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For Immediate Release
California Voyager Passport™ Adopted by
the
California State Board of Education for
Grade 4-8 Reading Intervention
Sacramento, California, October 4, 2005-Voyager Expanded Learning® announced today that California Voyager Passport ™: Levels C-G is one of three programs recently adopted by the California State Board of Education as stand-alone reading intervention programs for students in grades four through eight. California Voyager Passport brings a new approach to reading instruction focused on pedagogy and it is deeply “research-based.”
Designed to support any core reading program, California Voyager Passport—which is a California-specific version of Voyager Passport—moves low-performing students in grades 4-8 who are reading at least two or more years below grade level toward grade-level proficiency. The program provides explicit, systematic instruction in the five essential components of reading, as well as critical writing strategies. Like all Voyager education programs, California Voyager Passport identifies struggling readers, intervenes with targeted instruction, and monitors student progress until intervention is no longer needed. VPORT® —included in Voyager Passport—is the online data management and reporting system that provides specific information and direction regarding which children are at risk for reading difficulty and need additional support.
“Voyager has a long-standing reputation for helping children become proficient readers with our research-based and continuously-evaluated resources,” said Dr. Jeri Nowakowski, executive vice president of product development, research and marketing for Voyager. “We are very pleased with the approval of California Voyager Passport by the California State Board of Education because we are highly committed to helping California students become successful readers.”
The California State Board of Education evaluated stand-alone reading intervention programs based on the following criteria:
- The program should be a separate reading intervention for students in grades 4-8 who are two or more years behind grade level standards.
- The intention of the program must be to provide acceleration to grade level standards.
- The program must include diagnostic assessment and placement with continuous progress monitoring.
- The program must include the foundational building blocks of reading and include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, as well as a writing component.
Voyager Passport has demonstrated success in California and other states. For example, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in the Los Angeles Unified School District enrolled in a spring 2005 program called Beyond the Bell used Voyager Passport for three months and surpassed benchmark goals after only 30 hours of instruction. Texas fifth-graders, who were struggling when they started the program, gained 70 percent more than the expected yearly gain and closed the achievement gap with their on-track peers by more than 50 percent. And in Baltimore, Maryland, first through fifth graders who were considered at one time to be “nonreaders” before being enrolled in Voyager Passport during the 2004-2005 school year were reading at grade-level by the year-end.
Voyager Passport is also a “recommended” intervention resource by the Reduction Referral Program of the California Supplemental Reading Intervention category for Reading First. Passport Reading Journeys®, Voyager’s intervention program for high school students, is also aligned to the California Reading and Language Arts Standards.
Voyager Expanded Learning is a provider of core, intervention and supplemental reading programs, as well as math intervention and ongoing professional development for school districts throughout the United States. The Voyager Universal Literacy System ® is the only reading program patented for its “method and system for preventing illiteracy.” Founded in 1994, Voyager has delivered extended-time reading and basic skills intervention programs as well as large-scale reading programs to more than 1,000 school districts in cities such as Dallas, Phoenix, New York, Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia, resulting in dramatically improved student performance. Partnerships and collaborations with the Discovery Channel and the Smithsonian Institution enable Voyager to provide timely and powerful curricula for the American classroom. Voyager Expanded Learning is a subsidiary of Ann-Arbor based ProQuest Company. For more information, please visit www.voyagerlearning.com.
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