Spotlight Georgia: Closing learning gaps through literacy reform

School districts in Georgia have been making big changes in how reading is taught. In 2023, state legislators passed the Georgia Early Literacy Act making literacy reform a state priority—it requires districts to take specific steps to improve literacy instruction, including: adoption of high-quality curriculum and materials aligned to the science of reading, use of universal reading screeners to identify struggling readers, development of individual reading plans for students, and training for all K-3 teachers in the science of reading.

In March 2024, the Georgia Department of Education commissioned the first of a series of three case studies to be written by the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (Georgia Partnership)—beginning with the topic of closing learning gaps through literacy reform. Georgia Partnership sought recommendations for districts leading literacy reform from a wide range of literacy experts in the state to feature in the first report. Marietta City Schools, Fulton County Schools, and Grady County Schools were selected and featured in the report, CARES District Case Study: Rewriting How Reading is Taught.

Through interviews and site visits, the CARES report authors highlighted seven common components in each of these districts’ reform efforts:

“Replacing previous approaches to literacy instruction with a new and very different one is a significant undertaking. Each district developed and implemented a comprehensive plan to do so. Despite their differences in location, size, and student demographics, their reform approaches share seven common components:

• Leadership-driven focus on literacy
• High quality training
• School-based coaches
• Aligned instructional resources
• Enhanced district capacity
• Data-driven instruction
• Sufficient funding…”

Leaders in Marietta City Schools, Fulton County Schools, and Grady County Schools had all independently acknowledged a lack of proficient readers by the end of third grade. Previously, balanced literacy was widely used in the three districts and across the state. To transform their low literacy rates, the district leaders all prioritized literacy and set about to identify and implement effective solutions to improve literacy instruction. The CARES report highlights how in each of the districts, the leaders’ commitment to and participation in intensive training in science of reading along with their district leadership teams helped drive teacher buy-in and gave everyone a common language.

The team at 95 Percent Group was not surprised to see these three Georgia school districts called out for excellence in the CARES report. We’ve had the pleasure to work closely with each of the districts, their leaders, and literacy teams at various schools as education partners. In conferences, webinars, and blog posts, we have held them up as models for successful transformation efforts in literacy practice.

Let’s take a closer look at their efforts…

Marietta City Schools

Marietta City Schools leaders began seeking solutions for their low literacy rates in fall of 2020 when they saw how the pandemic was dragging down already low literacy levels in the district. District superintendent Dr. Grant Rivera set out to design a solution to improve literacy with a focus on structured literacy training for teachers and staff district-wide.

Marietta City Schools became an early adopter of the original version of Top 10 Tools™ by 95 Percent Group, created by Deb Glaser, EdD (it has been enhanced and relaunched by 95 Percent Group). In 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, the district provided extensive training for district leaders, principals, coaches, K-3 teachers, and staff with content based on Top 10 Tools.

The CARES report quotes a district instructional leader in Marietta City Schools:

“So much of this work has only been able to happen because of (Dr. Rivera’s) visibility, to be honest, and his tangible investment in the work. Not just saying he’s invested, he attends a lot of the training. ”

In a March 2024 webinar, Professional Learning: What every leader needs to know, Dr. Deb Glaser, author of Top 10 Tools™, spoke with the teams from A. L. Burruss Elementary and West Side Elementary in the Marietta City School district about their work training teachers and implementing structured literacy in their two schools in the district.

A. L. Burruss Elementary

Snapshot

• Enrollment:  418​
• Grades:  K-5th grade​
• White 31%; Black 37%; Multi-racial 7%; Hispanic 23%​
• Title 1 school with economically disadvantaged 52%​
• Students with Disabilities 14%​
• English Learners 14%​
• Gifted 14%

A. L. Burruss Principal Dr. Jillian Johnson and first grade teacher Allison Taylor discussed their data with Dr. Deb Glaser:

Dr. Johnson: “We’re very, very proud of the growth that we’ve seen. This is year 3 of our implementation. We were a balanced literacy district prior to 2021. So in the first year you can see the percentage of students who were proficient and distinguished, and we knew that we had so far to go. These are devastating numbers. And so really, everything about the data told us that we had to do something differently.”

“And so we were thrilled with our results this past school year, where we saw 62% of our students who are proficient & distinguished and we’re proud to share that that was the second highest growth in that number in the state of Georgia. We are very, very excited to share that. We still have a long way to go. But we are very optimistic, as students matriculate through our district and through our school. So every year as we push students up into third grade, we are very optimistic that we’ll have everyone reading as children deserve to do.”

