In our “Spotlight On” interview series, we sit down with nonprofit leaders from across the education sector to dive deeper into how their organizations have unlocked innovation, built evidence, and achieved growth. Our latest Spotlight On Growth features Pete Lavorini, Manager of the Innovative Schools portfolio, in conversation with Michelle Brown, founder and CEO of the nonprofit CommonLit, dedicated to ensuring that all students, especially students in Title I schools, graduate with the reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in college and beyond.
Founded in 2014, CommonLit offers teachers and families free access to thousands of high-quality reading passages and lessons for students in grades three through 12, with a full-year ELA curriculum, CommonLit 360, in addition to benchmark assessments, standards-aligned data, and expert-led teacher development.
“What we’ve attempted to provide is a core curriculum program that takes a lot of the planning and burden of creating instructional materials off of the shoulders of individual teachers in the classroom, with fully planned out modules and a year-long scope of everything that a teacher needs every day to use best practices,” said Michelle. “Our curriculum program attempts to make those best practices routine for the teacher to take away that burden so that you can start to build momentum in the classroom.”
What we’ve attempted to provide is a core curriculum program that takes a lot of the planning and burden of creating instructional materials off of the shoulders of individual teachers in the classroom.
“On the engagement side, we’re doubling down on the question: how do you engage adolescents in a classroom about literacy? How do you get them excited about literature and off their phones, thinking and talking to their peers? [At CommonLit] we do that. We’re focused on peer-to-peer interaction.”
In March 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, CommonLit’s growth skyrocketed as schools shifted to virtual learning. Over the course of an eight- to 10-week period, the platform gained 32,000 new registered users per day on average. “It felt a little bit like drinking from a fire hose,” said Michelle. “But fast forward to today and we’ve metabolized that growth. We have robust services for schools . . . that drive revenue to our nonprofit. That includes professional development and valid assessments, offered three times a year.” CommonLit currently has over 3,000 school customers and reaches approximately seven million students who actively use the platform for literacy instruction. To date, students have completed 250 million CommonLit lessons.
It felt a little bit like drinking from a fire hose. But fast forward to today and we've metabolized that growth. We have robust services for schools . . . that drive revenue to our nonprofit.
The development of a strong evidence base has continued to fuel CommonLit’s growth trajectory, demonstrating the platform’s impact on students’ reading and writing skills. A quasi-experimental study of 113,825 sixth through tenth grade students in 313 schools across 40 states during SY 2021-22 found that students with teachers highly utilizing CommonLit 360 saw statistically significantly more academic growth in reading than students in comparison group classrooms. Specifically, teachers who taught more CommonLit 360 units of instruction saw 2.1 months greater growth in their students’ reading skills than students of teachers in the comparison group.
Watch the full interview to learn more about CommonLit’s approach to improving literacy instruction and the key factors fueling the organization’s growth trajectory.