About a dozen school districts have seen progress in reading and math after adopting high-quality curricula, professional learning and other systemwide changes, according to a recent report by the Center for Public Research and Leadership at Columbia University and cited in a K-12 Dive article.
“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,” says Elizabeth Chu, executive director of CPRL.
CPRL used the acronym “REACH,” focusing on five elements of the strategies generally used across these successful districts:
- Resource. Highlighted districts have all adopted and implemented high-quality instructional materials, curricula and other resources at the outset.
- Equip. All have supports to help teachers and others use those materials well, in some cases through the use of a third-party professional learning provider.
- Assess and Adjust. These districts have collected high-quality data about what instruction is working and for which kids, and how to close gaps.
- Cohere. Districts emphasize instructional coherence, ensuring the materials “hang together in ways that are really consistent,” Chu says. “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. Systematizing design routines enables 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,” Chu says.
Four of the 12 districts 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 says.
District 18 in Brooklyn saw a 14% increase in reading proficiency and 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 says.
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 says. “They chose a curriculum available in both English and Spanish, and they’re supporting teachers to use the curriculum effectively.”
“Radical change needed to be done, and done well,” says 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.
K-12 Dive
