What is Lexile^®

The West Virginia Department of Education leverages Lexile and Quantile measures to provide teachers parents and students with important information for personalizing learning and charting growth toward college and career readiness. Lexile and Quantile student measures are reported from summative assessments in grades 3-8 and from SAT scores for grade 11. State leaders collaborated with MetaMetrics to develop a Lexile and Quantile Parent Report that effectively communicates information about students’ Lexile and Quantile measures.

The report features the Lexile and Quantile Growth Planners that help forecast student reading and math growth starting at third grade and compare that forecasted performance to text and math demands of college and careers. With the Growth Planners’ career exploration feature, students and parents can select from hundreds of careers to evaluate a career’s educational requirements, salary range, job demand and much more.

K-5 educators face unique challenges. In addition to teaching and preparing students for high-stakes tests, successful teachers of young children also create lifelong readers. This responsibility weighs heavily on the shoulders of Susan Sidden, K-5 supervisor of reading and writing for the Wilkes County School District in North Carolina. Wilkes County is a quiet, largely rural county located in the northwest part of the state, at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains.

With a spread-out population of about 66,000 and a 45-minute drive to the nearest major metropolitan area (Winston-Salem), Wilkes County—and, by extension, its school district—is self-sufficient, self-reliant and determined to excel. It was that determination that led the district to turn to Lexiles to help its students build literacy skills.

As every educator knows, reading must be taught on an ongoing basis and throughout the curriculum—not just in Reading and Language Arts classes, but in all classes, particularly in elementary and middle school.

As students progress up the educational ladder, they must use their reading skills to interpret and analyze materials in every subject area. At Boca Raton Community Middle School in Florida, a new program is putting The Lexile Framework for Reading to work throughout the school's curriculum, helping teachers to ensure that students meet state learning goals.

Schools everywhere are grappling with balancing the ever-increasing emphasis on standardized test scores while ensuring that each student's individual learning needs are met. A small Alaska elementary school has achieved that delicate balance. East Elementary School in Kodiak implemented a school-wide reading initiative that is instilling a lifelong love of reading in its students and making their scores on the Alaska state reading assessment skyrocket.

Part of the Kodiak Island Borough District, East Elementary is located on an island off the southern coast of Alaska, where it serves 320 students from the town of Kodiak and the nearby Coast Guard station. School principal Ron Fried and reading specialist Margaret Reed embody the independent, self-sufficient attitude for which the forty-ninth state is known, and in 2002 created an in-school reading program using The Lexile Framework for Reading.

Houston Independent School District (HISD) is no different from most major urban school systems. As the largest public school system in Texas and the seventh-largest in the United States, HISD faces the challenges of serving a socio-economically and ethnically diverse student population with a wide variety of learning abilities and educational needs. Under the leadership of Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra, Ph.D., the district is dedicated to giving every student the best possible education.

Jim Hundemer, HISD's library services manager, attended the first Lexile National Reading Conference in Dallas. There, along with hundreds of his colleagues from Texas and around the country, Hundemer learned more about The Lexile Framework for Reading and the power that it could have for helping improve student reading abilities at HISD.