Steubenville: Still Great
A high-poverty district where nearly 100% of students can read proficiently
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Earlier this year I featured Steubenville, Ohio, as perhaps the best district in the country. It gets consistently strong early reading and math results and has been achieving results like these for years.
The data are now out for 2025, and Steubenville’s scores were once again outstanding. The district has three traditional elementary schools and one STEAM Academy that also has a third-grade classroom. Here are their results for each of those schools:
· At Pugliese Elementary West, all 78 of the third-grade students who sat for the state’s English Language Arts exam scored proficient or higher—100%.
· At Wells Academy, all 47 of the third-grade students who sat for the state’s English Language Arts exam scored proficient or higher—100%.
· At McKinley STEAM Academy, all 20 of the third-grade students who sat for the state’s English Language Arts exam scored proficient or higher—100%.
· At East Garfield Elementary, 53 out of the 55 third-grade students who sat for the state’s English Language Arts exam scored proficient or higher—“only” 96%.
Districtwide, that’s 198 out of 200 students who scored proficient on the state’s third-grade reading test (99%). These are outstanding results, and they come from a public school district where 99.8% of students qualify as economically disadvantaged.
In contrast, the Ohio statewide proficiency rate for third-grade reading was 61 percent. The graph below shows Steubenville (in dark blue) versus the state of Ohio (in gray) and other “similar” districts based on the students they serve (in dark green). As you can see, Steubenville far outpaces both the most similar comparisons in Ohio and the overall statewide average in math—and especially in English Language Arts.
So how does Steubenville do it? For the short version, you can read my piece for The 74 earlier this year. For the longer version, I’d suggest Emily Hanford’s award-winning podcast Sold a Story, which featured Steubenville in Episode 11, “The Outlier,” or the Education Trust’s ExtraOrdinary Districts, which featured Steubenville in a three-part series in 2017.
Whatever superlative you want to use, Steubenville is helping its students achieve some remarkable outcomes. It’s quietly showing, year after year, that it’s possible for a district to get nearly all of its students reading proficiently by the end of third grade.