When students returned to classrooms after the COVID-19 pandemic, DREAM Charter School’s educators focused first on re-establishing classroom culture and routines. Their student data, however, revealed a stark reality: too many DREAM Scholars were not reading on grade level. And results varied significantly across the network’s two elementary schools.

Seeing an opportunity to codify and improve their approach to reading as their network began to grow, DREAM partnered with Lit for a Lit Quality Review to assess where their current approach was—and was not—aligned with evidence-based practice. The result? A data-driven roadmap for transformation across their schools and a blueprint for high-quality reading instruction that supports all students.

Today, DREAM Scholars regularly outperform their peers in NYC public schools, scoring 12 percentage points higher in ELA in grades 3–8 on state assessments. This fall, they celebrated their second consecutive year of record-breaking proficiency rates as a network.

Click this link to download and read the full case study.