupil allotment they send to school districts, which hasn’t changed since 2019. Lawmakers considered raising the allotment during the 2023 legislative session, but proposals to do so became entangled in the debate over school vouchers, and never reached Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. This year, budget proposals in both the Senate and the House call for an increase in funding of about $5 billion for public schools.
But Choudhury said Fort Worth ISD also needs to be more strategic about the way it spends the recurring funding it already receives each year. Over the past two years, the district has used an “academic return on investment” framework to evaluate its programs — that is, looking at how much academic growth the district got from each program per dollar spent.
District leaders adopted that framework in part to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs it created using one-time federal pandemic relief money. Now that the district has two years worth of data, it can use that information to look more critically at the results it’s getting from vendor contracts, professional development programs and central office allocations, and make smarter decisions about what’s working and what isn’t, he said.
One of the areas where district leaders plan to invest is implementing a lab classroom plan in every school, Choudhury said. Experienced educators will be paid a stipend to act as model teachers for their early-career colleagues while continuing to work with their own classes. Teachers who are struggling in a particular subject area can walk down the hallway and watch a model teacher demonstrate how to teach that content.
Up until now, Fort Worth ISD has used long coaching cycles to offer guidance to teachers, Choudhury said. Coaches observe teachers at work, then talk with them one-on-one sometime later about areas where they could improve. The disadvantage to that model, Choudhury said, is that too much time passes between the observation and the meeting. The lab classroom model allows teachers to see an example of effective instruction and work with the model teacher in real time, rather than waiting days for feedback, he said.
Choudhury said the plan also allows teachers to act as specialists. If one teacher in a building is especially effective at teaching math while another excels in reading, they could act as model teachers for their areas of strength, rather than designating a single instructional coach to work with teachers on every subject, he said.
The demonstration teacher plan mirrors in part another model the district is piloting at three campuses. Under that model, called Opportunity Culture, school leaders designate a few high-performing teachers to act as master teachers. Those teachers spend part of their days working with their own classes, then hand their students off to a teaching assistant. For the rest of the day, the master teachers work with other classes in their team, helping teachers hone their skills or working directly with students. The district rolled the program out this year at Hazel Harvey Peace and Westcreek elementary schools and O.D. Wyatt Middle School, with plans to expand to more campuses if it’s successful.
A renewed focus on reading
The budget reallocations come as a part of what district leaders say is a larger renewed focus on improving reading scores. At a meeting in January, school board members passed a resolution declaring that literacy is Fort Worth ISD’s top priority. The resolution called for the district to ensure that every student can read on grade level, and directed the superintendent to develop a plan to work toward meeting that goal. On last year’s state test, 31% of students in Fort Worth ISD and 51% of students across the state scored on or above grade level in reading.
At a news conference ahead of last month’s board meeting, Karen Molinar, Fort Worth ISD’s interim superintendent, said the district’s lack of progress in reading amounts to a crisis. During the meeting, she outlined the beginnings of a plan to tackle the issue, including developing a district-wide framework for how schools handle literacy instruction, aligning budgets and school resources behind literacy priorities and monitoring students’ progress.
The resolution came about five months after Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker spoke at a board meeting, calling for a city-wide effort to boost reading scores in Fort Worth ISD. Parker noted that the district’s scores had been stagnant for about a decade, even as other big urban districts like Houston and Dallas ISD had made steady progress.
That lack of progress was underlined last week when U.S. Department of Education officials released results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nationwide test designed to compare student achievement from state to state. In Fort Worth ISD, 42% of fourth-graders and 47% of eighth-graders scored at or above basic in reading on last year’s test, meaning the district’s results were essentially flat compared to 2022. A “basic” reading score means that students have partially mastered the skills they need to be proficient readers.
The district wasn’t alone: Across the country, record numbers of students scored below basic in reading, meaning they haven’t even partially mastered those skills.
This story was originally published February 3, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
