Episode 4: The Readers STARI Didn’t Give Up On

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Hey, Serb story listeners. We have some amazing news that we can finally share. We're going to Austin. Get ready for a special podcast episode. We're recording live at south by Southwest Edu in Austin, Texas, this March 9 through 12. If you want to join us in person, south by Southwest Edu is offering all of our listeners a $50 off discount code to attend the conference and the festival. Use coupon code sxswedu P O D in the cart. Uh, at checkout, you can email infooouthbysouthwestedu m.com with any questions. See you there. Okay, now on to episode four. The readers starry didn't give up on belonging. Come confidence. Academic agency story has helped me to

Speaker C: become a better reader. And I know this how. Um, because I'm starting to read more often. I'm not a reader. Um, I don't like to read, but I'm starting to read more often by myself. Starting to learn new words, building my vocabulary, expanding my knowledge of reading.

Speaker B: I don't have to be forced to read.

Speaker D: I don't have to be told to read.

Speaker B: I just go on my own and read because I want to.

Speaker A: Uh, just because I need to.

Speaker B: This is what Staari students have told us, and we couldn't be happier. Welcome back to Serb Stories, a podcast where we pull back the curtain on research, practice, partnerships, transforming education. I'm your host, Dr. Kayla Jones. Today we're talking about what happens when struggling readers don't just learn the mechanics of reading, but find reasons to believe in reading itself. Um, before we dive in, I need to tell you something personal. For years, I taught AP students, AP Seminar, AP Research, AP psychology, those types of classes. My students were motivated, engaged, racing through chapters, debating themes, writing sophisticated essays and papers. I loved that work. But I was in a bubble. Down the hall, my teacher friends would come to lunch exhausted, frustrated, even. They say things like, my students aren't invested. They don't care about reading. I can't get them to engage. And honestly, I didn't really understand what they meant. My students were so motivated. What was the problem? Then one day, I walked into a reading classroom and I saw it. Rows of students, high schoolers, sitting at computers, clicking through programs with short passages written at, uh, elementary levels. Texts about topics that had nothing to do with their lives. No discussion, no connection, just isolated skills, divorce for meaning, divorced from anything that mattered. And I watched these students, 15, 16 year olds, shut down, heads on desks, eyes glazed, some trying to look busy while doing nothing, others openly defiant. Refusing to even read the stories about ducks. That's when it hit me. These weren't unmotivated students. These were students who had been given materials that insulted their intelligence. Materials that said, you're broken. You need baby work. You're not capable of real reading. Um, I've seen it in my own family, too. My niece struggled with reading in elementary school. By third grade, she'd stopped volunteering to read aloud. She'd avoid books, not because she couldn't decode the words, but because reading had become this thing that exposed her, that made her feel less than. And here's what really broke my heart. She's so smart, curious, full of ideas. But reading had become a barrier between her and everything she wanted to learn. Often when students struggle with reading, if they're offered an intervention at all, they're given activities that match their skills. Activities targeting foundational reading skills in isolation. From there, they can just read, right? I spoke to Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings, one of the nation's leading voices of equity in education, the scholar who coined the term culturally relevant pedagogy in one of my personal role models. She contextualized this a bit more by using a math example.

Speaker A: And that's the challenge, I think, that, um, teachers have if they're going to do discrete skills linked to what, Um, I often do talk to math people. Uh, I'm not a math person. And I put three plus four equals question mark. And I said, what does this mean? And of course, people are telling me it's seven. I said, no, I didn't ask you to solve the problem. Solve the equation. What does it mean? So then they go on and give me all of these, you know, highfalutin. Well, three units plus four units will yield seven units. And I said, I'm six years old when I first encountered this. I don't know what a unit is. So then someone says, like, if you had three oranges and four apples. I said, there's no such things as apple oranges, right? Do I have seven apple oranges? That doesn't exist or. No, you would, you know, you think of it as fruit or, ah, produce. I'm, um, six years old. I said, what if it's three snakes and four mice? What do I have? Maybe I just have three snakes,

Speaker D: because

Speaker A: the snakes are going to eat them mice up. If one of them snakes is bigger than the rest of the snakes. Maybe all I have is one snake. I'm, um, six. I need a context. Three plus four equals question mark. It doesn't mean anything.

