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

 

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Mission

The mission of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (CGLR) is to disrupt the generational cycle of poverty by improving the prospects for early school success for children growing up in economically challenged, fragile and otherwise marginalized families.

CGLR advances this mission by focusing on two critical inflection points: grade-level reading by the end of third grade and, more recently, on-track development by the end of kindergarten. Research, practice and common sense confirm both as critical to the early school success that predicts later school achievement and high school graduation, the first rung of the “success sequence” leading to employment and earnings.

What We Are

CGLR is an unusual nexus where local knowledge, energy, imagination and relationships intersect with national resources, access to expertise and influence.

The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading is the backbone structure for a nationwide, grassroots-to-governors network promoting grade-level reading as key to early school success. Led by a diverse team, CGLR is a source of strategic direction, dialogue, learning and facilitation for local GLR campaigns, national partners, funders and allied networks.

350+

communities in 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and two provinces in Canada have joined the GLR Network. Each state or local campaign is powered by a local stakeholder coalition.

5200+
organizations and institutions (libraries, museums, universities, program providers, public housing agencies and YMCAs), including 510+ state and local funders (family and community foundations, United Ways, corporate-giving programs and individual donors) have joined local GLR coalitions.
100+
national partners (sector- and field-leading organizations, associations and national affiliate networks), funders, research centers, social entrepreneurs and allied networks are stakeholders in CGLR.

What We Do

The national CGLR team provides backbone support to the GLR Network by acting as a hub, broker, dissemination channel and accelerator for established and emerging practice, policy, ideas, data and research. We also provide catalytic leadership to the movement and the field as a whole.

Our programming and events include:

Peer Connections

The Community Learning for Impact and Improvement Platform (CLIP) is a network learning platform available to GLR communities and partners that harnesses their collective knowledge, expertise and wisdom.

Learning & Engagement

Through its Learning and Engagement Opportunities (LEO) framework, CGLR hosts weekly webinars that tap the best science, ideas and programs featuring guest faculty, community members, funders, state and federal officials, and a wide range of others. LEO also offers peer sharing activities for the GLR Network, encouraging community story sharing within the What’s Working XChange.

GLR Week

An annual summer highlight, GLR Week presents a rich mix of webinars, fishbowls, documentary screenings, panel discussions and story times, tackling current challenges and opportunities. GLR Week events have been fully remote since 2020, enabling wider participation across the network. Many states in the network organize in-person sessions in conjunction with the virtual events.

You Are Invited

Anyone with an interest in advancing early school success is invited to participate:

ORGANIZE OR JOIN

a local GLR coalition

Connect

with peers in your community and across the GLR Network

Learn

about key issues and solutions from a CGLR webinar

Attend

our annual virtual conference

Donate

to a local GLR campaign or to CGLR

Our Work

Current Work: Promoting Early School Success and Accelerating Equitable Academic Recovery

Taking stock of the impact of the pandemic — both the sobering challenges of learning loss and the abundant bright spots and silver linings of creative responses — CGLR has prioritized building awareness, broad support and a sense of urgency around:

  • Encouraging schools and school districts to make “smart” decisions on some “big bets” (everyday attendance, technology in education, teacher development — especially coaching — and relational supports such as high-dosage tutoring);
  • Advocating around digital connectivity to assure access to the internet for all students;
  • Embracing the “learning happens everywhere” approach that makes learning-rich environments community-wide and ubiquitous;
  • Responding to the U.S. Department of Education’s call and advancing a collective effort to build the kindergarten year into “a more sturdy bridge” between the early years and the early grades; and
  • Partnering with public housing agencies to build the 24/7/365 multigenerational “surround sound” systems of care, supports and services that children growing up in economically challenged, fragile and marginalized families need.

Driving each of these priorities is the knowledge that parents are essential partners in improving educational outcomes for their children. This has been a central tenet of CGLR from its inception and the pandemic brought it into stark relief for all, as parents became not just their children’s first teacher but often their only teacher. A silver living of the pandemic is the renewed and strengthened empathy and appreciation teachers and parents have for one another. Finding creative ways to further those partnerships remains a high priority.

As CGLR looks to the future, it has outlined a Civic Action and Advocacy Agenda 2023–2026 that seeks to recharge its Learning Loss Recovery Challenge and marshal its network mobilization initiatives on advancing and accelerating equitable academic recovery. These efforts will be guided and undergirded by CGLR’s foundational imperatives:

  1. Focus on improving the prospects for the children of economically challenged, fragile and marginalized families who are disproportionately families of color.
  2. Elevate and center parents by equipping them to succeed as primary stakeholders and essential partners in improving outcomes and the overall well-being of their children.
  3. Practice intentional collaboration as the preferred approach for enhancing impact and engaging allies, champions and partners.
  4. Work and learn alongside the stakeholders most proximate to the problems and, therefore, to potential solutions.
  5. Supplement the prevailing “supply side” efforts working to develop and deliver more effective and effectively aligned services and supports with a robust commitment to stimulate and mobilize community stakeholder coalitions to exercise “informed demand.”

 

Pandemic Pivot

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 »

Laying the Groundwork

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.

Community Pacesetter Honors

Each year, CGLR communities are invited to submit stories about their work and progress for consideration for Pacesetter recognition. Communities that are “setting the pace” are selected for Pacesetter Honors based on a peer review and technical review process.

Meet the Team

Ralph Smith

Ralph Smith

Managing Director

Malai Amfahr

Malai Amfahr

Senior Program Officer, Constituency Outreach and Engagement

Joy Thomas Moore

Joy Thomas Moore

Senior Consultant, Media and Communications

Ron Fairchild

Ron Fairchild

Senior Consultant

John Gomperts

John Gomperts

Executive Fellow

Lisa Hoffstein

Lisa Hoffstein

Senior Consultant

Bonnie Howard

Bonnie Howard

Senior Fellow

Margo Lababdeh-Robertson

Margo Lababdeh-Robertson

Senior Associate, Administration and Operations

Siobhan O’Loughlin Reardon

Siobhan O’Loughlin Reardon

Auerbach-Berger Senior Fellow

Miriam Shark

Miriam Shark

Senior Consultant

Sarah Torian

Sarah Torian

Chief Learning Officer