International Literacy Day: 8 Things That Top Schools for Reading Have in Common

Today is International Literacy Day. The 60^th anniversary, in fact.

But with the rise of social media and video streaming, some news articles are warning that the Western world is heading toward a post-literate society where the written word matters less than it used to. Sixty years ago, if you wanted to learn the capital of Zambia or how to fix a leaky faucet, you’d have to look it up in a book. Nowadays, Google and YouTube can answer such questions, and tools like Claude and ChatGPT can spit out written text without much input from humans.

And yet, as E.D. Hirsch wrote more than 25 years ago, “it takes knowledge to gain knowledge.” The internet may have put an extraordinary amount of information at our fingertips, but we still need to be able to read it, understand it and connect it to what we already know. If anything, a world awash in information makes literacy more important, not less.

If reading remains the gateway to learning almost everything else, then one of the most important things a school can do is teach children to read well. So a year ago, The 74 started looking for schools that were beating the odds in teaching kids to read. By comparing literacy and poverty rates for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids, we found more than 2,000 Bright Spots across the country and plotted them on an interactive map. 

Since then, we’ve been speaking with teachers, principals and literacy coaches at a number of these Bright Spots schools, trying to figure out what they do differently.

A few takeaways from that search: 

The basics matter more than magic: Some schools were surprised to be on our list. They didn’t necessarily have an unusual program or practice in place, but across schools, we kept seeing the same organizational factors: they all have strong leaders who are resolutely focused on student outcomes, they pay attention to the quality of their curriculum and how it’s being implemented, and they closely monitor student performance data in service of continuous improvement. These feel like platitudes, but they’re essential elements to getting reading instruction right.

They focus on core instruction: The Bright Spots schools all seem to prioritize high-quality core instruction, for all kids. Notably, the Worcester County, Maryland, district getting “improbable” results explicitly protects its reading instructional time and doesn’t allow interruptions, even for providing a student with personalized help. Similarly, Connecticut’s Meriden school district earned several spots on our list in part by prioritizing a common reading block across the entire district.

They emphasize foundational skills. National data suggests that all boats rise when kids have strong foundational skills. Schools are emphasizing that lesson in different ways. For example, the Indian River district in Florida has an afterschool program that gives students who need extra literacy help explicit instruction on the letters or sounds they’re learning during the school day. In Illinois, a Rockford school saw strong gains after it shifted to skill-based, rather than grade-based, reading instruction.

They set high expectations. Many of the schools on our list simply set higher expectations than other places are comfortable imposing. A district in Florida officially adopted a goal of getting 90% of their students reading proficiently by the end of third grade and is holding itself accountable for it.

This also plays out in smaller ways. Worcester County schools asks parents to sign logs confirming that their kids read for 30 minutes every night. Over the course of a school year, that adds hours of extra practice time that schools couldn’t provide on their own. Schools in Steubenville, Ohio, where nearly all third graders read proficiently, boost language development by asking students to always respond in complete sentences.

Good schools are good across the board: One thing that surprised me, but maybe shouldn’t have, is that good schools rarely specialize. There are exceptions, but in general, schools that are good at helping some children learn to read are also good for other groups of students. Researchers analyzing data across 3 million students found that the most reliable indicator of whether a school is going to be good for a specific group is whether it produces strong learning gains overall. This is also true across subjects. Schools that are good at teaching reading also tend to be good at teaching math.

Charter schools were over-represented: In any given community, charters are often among the most academically oriented schools. They made up 7% of all schools in our sample but 11% of those that we identified as exceptional.

Poverty seems to matter more in some states than others. In some states, the connection between a school’s poverty level and its reading scores was very strong. In others, the relationship was noticeably weaker. My hunch is that this is mostly the result of how states are divided up into school districts and how concentrated poverty is in those communities, but it’s important for policymakers to understand what challenges students in their area are facing.

Find the Bright Spots: Documenting where students are struggling is important. But advocates and state leaders should spend more time identifying where students are succeeding despite the odds and what other schools can learn from these outliers.

Places like Steubenville and Worcester County show that demographics don’t dictate outcomes. Every state has schools that outperform what their circumstances would predict, and state and local leaders should find them, study them and figure out how to create more of them.