Reading scores in Washington’s schools tell the same story year after year: Black students and children from poor families struggle to read at grade level compared to their peers.
Education officials may have found a way to change that — and have already expanded their efforts to more schools.
Students who participated in a federally funded literacy grant program improved 54 percent more on English language arts assessments than peers at schools that did not receive the funding in recent years, according to a new report from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. The results, drawn from D.C.’s statewide assessments over four school years, showed gains across every grade level and were most dramatic among the students who have had some of the toughest times reading on grade level.
More than 17,000 children from public charter schools and pre-K centers participated between 2021 and 2025 in a $16 million grant program funded by the U.S. Department of Education. Nine in 10 were Black and nearly as many were economically disadvantaged. By the final year of the grant, those students had not just narrowed the gap with their peers. In some cases, they had closed it entirely.
Techniques to boost literacy varied by school and grade level but included providing high-impact tutoring, having coaches give teachers feedback on their performance and buying books and equipment.
Black students in grant-funded schools moved from scoring 2.9 points below peers at other campuses to 2.8 percentage points above them, according to the state superintendent’s office. Economically disadvantaged students outpaced similar peers by 5.1 scale score points, also closing roughly a third of the gap.
“The students that participated in this grant closed a third of the achievement gap in D.C.,” said State Superintendent of Education Antoinette Mitchell. “That is huge. It is so significant.”
Timothy Shanahan, professor of literacy and reading instruction at the University of Illinois Chicago, said the city’s gains are encouraging but difficult to attribute definitively to the grant program. The state superintendent’s report is not a peer-reviewed study, he noted, and it compares participating schools to nonparticipating ones without the controls academic researchers would use to rule out other explanations like absenteeism.
“It’s certainly possible that that program was having that effect,” he said. “It’s also fair to be skeptical.”
The U.S. Department of Education had commissioned a national evaluation of the grant program, conducted by the American Institutes for Research across 114 elementary schools in 11 states, involving more than 23,000 students and nearly 900 reading teachers, Shanahan said. Conducted by trained scientific researchers, the study would have provided far stronger evidence about whether the program worked and why, as well as how improvements could be made, he said.
But in February 2025, as part of a broad wave of contract terminations under the Department of Government Efficiency, the federal government canceled the evaluation before the report could be published. Researchers were told the study had been “terminated for convenience,” Shanahan said.
“The report was actually drafted,” Shanahan said. “This would have cost almost nothing to put this really useful data out.”
In D.C., the gains were sharpest among the youngest students, those at early childhood centers and elementary schools, according to the state superintendent’s office. The share of fifth-graders in participating schools who scored proficient in English language arts assessments more than doubled over four years, rising from 14 percent to more than 30 percent compared to 3.5 points for the District as a whole. Eighth-grade proficiency climbed 8.8 percentage points while high school proficiency rose 9 points.
Among 4-year-olds, the share demonstrating significant growth in oral language skills increased by more than 11 percentage points.
Mitchell said the results reflect what happens when several things work together rather than in isolation. Grant recipients were required to develop comprehensive literacy plans — blueprints that aligned curriculum, instruction and assessment under a single framework grounded in what researchers call the science of reading, an approach that encompasses phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.
From that foundation, schools invested in high-quality instructional materials and, critically, in their teachers.
“Teachers have to have a very clear understanding of the science of reading — that is, how kids learn to read,” Mitchell said. “They have to understand the connections that students are making as they move through” the stages of literacy development.
The grant paid for coaches who worked alongside teachers in real time, offering what Mitchell described as “just-in-time support.” Unlike traditional observations, which teachers often view as critical, the coaching model was explicitly collaborative. Coaches were partners, experts who could “hold up a mirror,” as Mitchell put it, to help a teacher see their own technique and work with them to refine it.
Schools also built regular data meetings into their schedules, gathering teachers, aides and administrators as often as each week to examine student assessment results, identify gaps and adjust instruction accordingly.
“Assessment is a window into a student’s mind,” Mitchell said. “Being able to assess students in a way that will give educators insight into where the gaps are — when a kid is ready to move forward — and having regular meetings around that data, so that the teacher knows what that kid needs to progress, is really critical.”
Following what is widely called the Mississippi Miracle, a dramatic improvement in that state’s reading scores after it overhauled literacy instruction in the early 2010s, school systems across the country have moved to adopt “the science of reading.” Mitchell said D.C.’s results suggest the approach is working here, too.
D.C. education officials want to build on that success. In October 2024, the Education Department awarded the District another five-year grant, this time for $50 million, more than three times the size of the first one. Officials expect to reach more than 25,000 students this school year under the new grant, which for the first time includes D.C. Public Schools campuses.
Mitchell said educators will carry forward lessons from the first grant, including a sharper focus on keeping professional development ongoing and embedded in daily school life rather than delivered in one-time sessions.
They also plan to hold on to something that doesn’t show up in the data, Mitchell said — but that emerged anyway as students got better at reading and writing: joy.
“When students are enjoying themselves,” Mitchell said, “the learning happens much quicker.”
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