As Fresno Unified enters the second year towards realizing its ambitious five-year literacy-boosting goals, Superintendent Misty Her shared the district’s plan to provide students with targeted support in improving early literacy.
Her made commitments to turn around the state’s third-largest school district’s student underperformance when she assumed the Fresno Unified leader role in April 2025. The four long-term goals she established, with the governing board’s vision, aimed to raise early student literacy and the percentage of college- and career-ready graduates by June 2030.
In the last school year, Her conducted extensive fact-finding and data analysis, including co-teaching in a first-grade classroom for two hours every week to identify the resources and support needed by teachers and students.
“One of the students that I was working with was a second-language learner. She was not getting it because of the way the English language sequenced, the student doesn’t have those sounds [in her language],” Her said.
Her said she first introduced the student to some sounds similar to those in her native language, then showed the student some new sounds. Gradually, the student was able to use the knowledge she had mastered to practice new pronunciations and words.
The process involves diagnosing, prescribing, implementing, and assessing, Her said, meaning diagnose areas where the student is struggling, teach the student how to do it, have the student learn to do the task on their own, and measure whether they are ready to move on to the next stage.
In the first-grade classroom she co-taught, 20 out of the 24 students were below grade level, Her said, so she started with assessing students.
“There were patterns and trends that we saw. So we started with ‘These are the students who don’t have anything at all.’ We put them together because those students were gonna have to start from scratch,” Her said, in recounting her teaching experience. “There were five students who had a little bit of it, but I think we can get them really quickly if we have somebody sit with them.”
By the end of the school year, one student had gone from knowing only four words to mastering 144 words, Her told the school board at last week’s meeting.
During the 2025-26 school year, Fresno Unified achieved a major milestone that 70% of kindergarteners gained foundational mastery in their grade-level literacy, exceeding the target of 62.5%.
Therefore, the district plans to scale the models that have been proven effective to all schools and classrooms.
Earlier this month, Her introduced the governing board to the district’s newly launched portal, which details the district’s annual goals and each department’s responsibilities. In the upcoming September, Fresno Unified will roll out a dashboard where educators can monitor each student’s learning needs and progress.
The dashboard will help all educators stay on the same page, and to hold all the departments, staff, and educators accountable, Her added. For example, it will track which portion a student has not yet fully completed in class, so the tutor can help the child continue to practice during the 30-minute extra session or in the after-school program. The data also serves as a reminder for the teacher to review and assess the student’s progress the next day.
At the district level, the superintendent will present to the governing board twice a month and publish an annual report for the public, so the community can track the district’s progress in achieving the annual plan or five-year goal. Schools will report to the superintendent on a weekly basis with certain initiatives and update data on the portal quarterly.
“When I say report out, I’m not saying randomly talking about how many kids at your school are not making it. It’s how many by the number, whose classrooms are they in, and what are you doing for these kids, and why they’re improving or why they’re not improving,” Her said. “So we can start looking at it, ‘this kid is only missing 10 more high-frequency words’ or ‘if this child can learn these sounds and these letters, then they’re going to start blending in.’”
Her recommended that when parents meet with their children’s teacher, they should ask four questions.
“Does my child know how to read? Or if you’re a parent of a younger child, does my child have the basic foundational skills to be able to read? How far below is my child, and what are you going to do to get my child caught up?” She said. “I would also ask, what are you doing to prepare my child to be either college-ready, or to be career-ready, or both?”
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Leqi Zhong is the Clovis accountability/enterprise reporter for The Bee. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a Master’s degree in journalism. She joined The Bee in 2023 as an education reporter. Leqi grew up in China and is native in Cantonese and Mandarin.