Ohio is in its early literacy era. Last year, policymakers established a statewide science of reading initiative that champions high-quality instructional materials and professional development for teachers. To support this effort, legislators set aside approximately $169 million. And just last month, Governor DeWine announced that the U.S. Department of Education had awarded Ohio a $60 million grant that will provide further help with implementation.
Advocates and families should feel good about these reforms. But that doesn’t mean policymakers can rest on their laurels. Establishing an initiative is only half the battle. The other half—faithful implementation and making data-driven tweaks as needed—is equally important. For clues about how to do this well, policymakers can look to states that are further along in their efforts. Mississippi and Florida are obvious choices, given their track record of success. But when it comes to data tracking and transparency, there’s another state worthy of attention: Colorado.
Colorado’s early literacy efforts began in 2012, when lawmakers enacted the Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act (READ Act). Much like Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee, which was also established in 2012, the READ Act required schools to administer reading assessments to incoming kindergarteners and develop an individualized plan for students identified with significant reading deficiencies (SRD). Colorado also allocated per-pupil intervention funds to support implementation, with an annual appropriation of approximately $38 million.
In 2019, Colorado leaders updated the READ Act to address several issues they believed were keeping the legislation from having its desired impact. Improving data tracking and transparency were part of those efforts. In fact, the state has a robust dashboard dedicated to READ Act data. Let’s take a closer look at two of its features.
READ Data Dashboard
As part of the READ Act, districts are required to report specific data to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) to determine the number of students identified with SRD and their progress. These data have been assembled into a detailed dashboard organized under three tabs.
- The state-level data tab identifies the number of students designated as having SRD over the last five years.[1] It identifies the statewide SRD rate as a percentage and disaggregates SRD identification rates by race and ethnicity, gender, grade level, and other demographics, including students with an IEP, students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and two categories of English learners.
- The district-level data tab allows stakeholders to access SRD data for specific districts during the five most recent academic years and filter results by the aforementioned student groups.
- The financial data tab tracks per-pupil intervention funding provided by the READ Act. It enables stakeholders to determine how much each district received during the last five years and includes an indicator of year-to-year percentage changes.
Literacy Curriculum Transparency Dashboard
Under the READ Act, schools must use evidence-based core, supplemental, and intervention reading instructional programs.[2] The Literacy Curriculum Transparency Act took this provision a step further by requiring districts to submit to CDE which core, supplemental, and intervention programs are used in each of their schools. The state must post this information on its website and does so via the Literacy Curriculum Transparency Dashboard. This dashboard is organized into three tabs, with each tab focused on either core, supplemental, or intervention programming. Under each one, stakeholders can access data on the programming used at the state, district, and school level, and can filter by academic year and grade level. For example, in Denver during the 2023–24 school year, the district’s most used core literacy program was Amplify CKLA. It was used in roughly 70 percent of schools in each grade, K–3.
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Like Colorado, Ohio has invested significant time, effort, and funding into improving early literacy outcomes. But right now, Ohio doesn’t have a dedicated mechanism for tracking improvement and implementation. The early literacy component on state report cards is certainly helpful in keeping tabs on student outcomes. But Ohio can and should do more to transparently track its early literacy efforts. Colorado’s detailed and publicly-available data dashboards offer a promising model for doing so.
[1] There are no data presented for the 2019–20 school year due to the pandemic.
[2] CDE was tasked with identifying evidence-based instructional programs that districts can use READ Act funds to purchase, but districts are not required to select programming from the CDE advisory list. They are permitted to use other funding streams to purchase scientifically-based reading programs that aren’t included on the state list.
