New United2Read Partnership Sets Out to Improve Early Literacy Skills
Despite considerable resources spent on improving early literacy skills in the past 15 years, reading proficiency scores at the end of third grade are largely unchanged. Research shows that children who fail to read proficiently by the end of third grade face serious academic and life challenges. They are more likely to be retained a grade, to underachieve in mathematics and science, and are four times more likely to drop out of high school. Yet only 37 percent of children in the United States learn to read proficiently by the 4th grade, and reading proficiency drops to 22 percent for high-needs students and children of color.
To help address this gap, Digital Promise, Learning Ovations, MDRC, and The University of California at Irvine have received a five-year U.S. Department of Education grant to support the United2Read project. Over the course of the grant, the project will bring Learning Ovation’s Assessment2Instruction (A2i) professional support system to more than 100,000 students in at least 300 schools across the United States.