Which schools do a good job teaching kids to read?
A 50-state project looking for bright spots
I worked with The 74 on a big new project to find schools that were doing a good job teaching kids to read. You can read the main article here or check out this beautiful interactive map highlighting bright spots across the country.
It starts from a relatively simple premise: Early reading skills are important, and they are also tied to language skills that children may partially acquire at home. That is, kids who come from wealthier homes tend to have an advantage when it comes to reading scores. We went looking for schools that got excellent results despite any disadvantages they faced.
Again, you should read the full article for more. But here I’m going to show you what this looks like in your state or community.
First up, you can sort the scores by state. I’ve pasted the graph for Virginia below. From left to right, the schools get progressively less affluent (poorer). On the vertical axis are 3rd grade reading scores. Each school is one dot, and the red line shows the relationship between poverty and third grade reading across Virginia. As you can see, it is negative, meaning that reading scores tend to decline as poverty rises.
What we were looking for were the schools in the yellow/ gold. We called these “exceptional” schools, and they were the ones beating the odds and performing significantly better than what we might expect based on their poverty rates alone.
You can also take it deeper. By selecting a district, you can see how all of its elementary schools perform. Fairfax County, where I live, is quite wealthy. Because of geographic sorting, it has a lot of pockets of affluence, and those schools tend to have really high reading scores (top left of the graph).
But is this because the schools in Fairfax County are good? Or because the parents are wealthy and providing their kids a lot of opportunities to develop vocabulary and build their knowledge about the world? That’s unclear from the graph, but what is clear is that Fairfax doesn’t necessarily get great results in its higher-poverty schools (on the right side of the graph).
So then I went to the map to see which schools in Virginia do outperform their poverty level. And I found a cluster of yellow “bright spots” in the southwestern part of the state. Notably, Wise County in Virginia is getting remarkably strong results. When I zoomed in on Wise County, I found that all of its schools were outperforming expectations. Even though its schools are high-poverty, they are all in the upper righthand corner of the graph.
For example, Union Primary in Big Stone Gap, VA had a poverty rate of 89%. Based on our calculations, we “expected” it might have a 3rd grade reading proficiency rate of 58%. But it came in much higher than that, at 86%.
Many people reading this article probably haven’t heard of Wise County or knew that its schools were getting such strong results. (I hadn’t, and I live in Virginia!) That’s the ultimate goal of the project, to find and celebrate the places where the schools are helping kids beat the odds.
There’s more to come on this project as we work to unpack what these bright spot schools are doing differently. But in the meantime, I hope you’ll take a moment to find the bright spots in your state.
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Excellent article. Thanks.