First grade teacher Allison Taylor emphasized how trust in the process was key in helping teachers to make the shift to structured literacy. She explained, “Knowing that the superintendent had gone through Top 10 Tools with Dr. Deb gave us the permission to lean into this work…It was easy to lean into this work that is systematic and explicit and makes changes in students’ lives.”

Dr. Johnson talked about success, both obvious and unanticipated: “Our obvious success is student data. We believe that literacy is a civil and human right. Every child has the right to read to their fullest potential and so, as we see those numbers climb, that is our obvious success that keeps things going. However, there was an unintended success that we would like to share. We’ve had a really positive impact on our climate and our culture through our discipline data.”

Allison Taylor continued, sharing unanticipated successes:  “With the student achievement, we saw students who are reading and because of that, we saw our classroom disruptions and our data from referrals reduced drastically. So in 2018-2019, which was our last normal year…pre Covid, we had 285 classroom infractions—incidents of students disrupting classroom instruction for their teacher and for their peers. Last year that number was 174. That’s 111 less incidents of students not being engaged in the classroom, and teachers not being able to teach instruction.”

“We notice that it’s because the students can access—they’re not trying to get out of the classroom. They’re not trying to avoid the work because they’re able to do the work now, because the work is not too hard, the work is something that they’re capable of doing, and because of that they feel more success. They feel pride in their work, and they don’t want to leave the classroom. They want to show what they know.”

Dr. Johnson added: “Another benefit of that is staff morale and staff retention. Behavior is one of the number one killers of staff morale—when teachers feel like they can’t actually do their jobs because of student behaviors. We’ve just seen such a beautiful increase in our staff morale, and we’ve had really high staff retention, even through those really hard, Covid years which is something that I know a lot of schools suffered from. And so we feel that these are all really connected.”

On sustainability, Dr. Johnson emphasized: “We are never going back. We are fully committed to this work.”

To hear how their efforts dramatically improved communication with families, and the role of coaching in keeping all of the Top 10 Tools top of mind, watch the on-demand webinar, Professional Learning: What every leader needs to know.

West Side Elementary School

Snapshot

• Enrollment: 566 students​
• Grades:  K-5th grade​
• White 72.3%; Black 13.6%; Multi-racial 6.7%; Hispanic 6.5%​
• Economically Disadvantaged 15.5%​
• Students with Disabilities 11.5%​
• English Learners 2.1%​
• Gifted 28%

West Side Elementary and A. L. Burruss schools are neighbors. West Side is a little larger and not as diverse as A. L. Burruss. But West Side principal Dr. Christina Wagoner explained that despite the lack of socioeconomic or other challenges, they still had 40% of their students reading below grade level or not meeting 3rd grade state proficiency.

Dr. Wagoner shared the role that Top 10 Tools played in their literacy transformation: “Top 10 Tools was the driving base of our teacher knowledge, and I would not just say, teacher knowledge. It really was knowledge across everybody in our district and in our schools that has a direct connection to a child learning to read. So we utilized Top 10 Tools, not just as the teacher knowledge piece, but it was the knowledge piece at every level of leadership in our district, from our superintendent to our special education staff across the district at Central Office and in local schools, all of the school principals, the instructional coaches. All of us came alongside of our teachers and completed Top 10 Tools as well. We needed to know what our teachers were learning so we could support them along this journey.”

“Across the state, we were looked at as a relatively high performing school. There really were no red flags or any indicators that we were not doing well. But as my instructional coach Sara Kany and I sat back and looked at the data and reviewed it with teachers, it just didn’t feel right that 40% of our kids were still not meeting basic proficiency levels. So our teachers, while they didn’t initially have the same sense of urgency, they certainly could all relate to a student in their classroom that was struggling to read, and that they were not able to find success for that child.”

Dr. Wagoner explained the data in the chart: “In year one [2022], we completed five of the Top 10 Tools. We did about one tool every other month, and once a teacher completed a Top 10 Tool, then we came alongside the teacher and did job-embedded coaching within the school with the support of a science of reading facilitator who led the pedagogical shift and our instructional coach. So year one, we completed the first five which really lived in the word recognition strand of Scarborough’s Reading Rope, and then in year 2, we completed the second five of the Top 10 Tools which lived more in the language comprehension strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope.”