Speaker B: I got her point. We can teach all of the phonics patterns in the world. We can drill fluency until students can read 150 words per minute. But if students don't believe they're readers, if they don't see meaning in what they're reading, if they don't feel competent and connected, if the materials insult rather than inspire them, the skills alone just won't be enough. So today I want to share three shifts that occur when students aren't merely taught to read, but given a reason to believe in reading. Three themes that aren't necessarily explicit within the lesson plans, but are essential threads throughout the curriculum. Three transformations that are hard to measure and do research on, but that we now understand are essential to why Starry works. These aren't the metrics that Earn Staari Its Essa Tier 1 rating, but they're the heartbeat beneath every data point. The reason struggling readers become the invested readers who choose to keep reading.

Speaker D: Uh,

Speaker B: the first thing we'll discuss today is belonging. When students find themselves in the stories we give them, something shifts. Reading stops being an assignment and becomes an act of recognition. A moment when the page looks back and says, I see you, that's belonging. It's not about lowering the bar or simplifying the text. It's about raising students sense of purpose and connection. Because when the story feels real, the learning becomes real too. Let's hear from middle school teachers Tynesha Banks and Sherry Mackenzie.

Speaker D: One of the challenges that I faced teaching adolescents, um, is trying to match or pair, uh, their levels with their interests. Uh, sometimes, especially with our low level readers, their interests don't necessarily match up with books that, uh, align to their level. And so students get bored. Uh, students feel like the text is too easy, it's babyish. They may be embarrassed by how small the book may look.

Speaker B: I think it's important to understand how necessary the program is for middle school. Middle school students still want to read the good stuff. They're just having a hard time accessing it. And this program really, really nailed that. It helped them to read the actual really good books, but on their own pace and with the extra scaffolding that they need. There it is the problem and the solution. Students aren't unmotivated. They're insulted by materials that don't match their intellectual maturity. They want the good stuff, as Ms. McKenzie says. They want books that matter, stories that challenge them, ideas worth discussing. They just need access. They need scaffolding that respects where they are while honoring who they are. That's what Separates Starry from so many other interventions. It doesn't dumb down the content, it builds up the support. Here's Ms. Banks again.

Speaker D: I enjoy Starry a lot, um, especially because I feel like the material really connect to our students.

Speaker B: And we also heard this from another Starry teacher, Sonia Kendall.

Speaker C: Last year we read the Skin I'm in, and, um, most kids can identify with the main character and issues that she faced. This year we read Ninth Ward and it was real to them because we were able to show them videos of what actually happened in New Orleans. And then the main character was someone around their age group and so they could identify with it. And now we're reading the Game. And, um, most boys love that book because they like to play basketball.

Speaker B: Let's pause for a moment because here's what happens when students like AJ encounter a book like game that reflects their lives.

Speaker C: Basically, it's this young guy and it's like really hard in his neighborhood. And I could reflect to that and actually based that off of my life because he's interested in basketball and I am too. And he's just trying to make something out of it, you know what I'm saying? Even though he doesn't have as much people to bring him up. So, um, he's just trying to put his talent to work and try to make something of it. And I could just relate it to my life.

Speaker B: I could just relate it to my life. That recognition, that moment of this book sees me. It's powerful stuff and it's not accidental, it's intentional. When Ms. Banks says the material connects to our students, this is what she needs. Not just interests, connection, recognition, the feeling that your story matters enough to be told in a book from the beginning. Dr. Laurie Hemphill, who you may remember from earlier episodes and the SERP team, knew that text selection mattered not just for reading level, but for relevance, for representation. Lauri, tell us more about how you initially thought about text selection connected to engagement.

Speaker E: From the beginning, we worked with this idea that what was going to engage kids was cognitively challenging texts. We felt that there were all these kind of little fires that you could light inside kids that would motivate their skill development. Um, if the skill development was in the service of engaging with really complex and really intriguing ideas.

Speaker B: Complex ideas, yes, but also mirrors. Windows, doors, books where students could see themselves, books where they can see into others lives. Books that opened up new possibilities. And Linda diamond, whose organization Core Learning supports schools and uh, implementing research based literacy practices, had this to say about Starry.

