At KIPP Lanning Square Primary School, one of Camden City’s renaissance schools (hybrid district-charter), 25 first-graders who have struggled to learn to read are making surprising progress through a science of reading-based online tutoring program 

The program — now in use at all KIPP NJ schools — is Ignite Reading. During a daily fifteen-minute block students log onto their laptops and have an intensive one-on-one lesson with a highly-trained tutor, the same one every day, who differentiates instruction depending on the student’s needs. The results? After 24 hours of instruction, 90% of students at Lanning Square who began the program with beginning-of-kindergarten reading skills — such basics as letter recognition and understanding that you read from left to right— are now first-grade level readers. This comes out to 1.9 weeks of reading progress for every one week of tutoring instruction, or double the rate of a typical classroom. (A new study comparing in-person vs. remote tutoring finds “no statistically significant differences in students’ literacy outcomes by instructional modality.”)

Yes, it’s the five-days-a-week schedule, the tutors’ knowledge of the science of reading ( phonemic awareness, phonics , fluency, vocabulary skills, reading comprehension, core knowledge), and the way Ignite quickly delivers data back to teachers.  But KIPP Lanning Square Assistant Principal Megan Pauley told NJ Education Report that a big factor of the success of her students, 90% of whom are economically-disadvantaged, is their investment in their progress.

“These are students,” she explains, “who have struggled for a long time and are disengaged from learning. But with the relationships they develop with the tutors, they stop feeling like they’re behind and instead they feel successful. We see this change in their approach to reading and in their demeanor.”

She continues, “with 30 kids in a class, teachers can’t sit one-on-one with students every day. The 1:1 interaction students get through Ignite is something we simply can’t replicate at scale, and it’s making a real difference. What we see is so powerful, with the tutors taking time to build relationships with the kids before diving into content.  That connection really shows.”

KIPP relies on Ignite’s monthly formative assessments (and the three-times-a-year benchmark assessments)  to drill down on learning gaps. Also, every three weeks teachers in the lower grades administer DIBELs tests (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), which measure not just phonological awareness, decoding, and word recognition but fluency. These are one-minute child-friendly tests that give educators information on students’ literacy and reading skills acquisition. 

Of course, teachers need to know how to use the data, often an obstacle given the lack of proper literacy instruction in New Jersey’s teacher training programs. KIPP Lanning Square makes this work through intensive professional development led by Pauley. In addition, all teachers in the early grades take a course through  LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), a professional development program that provides them with a deep understanding of the science of reading. 

 Then when they get the data back from Ignite or their DIBELS assessments, explains Pauley, “I sit with each teacher to crosscheck it with our own observations and then use the data — this student is missing blends, this one is struggling with multisyllabic decoding—to inform instruction and how to break them into small groups. This is in real time — we know what they need. ”

First grade Lanning Square teacher Tasha Terry says,  “I’ve seen these students go from just learning letters and sounds to recognizing and writing sight words, and they’re now able to transfer those skills into their independent work in class. They love their tutors, and even the kids who aren’t in it wish they were. I’ve seen real growth in their confidence, like one student, Jackson, who used to struggle with reading and now holds up his board proudly, showing the words he knows. It’s made a big difference, especially for students who need more access to reading support than I can always provide on my own.”