CommonLit aims to help every student become a confident reader, writer, and thinker, and make teaching both effective and sustainable. Through its free digital text library and CommonLit 360, a full-year English language arts (ELA) curriculum, the organization brings together high-quality, standards-aligned instructional materials, embedded assessments, and curriculum-based professional learning in a single platform. Designed to provide a coherent, yearlong literacy experience, CommonLit 360 integrates rigorous grade-level texts with reading, writing, speaking, and listening instruction; embeds formative, benchmark, and performance-based assessments into daily practice; and offers sustained, job-embedded professional development to reduce planning burden, strengthen teacher confidence, and build strong ELA departments over time. This comprehensive approach has been shown to be associated with positive student learning outcomes and increased student engagement.
Since it launched in 2014, CommonLit has experienced steady year-over-year growth in revenue. The organization grew from serving 1,779 schools in 2021 to 3,273 schools in 2025, reflecting annual program revenue that covers roughly 70 percent of general operating expenses. In a “Spotlight On Growth” interview with founder and CEO Michelle Brown, she reflected on how the organization navigated an influx of demand sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has sustained this growth in the years since through key hires and product development.
In addition to focusing on growth over the past five years, CommonLit has invested in strengthening its evidence base to ensure that use of the curriculum results in meaningful student outcomes. An ESSA level 3 study of 45,181 sixth through 10th grade students in 313 schools across 40 states during SY 2021-22 found that in classrooms where teachers used CommonLit 360, students saw faster growth in reading—equivalent to about 2.1 months of additional learning—than students in comparison group classrooms (who did not use the curriculum or used it at negligible amounts). CommonLit has also been awarded an EdReports “all-green” rating, indicating it meets all quality and usability expectations, including alignment to standards.
Over the past four years, Overdeck Family Foundation’s general operating and capacity-building support have enabled CommonLit to enhance its product suite, leverage artificial intelligence to build internal data capacity, develop a growth plan, and launch an external validation on the impact of CommonLit 360’s program on ELA achievement in sixth through eighth grade, with findings anticipated in 2027.