Speaker A: What Excited me about it was the content was motivating for these kids who were struggling with reading. The kind of text that these students will benefit from will be texts that in some cases are somewhat controversial or stimulate discussion. And the text I saw in Starry stimulated conversation. They were interesting. They were topics that the students would engage with.

Speaker B: With her extensive experience in curriculum development, what excited Linda was that engaging students in relatable discussion, discussable text, didn't come at a cost to students learning reading skills. The efficiency of the Starry design ensures that basic reading skills are not a casualty of student engagement. They're a close companion. Here's a teacher, Elmer Robin, describing what changed when her students encountered Starry text.

Speaker D: Uh, my experience teaching Starry has been very different from, like, how I've taught previously when it came to reading. Part of the change for me has been just really letting students own what they're doing on their own, rather than me telling them how to do it. Using the Starry curriculum has impacted their reading in the way that they are reading for a purpose. And I've seen the growth in. When they have a purpose for their reading, they're able to articulate their thoughts later in a discussion very differently than if it's just, what did you read about and what did you think?

Speaker B: It goes beyond that. Reading with a purpose. That's what Ms. Rahman is describing. And here's what it looks like from a student's perspective. My favorite thing is when we actually talk with our partners about something like we're not confused with in the book, so we understand it better. When students understand why they're reading not just to complete an assignment, but to grapple with ideas, to work through confusion with the partner, to form opinions, to discuss and debate, everything changes. They take ownership de articulate their thinking. The engagement becomes real because the reading matters. And when you pair that sense of purpose with texts where students can see themselves, that's when belonging becomes transformative. Here's Dr. Ladson Billings again.

Speaker A: There's nothing new about the notion of prior knowledge. Psychologists say that's how we learn. You don't learn things in isolation and in bits. They don't stick. We have to connect them to something, and we typically connect them to things that we already know. What's challenging, I think, uh, for many of our students is that they are in classrooms with people who don't know their experience, so they have trouble connecting them with things that they already know.

Speaker B: Students engage more deeply when the curriculum reflects their identities, their experiences, their communities. But it's not just about engagement. It's about validation. It's about telling students, your life matters, your story matters. You belong here. Reading isn't just a cognitive skill. It's a social practice. It's how we make sense of the world and our place in it. And that's what belonging looks like in Starry classrooms. Not just students learning to read, but students seeing themselves as readers. Not just completing assignments, but connecting to stories. Not just building skills, but building identity. Because when you belong, you lean in, you take risk. You start to believe. This, uh, brings us to our second shift. Confidence and confidence. It's a little complicated. There are two challenges here. First, these students have experienced a lot of failure. Years of being told directly or indirectly that they're not good at reading. Second, to rebuild that confidence, they need to experience real success, actual, measurable progress that helps them believe in themselves again. Starry was designed for both. By middle school, many struggling readers have internalized the message that they're not good at this. They've been corrected, criticized, and compared. They've watched other students fly through books while they stumble over sentences. Somewhere along the way, they stopped trying because trying meant failing, and failing meant feeling stupid. My colleague, Emily Hayden, a fellow Starry literacy specialist like myself, spent years as a classroom teacher, administrator, and college professor, puts it this way.

Speaker A: I think they need to see the value of being able to read and make meaning for themselves, and they need

Speaker B: to see that they can do that. Because I think, especially once kids get

Speaker A: to middle school, they've had a lot

Speaker B: of years, six years maybe, of, um,

Speaker A: believing and maybe even being told that they're not good at this, that they can't read, they're not good at reading, and they internalize that. So they need to see why we

Speaker B: teach kids to read, and they need

Speaker A: to believe that they can do that and can do that successfully.

Speaker B: Here's how one teacher, Angie Lewis, describes that reality. My biggest challenge in implementing the Starry

Speaker D: curriculum, um, was dealing with students who

Speaker B: are reluctant to read. Some students don't have the confidence level yet to be able to turn and discuss a text with their partner.

Speaker D: They might think that their idea is

Speaker B: silly or that the answer is wrong. Dr. Hemphill saw the same pattern years ago in Boston classrooms.

Speaker E: One thing that I saw was teachers would actually read a lot of the books out loud to the kids because the kids couldn't access the books independently. In general, what we saw was large numbers of kids just plain checked out.