“So you can see by the end of year 2, once our teachers had built that knowledge base, and we as leaders had built that knowledge base, we had 82% of our students that were meeting proficiency on state assessments. 95% of our students were meeting grade level, lexile expectations. And you could see the mean lexile growth of almost 100 points. Our student achievement overall went to the top 15 in the State—so looking at all the elementary schools in this state, we rose to number 15. We were really proud of that, knowing that our students deserved more, just like Dr. Johnson said. And we truly believe that with these practices 95% of our students in our schools should be successful proficient readers.”

Sara Kany commented on the transformation she has observed: “I think back over the years when I taught first grade and fourth grade—there was always this pocket of students whose needs you felt like you couldn’t meet. I shared the office with the MTSS coordinator for my first four years here, and I’d see the teachers come in and say ‘I don’t know what to do. Can we refer him? Can we get him tested?’”

“There’s so much less of that now, because the teachers are empowered and they know this data is telling them that they need to take these steps. It’s been quite transformational to see for teachers. And then, of course, the students that we are continuing to see that are struggling, there are real needs there. So we’re able to meet those ones that just needed great quality Tier 1 instruction, and for those other ones, we have layers of intervention in place for them.”

To learn more about the major shifts the West Side literacy team made—including redesigning their assessment system, prioritizing literacy practices, providing ample time for students to develop foundational reading skills, the role of coaching, intervention process, planning for the future, and more—watch the webinar Professional Learning: What every leader needs to know.

Fulton County Schools

Snapshot

• 4th biggest district in Georgia (Atlanta metro area)
• 14,000 employees and 90,000 students
• 59 elementary schools
• 74% minority enrollment
• 31% free and reduced lunch

Dr. Mike Looney joined Fulton County Schools as district superintendent in 2019. With historically low reading scores in the state, Looney made reading improvement a priority. In an interview with 95 Percent Group, he got specific: “Less than half of the students in the state of Georgia read on grade level. That’s one heck of an indictment on what we’ve historically done.”

For years, decisions about reading curriculum were left to the discretion of individual schools in Fulton County. Fulton County Schools’ former Director of Literacy Jennifer Burton explains, “This resulted in a hodgepodge of balanced literacy-based programs, not backed by the science of reading, that clearly weren’t reaching all students.”

Making the turn toward science of reading-informed literacy instruction

Looney continued: “We had 40+ different reading programs in place when I first arrived here. We know that is not a great strategy. What we’ve done in Fulton County is train our teachers in the science of reading and given them the tools that are aligned with the science of reading—one of the major tools we’ve implemented is 95 Phonics Core Program®.”

In reporting on Fulton County, the CARES Report authors give some background on Fulton’s inconsistent literacy instruction, the results of these inconsistencies, and making the turn toward science of reading informed literacy instruction:

“They used pandemic relief funds to conduct a comprehensive assessment of literacy practices across the district and found they differed considerably. Many schools relied on versions of balanced literacy, while other schools used different strategies. There was also little consistency in the curricula and other instructional resources schools used.

These inconsistencies upended learning for students who switched schools, and district leaders could not effectively support schools if each had a different approach to literacy. District leaders decided to replace this fragmented approach to reading instruction by implementing structured literacy systemwide. When ARPA funds became available in the summer of 2021, Looney recognized it was a rare chance to invest in a full array of resources to implement and support systemwide reform.”

Dr. Looney and his school team turned to 95 Percent Group’s 95 Phonics Core Program® to ensure that all students in Fulton County could receive the science-based literacy instruction they deserved. At the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year, they put 95 Phonics Core Program in every K-3 classroom in the district.

The importance of explicit literacy instruction past third grade

They also knew it was essential to implement explicit literacy instruction past third grade. To support students in grades 4 and 5, the Fulton County team implemented additional resources from the One95 Literacy Ecosystem such as 95 Vocabulary Surge™–Unleashing the Power of Word Parts.

Also in the Spotlight blog interview, Nicola Johnson, 5th grade teacher at Stonewall Tell Elementary in Fulton County Schools (in the 2024-2025 year, she has moved to a new district), emphasizes the urgent need for rigorous expectations and high-quality curriculum. Implementing explicit vocabulary instruction through 95 Vocabulary Surge has made a noticeable difference in the upper elementary classrooms at Stonewall Tell:

“I come into the classroom and make sure that my scholars can exceed their own expectations—every single day,” said Johnson. “Especially as brown and black boys and girls, their expectation is that ‘we’re not learning, we’re not going anywhere.’ And if there is a teacher that has explicit modeling and an explicit curriculum that allows for that learning and expectation to be exceeded…they can do anything.”

