The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading provides backbone support to a nationwide network of local and regional coalitions who are committed to assuring…

At the start of 2020, CGLR had adopted the following strategic priorities:

• Make and document more substantial and durable gains around readiness, chronic absence and summer learning.
• Aggregate the gains into observable progress on grade-level reading proficiency and early school success.
• Elevate and make even more explicit the critical importance of parents, parent success and productive partnerships with parents.
• Provoke informed demand for quality teaching, robust family engagement and 24/7/365 multigenerational wraparound services and family supports.

Just months later, those priorities were amended and reordered to declare CGLR’s most urgent and compelling focus: slow and stop learning loss and accelerate equitable academic recovery. Having worked for a decade on the learning loss associated with both chronic absence and the “summer slide,” CGLR pivoted to prioritize mobilizing its networks to act to slow and stop pandemic-driven learning loss and to jumpstart what was anticipated to — and has — become an equally urgent need to accelerate equitable learning recovery.

In making this pivot, CGLR leveraged its LEO webinars, launched the previous fall, to follow the data on the impact the pandemic was having on children’s learning and development, lift up bright spots and silver linings that offer hope for transformative change, and encourage smart decisions in the investment of public funding from the federal government. Between March 2020 and December 2021, CGLR’s LEO platform of webinars and engagement opportunities hosted a diverse “faculty” of 519 moderators, presenters and commentators who contributed to 129 online events focused on the Learning Loss Recovery Challenge for which 28,486 people (10,435 unique individuals) registered. In addition, CGLR LEO webinars continue to explore critical topics related to early school success, such as engaging and supporting parents as their child’s first and most important teacher; strengthening the early educator workforce; promoting early math and numeracy skills; and much more.

Learn more and find current LEO offerings »

The onset of the pandemic dictated an immediate shift for CGLR. It was perhaps the most sudden and dramatic driver of a pivot, but it was not the first. In fact, CGLR has a history of making tactical shifts to meet the moment and, in so doing, has developed an agility and adaptability that served it well in responding to the pandemic.

The groundwork for CGLR was laid in 2010 with the publication of Early Warning: Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters. After extensively reviewing the literature and learning from practitioners, it was evident that three essential assurances had to be in place to move the needle on grade-level reading proficiency: quality teaching in every setting, every day, for every child; a more seamless system of care, services and supports to meet the challenges caused by poverty-related adversity; and community solutions to ensure that more children were ready and prepared to start kindergarten and first grade, attended school regularly and avoided losing ground over the summer.

In response to Early Warning, the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading was formed as a decade-long effort to move the needle, with a dozen states or more having increased by at least 50 percent the number of low-income children reading proficiently by the end of third grade, and to close the gap, producing a promising trend line and sustainable momentum toward closing the reading proficiency gap between children from economically challenged families and their more affluent peers. The expected progress included these targeted results: (1) GLR Network communities would become proof points for improving school readiness, attendance, summer learning and reading proficiency; (2) these areas would become priorities for public officials and influential constituencies; and (3) early learning, healthy on-track development and successful parents are recognized as essential contributors to success in the early grades.

By the time the GLR Communities Network formed in July 2012, the Common Core Standards movement — which would have driven the focus on standards to drive curricula, professional development and assessment — had imploded as many of the supportive governors termed out and were replaced by highly partisan state leaders. In addition, the systems of care, services and support that Community Schools, Promise Neighborhoods, Choice Neighborhoods and Empowerment Zones were expected to produce were derailed by the substantial investments needed to rescue the economy.

CGLR pivoted to lean into the proximity and energy the 124 local communities that had developed plans (now 350+) could bring to parent-centered community solutions addressing some of the major impediments to early school success — school readiness, chronic absence and summer learning loss.

A midcourse review led CGLR to conclude in 2017 that the needle had begun to move, revealing  measurable progress in a significant number GLR communities on readiness, attendance and summer learning. But double-digit gaps in reading proficiency persisted. In response, CGLR ramped up the emphasis on the second part of its goal, sustainable momentum toward closing the gap. This “bigger outcomes” strategy sought powerful and durable interventions that would reach more children and families in more ways. CGLR doubled down on readiness, attendance and summer learning while also lifting up parent success and healthy child development as critical determinants of early school success, prioritizing children and families in public housing, promoting systemic solutions to data challenges, and using technology and technology-enhanced platforms to assist with all the above.

By the end of the 2018–2019 school year, just before the pandemic, there was widespread agreement that the three milestones for the 2020 goal had been achieved. A large number of local school districts produced verifiable data of progress. Although the increments were still too small and frail, they were progress.

And then the pandemic hit, eviscerating both the progress on moving the needle and the hope for sustainable momentum toward closing the gap. Fortunately, the pandemic also brought renewed energy around the assurances that went “missing in action” a decade ago, with a resurgence of public concern about the quality of teaching — focusing on the gap between the science and practice of teaching reading — and increased funding for wraparound care, services and supports, including significant funding for Community Schools and Promise Neighborhoods.

For more on the history of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, click here. To read how CGLR assessed its progress and adjusted its strategy along the way, click here.