Speaker B: This is the cost of repeated failure disengagement. Students who stop believing they can succeed. Stop trying at all. To rebuild confidence, students need evidence, experience of success. STAARI was designed with this in mind. It includes passages written at four fluency levels, each aligned to the larger unit topic so that every student begins where they can succeed and can see themselves progress. Katrina Poston, another Starry teacher, shares her point of view on students doing fluency.

Speaker C: The fluency routine helps the kids in a couple of ways, so it definitely helps with their confidence, um, given that they are assigned passages at their level. So they're more confident knowing that, oh, I'm not gonna have problems reading this. I can definitely read this out loud to someone and know that I'm not gonna mess up or it's okay if I mess up because my partner is going to encourage me and we're gonna work through this. I've had a ton of kids move from one level to the next over the course of a unit. I, um, they can't wait to move up because their courage and their comfort with reading has increased so much. I think that's probably the biggest piece is them just being confident with reading.

Speaker B: Ms. Poston is right. Confidence comes from knowing you can do it. But here's the thing. Students also need to see their progress over time. That's where the progress tracking comes in. Ms. Banks saw this working with her students.

Speaker D: I feel that my students feel that they're growing as readers as far as fluent readers and understanding. They are able to track their fluency throughout the weeks and hopefully seeing growth. Um, and I think they really like that because they sometimes, you know, you have these reading programs that the students don't see their growth. Um, and I think that's one of the coolest things about Starry is that they're seeing their growth and they're seeing their progress. Um, as they're going along, they write their words per minute every single time that they're doing their fluency, so they have that information available to them.

Speaker B: Confidence is built through repetition, through success, through seeing tangible progress. Starry structure creates a feedback loop. Practice, improvement, recognition. Students begin to change their internal narrative from I can't to I am improving. Ms. Lewis, what are your favorite aspects of staari? What I love about Staari is that there are built in scaffolds that allow different levels of readers to access the text, and Ms. Banks agrees. Tanisha, what did it look like in your classroom?

Speaker D: I have a lot of students who aren't able to read a entire book. And so in Starry, we're able to do that together. So they feel success in that. Like, I actually read this entire book and, you know, I understood, you know, what was going on, and I was able to finish it.

Speaker B: Uh, that feeling, I actually read this entire book. It's transformative. Emma's posting. What does the intentional design of staari support your students to achieve?

Speaker C: When they can access the text. And when they can read the text, they're more willing to participate in the discussions without feeling like, oh, I couldn't read this, so I'm going to be left behind. I'm just going to sit here and not say anything. And so knowing they can access the text makes it easier for them to participate in the discussions too.

Speaker B: But in true cert fashion, we didn't just ask the adults for feedback. We also got input from the students. Back to one of our staarie students, Isamar. It makes me more confident to actually speak up and actually talk about something in the book, rather than just staying quiet and not really understanding. Which is evidence for school leaders like principal Kamala Carnes that staari is a worthy investment.

Speaker F: It starts them where they are, and then they begin to build and they seek success as they go through, which I think has been a powerful piece for us at my school.

Speaker B: That's the turning point. When a student stops seeing themselves as someone who struggles with reading and, uh, start seeing themselves as a reader. Confidence in reading becomes confidence in learning. Because confidence isn't just about skill. It's about identity, agency, and the belief that you can grow. Confidence isn't built overnight. It's built moment by moment in the small victories that rewrite a student's story about themselves. When a student who once said, I can't, finally says, I did, that changes more than their reading score. It changes their sense of self. Confidence is the bridge between belonging and becoming, between seeing yourself in a story and believing you can write your own. Belonging, uh, gives students a place. Confidence gives them a voice. And once they have that voice, they start to use it to question, to analyze, to stand by their ideas. That's the heart of academic agency. Our third theme. When students move beyond doing the work to owning their thinking. Let's start with evidence. Because agency leaves a trailer, the data tells a story not just of progress, but of persistence, of students showing up, leaning in, and taking charge of their growth. Here's principal Carnes again.

Speaker F: The data that we've, um, recently been able to review has shown that kids have moved four to five grade levels in staari just in the small amount of time that we have been able to implement the program. One girl in particular I remember started off at kindergarten level. I think she's now close to third grade level. So that's significant.