In five months from first implementing 95 Phonics Core Program, teachers, students, and parents reported significant changes in the rate of reading and learning. Students that came into the school year barely reading were fully decoding and, even better, really enjoying books.

The data speaks for itself. Here’s a look at the data from 3 schools in the district from 2024.

Asa Hilliard Elementary

Students in Dru Wilson’s 2nd grade class at Asa Hilliard Elementary grew as much as 46 percent from their first assessment at the beginning of the year to their third assessment mid-year. This second-grade class began at 63 percent proficiency and now, with only five months of instruction from 95 Phonics Core Program, 92 percent of the class is scoring as proficient on their assessments.

Vickery Mill Elementary

Mr. Townsend, a third-grade teacher at Vickery Mill Elementary, reported that growth has been enormous already, and clear in his phonics assessments: “…in the beginning of the year, only 53 percent of my students were able to master this program, and now I’m at 94 percent of students understanding it.” He also adds, “Results are very noticeable in student writing, spelling, and reading comprehension. There is improvement in every area that has writing and reading—it’s just clicking for them.”

Stonewall Tell Elementary

Amy Long, literacy coach at Stonewall Tell Elementary explained excitedly: “We had a 30-point gain in first grade in the phonics domain! We’re growing our green, we’re reducing our red; it is really transforming both the teachers’ and the students’ learning here at Stonewall Tell, and in Fulton County.”

Watch our Video Blog: Fulton County to hear stories from educators, parents, and students in three schools using 95 Percent Core Phonics in Fulton County.

Discover more about how Fulton County made science of reading their roadmap

• Read our blog post Spotlight Georgia: Watch Fulton County
• Watch the video blog featuring Dr. Mike Looney’s Transformational leadership
• Watch Kerri-Ann C. Williams, Director of K-5 Literacy, on the results they’re seeing with 95 Phonics Core Program in all Fulton County schools
• Download the ebook The Courage to Lead Literacy, featuring Dr. Mike Looney and other inspiring district leaders

Explore One95 literacy ecosystem solutions used in Fulton County Schools

• 95 Phonics Core Program® (used district-wide)
• 95 Vocabulary Surge™: Unleashing the Power of Word Parts (used district-wide in grades 4 and 5)
• 95 Phonics Lesson Library™ 2.0
• 95 Phonics Chip Kit™ (used in Zone 1 with intervention coaching)

Grady County Schools

Snapshot

• Full-time equivalent student enrollment: 4,470
• Number of schools: 7
• Economically disadvantaged students: 100%
• Students receiving special education services: 11%
• ESOL students: 13.2%

Grady County School district is a small rural district, in contrast to Marietta Schools and Fulton County, large urban districts. Like Marietta Schools and Fulton County, district leaders at Grady County Schools were examining how reading was being taught. When Janet Walden became assistant superintendent of curriculum for Grady County Schools in 2018, she determined literacy was the district’s top challenge. The CARES Report authors write:

“In Grady County, Walden concluded phonics was the critical component missing in the district’s reading instruction and determined other essential elements were not taught consistently across schools. She identified additional gaps including varying practices to identify struggling readers and interventions for them. With support from then Superintendent Dr. Kermit Gilliard, she determined the district’s instructional approach to literacy needed a strong foundation in the early building blocks of phonemic awareness and phonics and consistent instruction in the other three essential reading elements: fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Walden and her colleagues developed a plan to put those elements in place.”

In February 2020, Grady County schools received an L4GA grant (Literacy for Learning, Living, and Leading grant) from the Georgia Department of Education. Shortly after, the Covid pandemic disrupted schools throughout the state, delaying implementation of the plan but deepening their resolve to design an effective approach to literacy. Federal pandemic relief funds provided them with resources to do even more than the L4GA grant had allowed.

Initially, Grady County Schools launched a pilot with 95 Phonics Core Program in one school and in the 2021-2022 school year, the district implemented 95 Phonics Core Program for Tier 1 in all K-3 schools. In addition, they piloted 95 Phonics Lesson Library™ for Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction. They also hired three Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) coordinators during the 2021-2022 school year. The district’s MTSS coordinator and her team trained teachers with one-on-one sessions in which they modeled instruction, followed by observation and feedback sessions.

In the 2022-2023 school year, they implemented 95 Phonics Lesson Library in all elementary and middle schools for Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction. In addition, they introduced 95 Vocabulary Surge—Unleashing the Power of Word Parts™ for grades 6-8, Morphology Magic™ for grade 6, and introduced bi-monthly PLCs in each grade in reading.

