Every month, America Forward is highlighting a few examples of the vital work being done by our Coalition members to support students, families, educators, workers, elected leaders, advocates, and communities across the country. If your organization has resources, an announcement, or a story that you would like to see included, please send it to firstname.lastname@example.org.
To make sure the families they serve have the resources necessary to support their children as they continue to build and develop key reading skills, Reading Partners offers resources for families. These include a resource library, featuring reading worksheets and literacy engagement resources and tips, as well as a resource inventory, which houses links to online storytelling options, literacy skill-building resources for caregivers, technology support, and more.
During recent panel discussions, New Classrooms’ co-founder Chris Rush has brought his expertise to critical conversations about how to best improve systems-wide education innovation. While serving as the Senior Advisor For Innovation and Improvement at the US Department Of Education, Chris hosted “Activating the People Side of Innovation,” focused on the “people side of innovation.” At this year’s NewSchools Venture Fund Summit, Chris also joined NewSchools Venture Fund President Frances Messano and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for a keynote session, “No Going Back to Normal: A Peek Into the Future of Education,” focused on “how resilient schools and their communities are and how a reimagination of public education will provide the tools and solutions for this tough time.”
Children’s Literacy Initiative
Children’s Literacy Initiative is committed to supporting high-need populations and breaking down structural inequities by fostering the development of essential literacy skills. In service of this work, they offer a “go at your own pace” website called LEARN, “that provides educators with a comprehensive, expanding, and research-based resource to read about, watch, and discuss the best practices for comprehensive early literacy instruction,” including videos, instructional resources, lesson plans, templates, and more.
Education Leaders of Color (EdLoC)
While young people have been forced to confront food insecurity since long before the onset of COVID-19, the pandemic has only further exacerbated entrenched disparities—particularly for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities—in access to the nutrition every person needs to thrive. To support schools as they work to provide students with the resources they need, and bring leaders across sectors together to improve food access, Education Leaders of Color (EdLoC) has partnered with No Kid Hungry to “award one-time grants ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 to activate these partnerships” and “advance community-driven food security strategies and culturally-adapted interventions that aim to increase access to and/or availability of safe, nutritious, and acceptable food.”
Saga Education works to support middle and high school students by providing the curriculum and resources necessary for robust math skills development. Their free math tutoring curriculum, when coupled with individualized tutoring, has been shown to “allow students to learn 2.5 years worth of math in one academic year, reducing math failures by as much as 63%, and reducing non-tutored subject failures by as much as 26%,” as well as close the opportunity gap, “the observed and persistent disparity in educational performance by socioeconomic status,” by nearly 50%.
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