Speaker B: These are students who have been stuck, who had been falling further and further behind, and in less than a year, they're making gains that seem impossible. These aren't just test score gains. They're signs of momentum. Students who once avoided reading now track their own progress, push themselves to new levels, and show what happens when motivation meets structure. The academic outcomes of STAARI are well documented. Students in the first randomized controlled trial and gained a full year of reading growth beyond their peers, many of whom were in other literacy interventions. That's growth in decoding, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. And in the second study conducted in Jackson, Mississippi, during the 2021-2022 school year, probably one of the most challenging school years in recent history, star students grew at twice the expected rate for middle schoolers. Their growth exceeded the estimated learning loss for Covid related school closures. We were able to get a statistically significant effect on the Mississippi state ELA test, um, for our students in Jackson. And that's actually a really big deal because most intervention research, particularly focusing on adolescents, does not show an impact on state standardized tests. Test scores matter. Fluency rates matter. Grade level equivalencies matter. But here's what matters even more, what students do with those skills.

Speaker E: A lot of the story teachers would say, uh, the starry kids are the ones who are prepared. The starry kids are the ones who do the reading. The starry the kids are the ones with their hands up for class discussion. And they say, and I see the skills getting transferred. And that's a really important part of really what we're trying to get with the program. It's not just about improving your reading scores. It's about, you know, all these other attributes that make you a successful student.

Speaker B: It's not just about proving your reading scores. It's about how those skills change students daily experience of school, how those skills open doors, or how the lack of them closes doors permanently. Lowrey calls this the transfer effect. When students begin to apply what they've learned independently, taking responsibility for their thinking and performance across subjects. That's academic agency in action. Linda diamond has worked with countless school systems on adolescent literacy.

Speaker A: The fact that we have kids in the middle schools and high schools who are still struggling with basic literacy is a, um, major problem in our system. It's a pipeline to the juvenile court system, to prison, and it's immeasurable uh, harm on children and their families if we don't provide support to these students.

Speaker B: What Linda names here, that, uh, measurable harm is real. She understands the stakes in the most personal way possible. Her younger brother struggled with reading throughout his life. By high school, the challenges had become overwhelming. He ultimately took his own life.

Speaker A: She told me, he is my why, he is why I do what I do. He's why I started core, and he's why I want to stop so many other kids from going that route, which is not uncommon for struggling older kids.

Speaker B: Linda reminds us that the stakes of literacy are life defining. Agency isn't abstract. It's what keeps students connected to school, to opportunity, and to hope. That loss became her purpose. It drove her to found Core Learning, an organization that partners with schools and districts to implement evidence based literacy instruction. Her brother is why she travels the country training teachers, evaluating programs, and advocating for older struggling readers. She's determined to stop other kids from going that route, as she puts it,

Speaker C: uh,

Speaker B: in my own research, I've written about a phenomena I call school specific slow violence. The gradual, often invisible harm done to students when schools fail to provide effective literacy instruction. It's a form of violence precisely because it's quiet and persistent. Each year a student falls further behind in reading is another year of lost access to content, to opportunity, to their own future. And Lowery saw this firsthand during the starry clinical trial.

Speaker E: When Jimmy Kim and I did the clinical, uh, trial of staarry, half the control group kids had disappeared. So these were kids who are struggling readers who are not assigned to staari and they just stopped coming to school by May. And the reason they stopped coming to school is because they'd failed all their major subjects for two or three marking periods and they knew there was no way they could pass.

Speaker B: That's what slow violence looks like. The harm accumulates quietly year after year when students can't access grade level text. Agency is the antidote to that slow violence. When students gain the tools, the confidence and the support to act, to participate, to persist, they resist being defined by their limits. When students are given the right tools, text and community, they change their trajectory. Isn't that right, Lowry?

Speaker E: The reason kids are coming to school who are in the STAARI programming was because they could see themselves getting better. Um, they were conscious that their reading skills were improving. And also they were experiencing, and the teachers tell us this too, they were experiencing more success in their other classes.

Speaker B: And attendance isn't just compliance, it's commitment. Students came to school because they were experiencing success. They stayed because they could see the impact of their effort. They showed up because Staari gave them a reason to hope. And here's what Principal Carnes.

Speaker F: The kids are totally engaged the entire 35, 40 minutes that they are together. They are actively participating. They are excited. They don't get up and leave the room. They don't ask to go to the bathroom. They're not off task. Everybody wants to be there and is excited to get in there and get to the next piece.

