The Houston Independent School District (HISD) first implemented its Secondary Reading Initiative in 2012-13. All low-achieving, early middle and high school students are now required to enroll in reading remediation courses in place of their electives. Students were required to enroll in these courses if they scored below a pre-determined threshold on the Stanford reading assessment in the previous school year. Ultimately this policy made it such that more than half of all early middle and high school students were required to enroll in this course.

One major issue with this intervention was that teachers at the middle and high school levels are typically not trained in reading instruction. Therefore, HISD provided financial incentives to attract and motivate teachers to participate in professional development courses and increase students’ reading test scores. A teacher received $3,000 for completing the professional development and up to an additional $7,000 was tied to their students’ performances on the state’s reading assessment.

The effectiveness of this program is primarily evaluated through a regression discontinuity design, where students scoring marginally above and below the Secondary Reading Initiative eligibility makeup the treatment and control groups. The primary bandwidth that is applied in order to conduct these analyses includes 2,137 6^th and 9^th grade students in 101 schools throughout the District for the first year of the evaluation. Data for the second year will be received at the end of the current school year and analyzed this summer.

The first year results indicate that students receiving this intervention do not significantly benefit in terms of measured scale score growth on the state’s standardized reading assessment. This evaluation also found that this intervention has a negative impact on time spent and exposure with arts and physical education elective courses at the expense of the reading remediation course. However, HISD has made substantial changes to the Secondary Reading Initiative in year two (2013-14). This paper will report whether these changes have led to significant effects for students’ reading scores. In addition to this central question, this paper will also report whether this exogenous shock to students’ course loads had a substantial impact on student promotion and retention (plausibly attributed to changes in engagement levels). Finally, this report will also include exploratory analyses on the mediating influences of the professional development and performance pay components to the Secondary Reading Initiative.

The findings of this evaluation will help inform education policymakers about the costs and benefits of mandating remediation requirements from the experiences after two years of one of the largest, urban U.S. school districts. This paper also aims to provide insights about the value of student elective courses that can be causally attributed to the policy’s exogenous impact on student course loads. Finally, this evaluation highlights some of the advantages and concerns with integrating multiple education policy strategies (remediation, professional development, and performance-based pay) in reading a particular objective.