Three mornings a week for the past several months, a Northeast Portland second grader named Jaden has left his classroom for a 30-minute session focused on taking words apart and putting them back together.

By early June, a week before school was due to let out for summer, Jaden had progressed to reading full sentences with practiced ease, a huge leap forward.

The nearly concluded school year is the first since the pandemic that Oregon’s largest school district went big on a strategy that researchers have consistently pinpointed as among the best to help students who need more help to master grade level reading.

Like Jaden, who attends Scott Elementary, about 12% of Portland Public Schools’ 12,500 students in kindergarten through third grade got help from a reading tutor this ye

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