Speaker B: Everybody wants to be there. That's not language we're used to hearing about reading intervention classes. But here's what it sounds like from a student's perspective. This is Nelsey. When I was younger, they give me, um, some questions that I don't understand at all. And that makes me like, or what am I doing in this? I actually read at home now because, um, the START program actually makes reading

Speaker A: books more fun because, uh, the questions

Speaker B: are really like, I understand. And the book is, like, amazing. I love reading the books I actually read at home now. That's academic agency in motion. Choosing to engage not because someone told her to, but because she now sees herself as capable and curious. From confusion and frustration to comprehension and joy, from what am I doing to. I love reading the book. This is what I call academic justice. When we close reading gaps, we don't just improve literacy outcomes. We open doors, we create pathways. We give students access to curriculum, to college, to careers, to futures they couldn't imagine before. What we see with Staari students is consistent with my own research. We when the quiet denial of opportunity, class after class, day after day, year after year, gets reversed. When students are actually given the tools, the text they need, they don't just catch up academically. They reclaim their identities as learners. They reclaim their sense of agency, and they rewrite the narrative that's been written for them that they're not readers. Dr. Ladson Billings frames it in the terms of our democratic project.

Speaker A: Why we do what we do is really a part of the larger democratic project. If you think of democracy as perhaps the most liberating form of governing, then literacy is the key to preserving full democracy. Learning to read is not just about developing the skill, but it is a sense of empowerment that we were able to seek liberation through our ability, uh, to be literate.

Speaker B: Students need explicit instruction. Yes. They need systematic practice. Absolutely. But they also need reasons to care. They need texts that speak to them. They need classrooms where their voice matters. They need evidence that they're Growing. And they need to believe that reading is something they can do. Staari does all of that. It builds skills through explicit instruction in phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. It builds motivation through engaging, culturally relevant texts. And it builds community through collaborative discussion and peer support. Here's what Arianna Philip Santos, another star teacher, observed.

Speaker D: In my student group, you have English language learners, you have students with IEPs, and you have students that have just been low performing or plateauing in their reading skills. And I think that having that holistic approach to developing their reading skills, including the discussion component, really makes a big difference in some of their growth. Their confidence in being able to speak up about what their reasoning is and what their thinking is. Those are things that in sixth grade I would see them be very quiet and shy away from those kind of discussions now with Staarie because it's so normalized to them. They're putting themselves out there a lot more. And I think that that also is

Speaker B: what builds their skills. Putting themselves out there, taking risks, speaking up. And that shift doesn't stay contained to the starry classroom. Principal Karn's thoughts spreading across her school.

Speaker F: It shows such promise that the kids

Speaker B: are going to be able to use

Speaker F: an, uh, intervention program that is geared towards them, that they're confident that they can do it and they're seeing the results because they're doing well in their

Speaker B: other classes geared towards them. That phrase is important when students begin initiating discussions, taking intellectual risk, and applying their reading strategies across subjects. That's agency. That's when we see the work of, uh, belonging and confidence come to life. That's the transfer we're looking for. Not just reading better in Starry, but succeeding in science, in history and math. Not just test scores, but a new relationship with learning. Not just improved fluency, but empowered learning. Not just catching UH up, but taking the lead. Academic agency is what happens when students feel seen, believe in themselves, and act on that belief. It's the difference between being taught and taking ownership, between having potential and using it. Academic outcomes aren't separate from belonging and confidence. They're the result of belonging and confidence. When students feel seen, when they believe in themselves, when they're given the tools and support they need, that's when learning happens. Agency isn't the end of the story. It's the beginning of a new one. Because once students take ownership of their learning, everything else becomes possible.

