The Imperative to Combine Tutoring with 'Science of Reading

As the political conversation heats up around the impact of tutoring at-scale and the actual results from all that one-time emergency money school districts received in the wake of COVID, Jessica Silwerski, cofounder of Ignite Reading joined me to discuss the organization’s approach to literacy tutoring. We talked about the science of reading, the keys to Ignite’s success, and how districts are budgeting for tutoring as those one-time elementary and secondary emergency relief (ESSER) funds dry up.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose and to help us think through that today and how we get there, how we get to that promise for all individuals. I'm really delighted that we have Jess Reid Sliwerski. She is the co founder and CEO, most recently of the the literacy tutoring company Ignite Reading, which we're going to hear a lot about today. But Jess, welcome. You have a fascinating education background in general, so we're going to get into all that and more. Thank you so much for being here.

Jessica Sliwersk:

Oh, my gosh, Michael, thank you so much for having me. I feel like I am living the dream right now, getting to do a podcast with you and talk about my favorite thing ever, which is teaching kids to read.

Jessica’s journey to the work 

Michael Horn:

Which is incredibly important. And that's why we're both excited for this conversation as a result. So let's dig in. But where I want to dig in is both the founding story behind Ignite Reading, because it came about at a really important time, the country's history, the world's history, the school's history at a challenging moment, but also your own background into that story, because, as I said up front, like, you've had some really neat roles in the world of education. Lots of different organizations, seen lots of different stripes of all of this. And so I'd love you to blend those two together, if it's possible.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Yeah, definitely. I am going to go back in time about 20 years, when I first started my career in education as a classroom teacher. And then I'm going to tell you all of these really interesting steps I had along the way that I believe in retrospect, positioned me to be doing exactly what I'm doing in building and leading Ignite Reading. So 20 years ago, I joined Teach for America on a complete whim and was placed into a fifth grade classroom in the Bronx in New York City after a six week crash course. And it became very apparent to me within my first week of teaching that many of my students still did not know how to read. And over the course of the next two years, I tried everything I could to figure out how to teach them to read. And, you know, 20 years ago, we were just starting to use Gmail. There wasn't a bunch of resources that you could google around science of reading in order to figure this out. And so I was asking everyone, you know, how do I teach my kids to read, and nobody knew how to help me. And so it wasn't until my third year of teaching, when I was a founding first grade teacher at a school in Harlem, that I finally learned how to teach my kids to read. Because it just so happened that that school was using an evidence based foundational skills curriculum. And I vividly remember, Michael, that feeling of going from working with kids who were just learning the Alphabet to then watching them learn to read words and sentences and paragraphs of text. And it was so deeply, emotionally gratifying. And I was also angry as hell that I had gone my first two years of teaching not knowing how to do this. Because what was so obvious to me, even as a baby teacher myself, was that, yes, learning to read is a science. And what I was able to very easily understand was that it was not rocket science.Because here I was in my early twenties, and I was learning to do it, and it was working, and all of my kids were learning to read in first grade on time. And so that was when there was this fire that was lit in me, and I became absolutely obsessed with wanting to help as many kids as possible learn how to read. And so fast forward. Over the course of my career, I've had a really unique mix of roles in education. I became a school leader. I was a K-12 instructor instructional coach with a focus on foundational reading and, you know, the other strands of what lead to highly skilled reading for kids. I was coaching principals across New York City in best practices and literacy instruction. I was a literacy specialist for a network of 22 schools in New York City. And then I accidentally co-founded my first edtech company with a literacy app that I designed with the goal of helping teachers and helping school leaders. And then it was like, oops, I think this is a product, and we now need to build an ed tech company in order to scale this. And that was when I then had my first taste of national impact, which for me, the work has always been about trying to help as many kids as possible. So that was exhilarating. And when I got my first taste of working at a national level, I just wanted more. And I went on to lead a nonprofit called Open Up Resources that publishes high quality instructional materials. And this is where it gets even more interesting, because while I was running Open Up Resources, my daughter started Pre-K in Oakland Unified school District. And of course, being an educator, I was like, oh, I can't wait to volunteer in her classroom. And being a CEO, I had the flexibility with my schedule to make that happen. And I quickly saw that kids in her class, as well as the grades above, were not being taught to read with an evidence based curriculum. So at this point, it had been about 15 years since I had been in the classroom, and I'm just having this moment of like, are you kidding me? This is still happening, even though we know better. And so I started teaching kids to read using a structured literacy approach, and then was very quickly kicked out of volunteering because I was being a troublemaker. This was in a school that was using the Lucy Culkin's curriculum. They were using guided reading. I was told, if you want to be a volunteer here, you must do guided reading.And my response was, you want me to do something that has proven to be ineffective and harmful to kids rather than giving them what the reading research shows their brains need in order to learn to read? And they said, yes. And they said, I'm not going to do that. And they said, then you can't volunteer here.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Jessica Sliwerski:

