Last week in Denver: The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading

The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (GLR) returned to its home-base in Denver last week. Established in June 2012, the GLR campaign was founded with the coveted title of All-America City, with 124 communities signing on as Charter Members of the GLR Community Network. Last week, June 13-14, the 2017 Funders Huddle gathered local, state, and national funders in support of early literacy. For the remainder of that week, hundreds of civic and community leaders, public officials, and educators from across the states came together to celebrate the 2017 All-America City Awards – the oldest and most prestigious community recognition in America.

In 2012, GLR encouraged Colorado to initiate its own READ Act and work toward achieving the goal of having 90% of students ready at or above grade level by third grade. The concept to achieve this goal was simple: identify students entering kindergarten behind and get those kids back on track before third grade by expending $33 million a year on professional development and literacy coaches. After having this program in Colorado for the past four years, the results have been painfully insignificant. As such, GLR has revised its strategy to achieve a larger impact across the state, with the ultimate goal of increasing literacy among young learners. The campaign’s newly devised plan is threefold:

1- Teach parents how to teach their infants to be school-ready
2- Support parents in overcoming obstacles that contribute to chronic absenteeism
3- Encourage learning to occur during summer months, a time when students may regress

Today, we still do not know of any single program that, on its own, is sufficiently powerful to close the reading proficiency gap by even one standard deviation, let alone two, at a population level — even over time, and even if fully scaled up.

Ralph Smith, Managing Director of the campaign