Nearly all students in Steubenville, Ohio come from "disadvantaged" families, according to the state. And nearly all elementary students are "proficient" readers on state tests. In The Outlier, APM Reports writers Kate Martin, Carmela Guaglianone and Emily Hanford explain how the "elementary schools in this economically depressed area are producing better readers than some of the wealthiest places in the country."
"Every year since 2008, between 93% and 100% of the district’s third graders have scored proficient," they write. Nationwide, nearly 40 percent of fourth-graders score "below basic" on federal tests.
Steubenville subsidizes pre-K to give children an early start, and works hard to persuade students to attend school every day, they note.
But I think the key is the district's embrace of  Success for All, a structured, scripted, phonics-based program developed at Johns Hopkins in the 1980s. Steubenville chose the program in 2000, and has stuck with it.
All students get 90 minutes of reading instruction for the first period of the day. All teachers and sometimes administrators lead a group, so the size can be small. Students are grouped by reading level, not age, so teachers aren't asked to "differentiate instruction." Those who are below grade level receive tutoring to move up.
As APM reporters write, there's lots of evidence Success for All works, yet "relatively few schools use it."
Emily Hanford talked to Rick Hess about Sold a Story, her podcasts that changed the debate about reading instruction. Hanford started by asking "why so many students end up in remedial classes in college." That led her to dyslexia, and then to how people learn to read. "There are decades of research — with real kids in real classrooms — that show, with good instruction, kids with these disadvantages can learn to read well," Hanford says.
I think there's a tendency to write off children from working-class and low-income families, or immigrant families or single-parent families or non-white/non-Asian families. That adds up to a lot of kids.
Karin Chenoweth first visited Steubenville in 2008, wrote about the district's extraordinary success in 2016 and included it in her 2021 book, Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement.
Chad Aldeman's research on school districts that are outperforming expectations also spotlights Steubenville, as I blogged last year in Poor kids can learn to read too.
I reported on Success for All in several San Jose schools when it was fairly new. A principal at a very high-poverty, high-minority school told me they had a first-grade-level group for fourth- and fifth-graders who'd been passed along unable to read.
"A mother asked why her fifth-grade son had gotten A's if he couldn't read," he told me.
"That sounds like a good question," I said.
He sighed. "He was well-behaved. He made an effort. Teachers liked him. But he couldn't read. Now he can."
In The Southern Surge, Karen Vaites notes that the four states showing the greatest progress in reading are Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. All spend less on education than the national average and have way more students from low-income families. She describes how high-quality, knowledge-based curriculum and teacher training is making a difference.