And I am stubborn. And I also, when it comes to kids, I fight really, really hard because I think about the fact that I am so lucky to have the education that I have, and it's not right that any kids in our country shouldn't be getting the best possible education. And connected to my story is that I'm also a cancer survivor. And as obsessed as I was with teaching kids to read prior to my cancer diagnosis, having gone through the experience of cancer right after my daughter was born, surgeries, chemotherapy, I learned how strong I am, and I have a deeper appreciation for just how short and precious this life is. And I want to live every day with purpose. And so there's this passion that I already have that is now on completely steroids because of this crucible that I've experienced in my life. So I get kicked out of volunteering, and I'm just like, oh, hell, no. No. And I go to the office that places volunteers, and I say, hey, is there a school I can work in where they will embrace the fact that I know how to teach kids to read? And they said, oh, yes, definitely. And they dropped me in the lowest performing school in all of Oakland. It's in East Oakland, and at the time, had 2% literacy proficiency. So their mentality, I think, was like, okay, troublemaker, go here and see what you can do.

Michael Horn:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Meanwhile, Michael, I'm like, challenge accepted.

Michael Horn:

Accepted. Let's do this. Roll up our sleeves.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Let's do this. Bring it on. So I show up in this classroom with this first grade teacher who's in her second year of teaching and is completely frazzled because the only thing she's been given is Lucy Culkin's units of study, and she can obviously see it's not working. Her kids aren't learning to read. And yet, like me, when I was a new teacher, had no other resources, had no other support, and nobody else helping her figure out how to teach kids to read. So in I walk and I'm like, hey, I'm Jess. I'm here to help teach your kids to read. And she's just like, great.

Jessica Sliwerski:

I will take anyone with a pulse. And she's kind of thinking, I'm going to do what like a lot of folks do, which is just sit with her kids and read books, right? I start teaching them.

Michael Horn:

But you don't.

Jessica Sliwerski:

I don't. I start teaching them, and very quickly they start learning to read. And then she's like, what are you doing? I need to learn how to do this. So I teach her, and then the two of us every afternoon are pulling small groups and we're doing differentiated instruction. And her babies were learning to read, and they were learning to read fast, and they were on a trajectory, for perhaps the first time in the history of that school to end the school year reading on grade level.

Michael Horn:

Wow.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Which, when you learn to read on time, which is ideally before the start of second grade, it fundamentally changes everything else about your school and arguably your life trajectory and the opportunities that are available to you. And I was, like, watching all of this happen, it was incredibly, incredibly exhilarating. And then, boom, it came to a screeching halt because of the pandemic. We packed the kids up for what we thought was going to be an extended spring break, and they never came back that school year. And I couldn't stop thinking about them. And my personality is kind of obsessive. And I'm watching, in the meantime, my own child transition to Zoom school. And I'm thinking to myself, this is a disaster, but there's something really interesting about this. And then meanwhile, the teacher I'd been mentoring was like, hey, we're gearing up to go back to school in the fall and be fully virtual. What do I do? And I said, you're going to do exactly what we were doing, but we're going to adapt it to be virtual. And I'm pretty sure your kids are still going to learn to read. And she trusted me and she tried it. And sure enough, within the first month of instruction, we had a crop of data showing, from baseline to progress, monitoring. Her kids were growing as readers.

