Providing one-on-one literacy tutoring to struggling readers in elementary school
Countries Served
United States
Budget
$31,900,000
Partner Since
2012
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Problem
In grades 1 to 3 students learn to read. Thereafter, students read to learn.
Students not reading at grade-appropriate proficiency levels by the end of the 3rd grade are four times as likely to drop out before high school graduation.
Only one in five low-income 4th grade students in the U.S. reads at grade level.
Limited school district budgets and rising class sizes reduce the capacity of classroom teachers to provide the 1:1 attention that many elementary school students struggling with reading require to catch up to grade level.
Programs Offered
Reading Partners recruits and trains local volunteers to tutor students 1:1 twice weekly for 45 minutes following a step-by-step, research-based literacy curriculum. The program works in low-income elementary schools to support students who are reading six months to 2.5 years below grade-level. A full-time staff member is always available at the reading center to assist tutors and students and to coordinate with the school’s principal and teachers. Students are assessed three times each year to track progress.
Reading Partners complements tutoring with home involvement strategies like the Take Reading Home program, which provides free, skill-appropriate reading materials for students to start home libraries.
Historical Results
In the 2020-2021 school year, Reading Partners helped nearly 5,700 students from 181 schools in 9 states and Washington, D.C., engaged 5,814 community volunteers who helped deliver 138,084 tutoring sessions, and achieved the following outcomes:
- 82% of K-2 students mastered key foundational reading skills needed to read at grade level.
- 77% of all Reading Partners students met or exceeded their end-of-year literacy goal.
- Based on survey responses, 89% of principals reported improved school-wide reading progress, 100% of teachers reported Reading Partners is valuable to their school, and 90% of volunteers were satisfied with their Reading Partners experience.
A year-long study released in 2014 by MDRC, a nonpartisan social policy and education research firm, confirmed Reading Partners’ impact. MDRC conducted a rigorous, randomized control study of the Reading Partners program in 19 schools in three states (including schools in Greater Los Angeles region) involving more than 1,200 students. The study’s findings included:
- Reading Partners had a positive and statistically significant impact on all three measures of student reading proficiency examined: reading comprehension, reading fluency, and sight-word reading for second- to fifth-graders. In particular, reading comprehension is often difficult to affect through tutoring programs.
- Tutoring by Reading Partners community volunteers twice a week for 45 minutes each session resulted in an additional 1.5 to 2 months of growth in literacy for Reading Partners students, compared to a control group of students who received other forms of supplemental reading services.
- The Reading Partners program was found effective for a wide variety of students: those with different grades or baseline reading achievement levels, male or female students, and non-native English speakers.
Path to Credibility
Focusing Philanthropy has served as the lead supporter of two separate multi-year district-wide expansions of the Reading Partners model.
Reading Partners only operates at schools with the official support of the relevant school district and school principal. The program has never been asked to leave a school where it has operated, has often been asked to add schools in districts in which it is active, and has a substantial waiting list of schools across multiple states that have made credible requests for Reading Partners to expand to their site.
Reading Partners became a national AmeriCorps program and leverages the service of hundreds of AmeriCorps members each year.
The Stanford University School of Education worked with Reading Partners to develop its initial curriculum, and a group of leading experts continues to work with the program to monitor and refine the tutoring protocols, teaching materials, and impact assessments. Reading Partners’ instruction is aligned to the Common Core State Standards and best practices in reading instruction to promote student mastery through alignment with classroom expectations.
Focusing Philanthropy team members have conducted 19 Reading partners program site visits program to seven of the 12 Reading Partners regions.
Focusing Philanthropy and Reading Partners have run 19 successful matching campaigns together.
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