1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home.
2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days.
3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
ch4s3|10 days ago
It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.
[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...