Michael Horn:

Goosebumps listening to this.

Jessica Sliwerski:

During a pandemic via Zoom in a school where she had little to no support, high population of multilingual learners, high poverty students with IEPs. Every single odds stacked against her and her kids, and they were doing it. And as I looked at this data and I looked at what we were doing together, I was like, there is a model here. What would it mean to create a core of highly trained reading instructors who meet virtually with kids during the school day and teach them to read? What could that mean for those kids? What could that mean for the teachers in those classrooms? Because I know firsthand how hard it is to differentiate and give every child what they need. And what could it mean for catalyzing the system to really, truly embrace the science of reading and all of the nuances that are connected to that. So this was like the genesis of Ignite Reading. And there's actually a documentary film called the Right to read. Have you seen that film or heard about it?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, sure.

Jessica Sliwerski:

So, fun fact that teacher, Sabrina Causey, is the teacher

Michael Horn:

Oh, wow.

Jessica Sliwerski:

And I am Jess, who she mentions in the film, who taught her to teach her kids to read.

Michael Horn:

Oh, that's wild.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Okay, so, fun fact, a little bit of behind the scenes tea. Is that the Right to Read film? And the story of Sabrina Causey is also the origin story of Ignite Reading.

The Ignite Reading model 

Michael Horn:

Very, very cool. Very cool. And so there's a couple angles of this that are so important this time, right? Because coming out of the pandemic, or as the pandemic hit, the emphasis on tutoring became a big deal to differentiate instruction, to be able to get kids the right thing that they needed to unlock progress. Obviously, the focus on literacy, science of reading, became a huge conversation across the country, and frankly, how we were ignoring the best evidence in hundreds, thousands of classrooms across the country. And Ignite Reading model really takes both of these things and pulls it together in a model. So tell us how it actually works today.

Jessica Sliwerski:

So, at the highest level, the way that our program works is that we partner with schools and districts to provide live, one to one virtual tutoring that helps kids who need extra support learn to read. Our tutors are working with students specifically to master foundational reading skills, not because decoding is the game, but because it is the ticket to the game. And when you can decode to the point that it is automatic, you don't have to look at the word and sound it out. You can just look at it and nothing be able to help but read it, then your working memory and your brain power is freed up to do the rich work of comprehension. So when you see high stakes testing scores starting in third grade that are indicating a lot of kids are below proficient, typically what's underpinning that is disfluency. And disfluency is caused by kids having gaps in their decoding skills. And so our tutors are working with students one on one every day, virtually for 15 minutes a day. And it's during the school day until such time as the kids become fluent automatic readers. But the thing about our model is that we honor what we know is best practice when it comes to teaching and learning, specifically in the realm of literacy, but that it is so difficult for schools to do on their own because the system is simply not designed to enable them to make the main thing the main thing. And in the design of Ignite Reading, there are five important things that make our model distinct. So the first thing is that our tutors are highly trained and accountable. They are completing over 100 hours of paid professional learning and practicum experience before they're certified to tutor up to 30 hours a week. And then even after they're certified, we are maniacal about ongoing performance management in order to ensure they're implementing with fidelity. The second thing that we do is that we differentiate instruction so that every child's precise needs are being methadone. Kids don't have time to waste. And the reality of classrooms is that there's a vast spectrum of where kids are on the continuum of learning to read. So precision matters. Third, the nature of one on one enables the necessary at bats or repetition that kids need to solidify the code. And while we're all running around talking about science of reading, what a lot of people don't know, but is also core to the science, is that the research shows that at least 60% of kids must have not only direct instruction, but also ample at bats and repetition to create that automaticity. So the one on one provides that additional practice for kids. And the fourth thing is that this human element is so crucial. The relationships that tutors are building with students fosters the motivation to persist. Learning to read is hard for little kids. Humans don't like to do hard things. Look at the number of adults that you probably know who have to hire a personal trainer because otherwise they won't.

Michael Horn:

Work out, they won't do it right.

