Dive Brief:
- Around a dozen school districts that have seen progress in reading and math after adopting high-quality curricula, professional learning and other systemwide changes are spotlighted in a report released Tuesday by the Center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia University.
- Titled “Reach Higher, Together,” the report draws from interviews and focus group research with district leaders, educators and families nationwide to present case studies and lessons learned from districts that have demonstrated success, according to CPRL.
- “We wanted to focus on places where things are going well and changes are happening, taking hold and making a difference for young people in public schools,” said Elizabeth Chu, executive director of CPRL. “We thought it was important that we make them more widely known to policymakers, leaders and communities so they can understand the key levers they can put in place to have similar results play out.”
Dive Insight:
CPRL used the acronym “REACH” to ground the report, focusing on five elements of the strategies generally used across these successful districts, Chu said. Those elements include:
- Resource. Highlighted districts have all adopted and implemented high-quality instructional materials, curricula and other resources at the outset.
- Equip. All have put in place supports to help teachers and others in the building use those materials well, in some cases through the use of a third-party professional learning provider.
- Assess and Adjust. These districts have been attentive to collecting high-quality data about what instruction is working and for which kids, and how to close gaps. “And looking at the aggregate level — even to which strategies are working — adjusting the strategy, and engaging in cycles of improvement at the individual teacher level and system level,” Chu said.
- Cohere. Districts have paid attention to instructional coherence, ensuring the materials “hang together in ways that are really consistent,” Chu said. “They’re also thinking about how you unify an entire system of people around the shared strategy — teachers and administrators, but also your community, as well.”
- Hard-Wiring. This refers to systematizing design routines to enable teachers to consistently implement materials, go through assessment and adjustment, and regularly make explicit what the most effective instructional practices are. “Consistent capacity building isn’t just about training individual teachers,” she said.
Four of the 12 districts being spotlighted are in New York City, which has adopted the citywide NYC Reads approach to shared curriculum, high-quality supports and rigorous, evidence-based assessment and adjustment for each of its 32 sub-districts, Chu said.
District 18 in Brooklyn, which has the city’s highest percentage of Black students, for example, saw a 14% increase in reading proficiency as well as an 8% decrease in students at the lowest level of reading proficiency among Black students between the 2021-22 and 2024-25 school years, she said. District 11, in the Bronx, saw a 7.4% increase in reading proficiency for students with disabilities from the 2023-24 to 2024-25 school years.
Passaic Schools in New Jersey, which has a 29% multilingual and 95% Hispanic population, has seen “tremendous gains across the board in literacy levels, including for their multilingual learners,” Chu said. “They chose a curriculum available in both English and Spanish, and they’re supporting teachers to use the curriculum effectively.”
Passaic, which saw a 15% gain in early literacy proficiency (grades K-4) between the 2020-21 and 2024-25 school years, had implemented a new science of reading-based curriculum using federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding for COVID-19 recovery, according to Stefania Duarte, the district's assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction.
When the pandemic hit, the students "were coming in with the learning gaps they left with, and those became wider with remote learning,” to which the district pivoted for 18 months, Duarte said. “We did an overhaul of the curriculum to … get them on grade level.”
“Radical change needed to be done, and done well,” added Sandra Montañez-Diodonet, Passaic Schools’ superintendent. “We needed to do something powerful and intentional that would provide some outcomes. … We thought, ‘If not now, when?’ ”
Other case studies featured include Aldine Independent School in Texas, Charleston County School District in South Carolina, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, Knox County Schools in Tennessee, Los Angeles Unified School District in California, Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, District 7 in New York City, and District 25 in Queens, New York.
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