Speaker D: Uh,

Speaker B: so what have we learned? If we want students to read, we have to care about how they feel about reading. It's a Simple equation, really. Skill and motivation are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. Not sustainably, not for students who've been struggling for years. STAARI shows what's possible when we honor both, when we pair explicit instruction with texts that matter. When we build classrooms where students voices are heard and their stories are valued and their growth is visible. Dari has helped me become a better reader because talking with others and hearing the opinions of others can help me learn more about what I'm reading about belonging, confidence, academic agency. As I said in the beginning of this episode, these three themes might not be the measures that got us As a Tier 1 evidence of effectiveness, but they're the forces behind every data point. Because when students believe their readers, when they see themselves in the books they read, when they experience success day after day, transformation follows. That's when they start reading to learn in science class. That's when they pick up the history textbook without fear. That's when literacy becomes not just a skill they're practicing, but a tool they're using in school and beyond. STAARI just isn't an intervention. It's an invitation for students who've been left behind to step forward, to see themselves as capable, competent, and confident readers, to take ownership of their learning and to claim their place in the classroom, in the curriculum, and in their own futures.

Speaker F: You gotta have an intervention program that teaches them how to work through language. Everything's about reading novels and analyzing text. And if you can't do that, you're not going to be successful as a learner. And some kids didn't get the foundation that they should have gotten early on. And this is a way to do it and keep the children whole.

Speaker B: I think about those students I saw in that intervention class years ago, heads on desks, eyes glazed, shut down by the materials that insulted their intelligence. I think about my niece in third grade who stopped raising her hand. And I think about what becomes possible when we give students what they deserve. Not baby books, but challenge. Not pity, but respect. Not isolation, but community. That's what Starry does, and it's a gift worth giving.

Speaker E: Uh,

Speaker B: if you missed our earlier episodes, go back and hear the full story of Starry's creation and its journey to scale. And if this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who works with adolescent readers. Because every student deserves to feel like a reader. Not just in first grade, but in sixth, seventh, eighth, and beyond. Because when students belong, they believe. When they believe, they act. And when they act, they change what's possible for themselves and for all of us. Before we go, I asked every guest this season, uh, one question. How did you learn to read? Given the context of this episode, I consider it an honor to share the story of one of my academic inspirations, Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings.

Speaker A: Wonderful question. And I will tell you, I don't remember a lot about learning to read. I know I did not go to school reading, and I think I learned to read. Ah, Back then the method was called the sight word method. You know, it's funny because people count phonics, but many of us who were prolific readers in the 50s and the 60s, we had those old Dick and Jane Basil books and we just had the same words over and over and over. Look, dick, look or run, spot, run. And we just kept saying them, uh, until we kind of got it. So I think that's, um, one aspect of my learning to read. I think the second aspect of learning to, of my learning to read is that my mother and father were both readers. I just always saw them reading, uh, and we had a lot of books in the house. Um, the interesting thing about my mother is she did not believe in book censorship. So my brother and I were permitted to read whatever we wanted to read. Somewhere around my teenage, um, years, early adolescence, um, I just became a fan of what could only be described as trash, right? So, uh, I was like the biggest Harold Robbins fan in the world reading these books. And I thought I was reading them and I thought, you know, what I liked is that I was grown up enough to be able to read them. My mother didn't say I couldn't read them. My friends, on the other hand, were not permitted to read books like this. And so in order for them to read the books I was reading, we had to cover the books with brown paper bag covers so they could read them. And so one of the things that happens this is very interesting because I just shared this story. A couple weeks ago I did an interview, uh, an in person interview with LeVar Burton. And so, uh, we were talking about learning to read. And I shared this story with him that I'd read this book by Harold Robbins called 79 Park Avenue and someone in the 70s, I think, turned it into a miniseries. And so I'm watching the miniseries and I get a phone call from my friend that I used to share my salacious books with. I had not seen or heard from her in 15 years. Phone rings, I pick up the phone and I hear a voice on the other end that says, are you looking at this? And I go, well, yeah. She said, did you know this is what this was about when we was reading this? And I said, no. And she said, me neither, and just hung up. And that was it, you know. So, uh, I just, you know, I've had so many adventures as a reader, and I think what really prompted my willingness to read was, um, that I didn't really have restrictions. I could read what I wanted to read.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening to this episode of SERP Stories. If you want to learn more About Staari, visit serpinstitute.org staari and if you believe like we do, that middle school readers deserve better, share this episode, leave us a review and follow along as we bring more research with purpose to the mic. I'm, um, Dr. Kayla Jones. See you next time. Serp Stories is produced by the Serb Institute, where educators, researchers and designers come together to tackle school's most pressing challenges. Explore our work at serpinstitute.

Speaker E: Org.