Jessica Sliwerski:

So our tutors are like personal trainers for little kids, adorable brains, but they're building these caring relationships that then enable kids to be more motivated. They're not going to opt out and try and avoid it because they care about pleasing this human that they are so excited to see every day. And then they're learning these competencies which create more motivation to persist. And it's this really virtuous cycle when it comes to learning. And the fifth thing that we do that is especially unique, and I am really, really proud that this is part of our model, is that we are focused on also building capacity with our partners by giving them a designated Ignite Reading literacy specialist who meets with them at the beginning of the program to unpack baseline diagnostics and every month thereafter to talk about progress and to connect the dots instructionally back to the literacy ecosystem and what teachers can do to piggyback off of our intervention. So these are all like really intentional moves. It is above and beyond what you typically see in this space from an edtech company. And I believe that's because the person at the helm, me, is someone who comes into this with the lived experience of an educator and understands all of the pieces that have to be at play to make this sticky so that we can work together to ensure every one of our babies learns to read well.

AIR study on Ignite Reading outcomes 

Michael Horn:

And it's paying off. If I understand, like you have some research a couple years now, I think, worth of research, why don't you share those results about what you've learned, about what it actually is happening in the field, and how you just set up those research studies?

Jessica Sliwerski:

We are actively building our evidence base. And this is really important because, as I've already said, and you've certainly picked up on, I want to prove a point and I want to prove what's possible for kids. And I want to prove that the issue with the literacy crisis in our country is not because kids can't, it's because there hasn't been equitable access to all kids getting what they need.

Michael Horn:

The adults haven't. Right? It's not. They can't.

Jessica Sliwerski:

That's right. And so we have a study that was published last school year, school year 22, 23 by AIR, and it showed that kindergarteners through third graders who participated in a 14 week pilot experienced 20 weeks of learning. And that meant that on DIBELS, they went from 11% on benchmark to 45% on benchmark. And that was after merely a 14 week pilot. Fast forward to this past school year. We have a forthcoming quasi experimental study from Johns Hopkins University that looked at first graders across 13 school districts that we were working with in Massachusetts, and the outcomes are phenomenal. But I can't yet share them, which, of course, is killing me, Michael.

Michael Horn:

Killing you right now, we'll have to.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Do a part two to this.

Michael Horn:

You'll come back. You'll come back.

Jessica Sliwerski:

But anecdotally, what I can tell you about our DIBELS data, because we validate the growth our kids are making with a third party assessment, is that we saw, with first graders in particular, who we were working with, which is the best return on investment. You can close the kindergarten gaps, you can tackle the first grade content. You can graduate them ready to start second grade building knowledge. That being said, heartbreakingly, we work with kids through high school. But in one of our analyses, what we saw for first graders in particular was that our students went from 17% on benchmark in DIBELS at the beginning of the school year to 51% by the end of the year. So that's three X growth right there. And, you know, the. The recovering perfectionist in me and the advocate for kids, advocate for kids looks at this, and it's like, this isn't good enough.

Jessica Sliwerski:

This isn't enough, and how do we get even better than this? So there is a level of continuous improvement we're constantly thinking about. But at the same time, what we have to recognize, the kids we're serving are the kids who historically come into first grade, or whatever grade they're in, already having gaps. And rather than those gaps being addressed and then the kids being accelerated forward, the gaps just widen. So when we're working with older kids, we see many of them still don't even know the alphabet or how to read simple words like sit or mug. So it's pretty significant that we saw three X growth. And then what was even more exciting about that was that the kids who had the most significant gaps when they started with us, for example, not knowing the alphabet, those kids had five X growth in our program over the school year. And this is where we see a lot of tropes in our country around why kids aren't learning to read. And you'll hear things like, oh, well, it's multilingual learners, or they have IEPs. The reality, Michael, is that it comes down to access and kids getting what they need when they need it, when they need it, then honoring the research around how the brain learns to read. And it sounds so simple to do those things. But we know that K-12 education is a very complex system, and that's where the design of any kind of product or service has to be so deeply intentional. And all of this data that we're seeing in our forthcoming study as well gives me so much hope. It tells me that we really are living in an era where if we all put our minds to it, and if we work together, we could actually have a world where every single child learns to read on time, which is ideally before the end of first grade.

