Fresno Unified is off track in boosting early literacy. Here’s the data
Fresno Unified is off track in achieving its ambitious early literacy and literacy intervention goals, according to the district’s assessment data for the 2024-25 school year.
Last spring, 46% of first-graders met their stretch growth target in the iReady diagnostic assessment. While the figure fell 1.5% short of the target, it represented an increase of 5 percentage point increase compared to spring 2024. The district aims to reach 54% by the end of this spring semester.
For literacy intervention, only 28% of identified third- to sixth-grade students met their stretch growth goal on iReady, showing a slight improvement from the 26% baseline recorded in spring 2024. The figure was 12.5% lower than its Spring 2025 target. The district has set a 55% goal for the end of this spring semester.
The results, shared at a school board meeting last week, are the initial outcomes of Superintendent Misty Her’s plan to improve the long-standing academic underperformance in California’s third-largest school district. She was appointed as the interim superintendent in May 2024 and assumed the permanent role in April 2025.
During Her’s year as interim superintendent, she refocused the district’s priority toward making double-digit gains to close academic gaps while working with the governing board to establish four long-term goals aimed at raising early student literacy and the percentage of college- and career-ready graduates. Each goal came with interim benchmarks designed to assess whether Fresno Unified is on track to reverse student underperformance by June 2030.
At the presentation last week, Her said the off-track results were due to the goals having only been implemented for one semester, and the district had insufficient progress monitoring tools and structures.
“This is for me and my district team to figure out, and we’re working every day to try to figure out how we’re going to get this into every single one of our schools. We also lack district-wide measures for student progress and performance in first grade,” Her said at the board meeting. “I want to be really clear that this is not on our teachers. This is not on the backs of our educators.”
This is the first time for Fresno Unified has used stretch growth as a monitoring metric on the iReady assessment, Her said.
Stretch growth measures whether students achieve a certain level of progress in a period of time, while typical growth assesses whether students reach a specific standard.
“Students that are significantly behind in their reading who met their stretch growth targets for two years in a row are much more likely to reach grade level, that’s why we’re going with stretch growth,” Her said. “This is for all students. Even our students who are on grade level, we want them to continue pushing them, and we want them to accelerate.”
Though the district’s overall data indicated that it fell behind in meeting the standards, some school sites delivered positive outcomes. About 40% of schools met the early literacy and literacy intervention goals, respectively.
At Kirk Elementary, south of downtown Fresno, 75.68% of first-graders met their stretch growth target last spring, exceeding the goal by 28 percentage points.
Krik Elementary is a pioneer in the district when it comes to utilizing diagnostic data tools. The school proactively monitors students’ learning and makes sure that teachers respond to individual students’ needs and provide timely intervention, Kevin Her, principal of Kirk Elementary, told the school board.
Superintendent Her said she is confident the district will be on track to meet its literacy goals at the end of the semester.
“The two schools that came to present (Jan. 28), it is happening at those schools, right?” Her told The Fresno Bee. “Wilson Elementary is in a socio-economically disadvantaged area of town, and they’re catching up to Manchester Gate. And if you look at Starr, it surpasses our Gate school. So we know it can be done.”
Her said the district is learning from these schools, building on their strategies, and scaling them into other school sites. In fall, one-on-one trainings were held with site leaders and academic coaches. Now, Fresno Unified is implementing some district-wide screening tools.
The district team will meet with site leaders this month to create action plans that identify the specific ways to monitor student learning. Teachers will receive plans for conducting differentiated instruction for students who are not meeting their stretch growth, Her told the board.
“The problem we’re having is we got to get all these schools to do it right,” Her said.
This story was originally published February 5, 2026 at 2:43 PM.
