Reading ability is one of the most crucial skills learned in elementary school, a primary focus for students in these years. Around the third grade, though, students start transitioning to a skill they will need the rest of their academic and work career--reading to learn. Students begin demonstrating their learning by taking high-stakes standardized tests that often reveal a gap in performance among subgroups of students. Despite many programs, billions of dollars, and educators' best efforts, such gaps continue to exist. Performance on these standardized tests is measured by scores that mark students as proficient or not, depending on which side of the cutoff line they fall. Researchers have focused efforts on effective ways to support students in achieving proficiency. However, these studies have only examined whether students met the score to be considered proficient, and have not tracked students' growth in moving toward proficiency. Over the last few years, many schools and districts have used growth models like the SAS EVAAS model to examine student growth over time as compared to their peers. These value-added growth models primarily serve to assess teacher effectiveness by measuring the growth of a teacher's students. Are the students in the class growing more, about the same, or less than their peers? In North Carolina, like many other states, this growth measure has taken on increasing importance, and has even been included in teacher and administrator evaluation instruments. A literature review revealed that research about supporting struggling readers focused on proficiency scores. Yet equally important as mere proficiency is understanding which instructional practices are effective at producing high growth for struggling readers in upper elementary grades. This question is particularly significant to teachers and school administrators since part of their evaluation contains a growth score for students. It is also significant to district leaders who must make decisions about supporting students and teachers in an era of declining resources. Most importantly, the questions posed by the current study are significant to the students whose ability to be successful readers will impact the rest of their academic, professional, and personal lives. Regardless of a student's proficiency score, is s/he growing enough to keep up with their peers? Enough to close gaps? Or are they falling farther behind? To uncover effective practices at supporting upper-elementary student growth in reading, a case study involving selected Title I schools in the Wake County Public School System was conducted. The district provided data about the individual growth of fifth-grade students who received interventions in reading for the 2013-2014 and the 2014-2015 school years. Schools with a high percentage of students exceeding individual growth targets were identified for both school years, as well as those with a large percentage of students not meeting the targets. Structured interviews were then conducted with fifth-grade classroom teachers, fifth-grade intervention teachers, and the principal from two of the schools with high individual growth in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 and two of the schools with low growth. Findings indicated consistent teachers and administrator practices at the higher-growth schools, practices which notably differed with those at the lower-growth schools. In schools that were successful in producing high fifth-grade student growth, teachers focused on ensuring students had many opportunities to interact with grade-level texts, even if their instructional reading level was behind their grade. These teachers also used a wide variety of data sources to identify students needing support, rather than relying on a single measure or instrument. These schools' intervention and core classroom teachers collaborated at a deep level, aligned support with grade-level objectives, and focused on building vocabulary and background knowledge to help students to get meaning from text. Finally, the principals at these schools established supportive structures and processes, and monitored teachers and students for effectiveness. This study suggests that key practices that align support for students with the manner in which they are assessed are effective at growing students closer to reading proficiency. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]