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As the lead author of the Joint Literacy Goal adopted in 2014 by the District 65 and District 202 boards of education, I was dismayed to read in your Feb. 25 edition that the leaders of the two school districts are recommending that the goal be “revised” to “acknowledge that the work going forward needs to be responsive to the students that we are serving today.”
What is the original goal? That all 12th graders in District 202 read at the 12th-grade level, and that all students be monitored at regular intervals from third grade through 12th to assure that they are on track to meet the 12th-grade standard. Certainly the students we are serving today have been through some difficult times – although it should be noted that we were nowhere near meeting the literacy goal even before the pandemic began – but that is no reason to lower our sights.
Obviously it is going to take us longer to meet the literacy goal than we hoped, but that just means we have to work harder and smarter to achieve this eminently reasonable objective.
Jonathan Baum