Make sure your strategies are grounded in evidence and research-based practices and rooted in local data, local community aspirations and local experts.
Working with your coalition, you’ll need to understand the barriers in your community and look for ways to overcome those barriers. Some of the barriers communities are encountering when it comes to boosting early grade reading include:
- Entering school without the basic development and skills needed to succeed.
- Home environments that are not language rich.
- Lack of awareness and information for families about the importance of vocabulary, literacy and exposure to reading from birth.
- School systems that do not identify or respond effectively to struggling readers.
- Teachers who are not trained to teach reading effectively.
- Reading textbooks that are not based on reading science.
- Chronic student absence or changing schools multiple times during the early grades.
- Access to quality neighborhood-based before- and after-school and summer programs that include research based reading and literacy instruction and other literacy rich activities.
Those barriers may be present in different dosages in your community, but uncovering that is key to developing strategies that can drive lasting change in this area. What does the data say about those barriers in your community? Check out United Way’s suggestions on the kind of educational data you should have for your community.
Don’t just get the data, get the opinions of your local experts too. Experts might be from local or regional universities, think tanks, foundations, etc. Find out what they think about these barriers. Get their views on the research-based strategies experts say work – would they work here? (You can find details on strategies experts say work in early grade reading in United Way’s Education Research Overview) If so, what might drive success? If not, what’s in the way?
For example, United Way Worldwide reached out to the following around early grade reading:
- Attendance Works
- U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Services
- Campaign for Grade Level Reading
- Harvard Family Research Project
- Child Development & Behavior Branch, National Institute of Child Health & Human Development
- Yale University School of Medicine
- Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk, Johns Hopkins University
- University of North Carolina of Chapel Hill’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute
- Annie E. Casey Foundation
As you go deeper into your strategy development, one piece you may want to vet with your local experts might be the high-impact approaches you’ve identified and the most impactful roles you think your United Way can play.