Tutoring post-ESSER

Michael Horn:

So let's take this, because you've said several obviously interesting things, but the one I want to pick up on at the moment is we're different from your average edtech company, and I think that's a good thing on a few dimensions, as I'm hearing it from you, I've argued edtech companies can't just simply throw their product over the wall and hope it gets implemented. And they have to be really intentional about thinking about the whole model and the coherence across all the tools being used, which is effectively what you're doing as you build capacity with your partners and really leaning in not just to make sure it gets used, what you're offering gets used efficaciously, but that it coheres with the rest of the activities going on in the building. I would love to hear you reflect on two things out of that one curiosity, like what are the resources for a school district to be able to afford that sort of services? And then the flip side is, we know a lot of the federal aid out of COVID is going away. There's a lot of talk about the tutoring services that have been offered that have in many cases not been implemented efficaciously. They've missed on some key things that you just described, but either way, those might be going away. How do you maintain and grow this service that you're offering? As maybe resources are being stripped away with what I imagine has some resources that are required to be able to provide it.

Jessica Sliwerski:

Really great question. And this is something that when I look across the landscape of Ed tech and particularly high dosage tutoring, you see a lot of companies that are struggling in this moment with ESSER funding evaporating. And we are not in that category. And the reason that we can maintain our program in light of what other companies are experiencing as like catastrophic funding shifts is because we get results. And the results that we are getting are results that schools and districts cannot get by themselves. Even in the most perfect literacy ecosystem, where you have adopted all of the right programs, all of the right assessment tools, you've done letters, training with your teachers, right? You are checking all of those boxes. And the reality is, for a host of reasons, kids will still fall through the cracks. And so Ignite Reading becomes that foundational skills safety net, working in partnership with all of the other strategic intentionality that's at play within the ecosystem. And oftentimes our partners say we are the missing ingredient that pulls it all together. And because of that, and because we are so transparent with our partners about our outcomes, we are self reporting every single month via the Ignite Reading literacy specialist. And they are seeing that this is a phenomenal return on investment for their kids, especially when it is a just in time intervention in first grade versus a reactive RTI situation for older kids when they can see this. And it also aligns with their own intentionality around really, truly making sure all kids have the right to learn to read. They find the money in their budget. So what we're seeing is that many of our partners, in light of the ESSER cliff, are now going into their budgets and they are operationalizing us with more sustainable funding streams. Be that title funding idea, it could look like school improvement funds. Right? The beauty of our model is that there are so many different funding streams that can be strategically braided together, and we work with partners to figure out how to access those funds creatively and to think about, well, what are the other things you're spending money on? And are they working because there's some historic vestiges of edtech products that they've been purchasing that they might be reluctant to get rid of? I see this a lot in education.

Jessica Sliwerski:

We like to hoard.

Michael Horn:

We don't like to prune very much in education.

Jessica Sliwerski:

No, no, not at all. It's like, I remember when I was a classroom teacher and I first walked into my classroom and opened the closet and there were like floor to ceiling materials from the last 50 to 100 years. We don't like to get rid of things, even when they don't work, even when they're not good for kids. But I think what we're helping to create is a new vision for everyone that we're working with and for the market as a whole of what's possible for kids and how best to allocate precious public dollars and budgets to do what I would say is the most important thing we can possibly do in education, which is make sure our kids learn how to read.

Michael Horn:

Love it. Jess. Final word, final thoughts. Where can people stay tuned for that study when it comes out and find out more. Take us home.

Where to learn more

Jessica Sliwerski:

So our website, ignite-reading.com, is the best place to get lots of information and insights around everything that we are uploading to and if anyone is interested in learning more or wants to be part of this incredible movement, they can also contact us via the website. I anticipate that once the study is released that there will be lots of people talking about it. And I cannot wait.

Michael Horn:

Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm glad it's in Massachusetts where I live. I'm glad to hear that as well.

Jessica Sliwerski:

I planned that for you, Michael.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, yeah. Just exactly right. That was the reason.

Jessica Sliwerski:

And like every holiday that you celebrate all combined into one, it'll be the best gift, best gift, best package.