In the 2023-2024 school year, they did district-wide structured literacy training that included all instructional programs, and they introduced district-wide structured literacy blocks. For 4th and 5th grades, they implemented 95 Phonics Core Program® Word Study, Grades 4 and 5.

For this post, we had the opportunity to interview Grady County Schools MTSS Coordinator Holly Harrison and Michael Singletary, Director of Curriculum, Assessment, and School Improvement for Grady County Schools.

MTSS Coordinator Holly Harrison explained why coaching was so critical for success:

“Many of our teachers are not regular classroom teachers. They are pharmacists and business people. Because teaching literacy was out of the content area, they weren’t comfortable teaching phonics.”

Director of Curriculum, Assessment, and School Improvement Michael Singletary added: “They’re working on certification concurrently while they’re teaching the first year or two. They only have so much time to get certification so oftentimes they walk in with no experience in a classroom at all besides maybe dealing with their personal children.”

Holly Harrison continued, “My background is in phonics so I could show them that if they would give us time, it will work. I focused on trying to get the teachers on board and getting them comfortable  and showing them how to use all the pieces that came with the core curriculum or the intervention kits.

The first year was a little rocky—we started at step 1: take the cellophane off and open the book. When they pulled the books off the shelf and started using them, the teachers were beginning to see, ‘Oh, wow, my students can read! They have the skills to be successful readers.’”

Gradual release coaching has been key

Harrison explained her gradual release approach to coaching: “It was a slow process in the beginning but I started with the classes that would allow me to come in and coach. I would teach a lesson, then let the teacher teach beside me. We would do it simultaneously. I would let them teach part of it. I would model some and then teach. When they became comfortable, then I would go in and watch them teach the lessons and give them feedback as we were teaching the lesson and just help them to feel comfortable with it. It was a gradual release–I do, we do, you do. The light bulb moments followed for them when the students had self-confidence—that ‘look what I can do! I can actually do this on my own.’ And so it took a while, but now everyone is on board.”

Harrison helped instructional coordinators shift roles into coaching—while they were learning 95 Percent Group programs and how to coach them, they were also in LETRS training along with all district staff and teachers. Today, they are in a much stronger place, to support veteran and new teachers as needed. And the work shows—students are making progress. Michael explained they’ve had a lot of heavy lifting this year but they know it’s going to pay off next year.

PLCs play an important role in their system…

The Grady County literacy team implemented PLCs to communicate with their interventionists how to use the intervention materials, and to support all the general education teachers in learning to be diagnostic and responsive in their instruction and understanding the why behind what they’re doing.

Michael Singletary explained: “The PLCs are where we do a lot of the training. Teachers get to practice those instructional strategies and then go implement them…We knew from the beginning it was going to be really important that all teachers in the district heard the same communication around this whole process…We have state legislation that says if students are not reading on grade level, then you have to have an intervention plan in place and you have to have high quality instructional materials.”

“So in these PLCs, we did communication around how to use the intervention materials because this year was our first year of getting those resources out to our interventionists and for our general education teachers as well. We’ve trained our general ed teachers to use the intervention materials in our WIN time. WIN stands for ‘what I need.’ Each grade level has a specific WIN time throughout the day. And our interventionists pull their students during that time for that grade level. We look at the data of every single student and place them in a group.”

Harrison continued: “We use the Acadience universal screener to help group our students for intervention and moving forward, we are changing over to DIBELS, very similar programs. I’ll go student by student and I pull the bottom 20% first and group them with the interventionist because I want those groups to be much smaller. I really want to hone in on those interventions because we tier those students, either Tier 2 or Tier 3.”

“Then for the students that are left, we flexibly group across the grade level—so all the classroom teachers participate. I’ll let them choose because they’re the ones teaching what they feel most comfortable with. If someone wants to have a comprehension or a fluency group, then I make sure their students are for comprehension or fluency.”

Singletary added: “We create the small groups as needed within Tier 1 based on diagnostic assessments—95 Phonics Screener for Intervention™ (PSI™) and the 95 Phonemic Awareness Screener for Intervention™ (PASI™).”

Singletary and Harrison regroup based on frequent diagnostic assessments. Harrison clarified their process: “We’re trying to hone in on those skills that they need. But we don’t want to keep the students in a group that’s not effective for them. If they need to move on, then we move them to a different group, so that they keep working on a different skill level.”

Until now, Harrison has been very hands-on with grouping students but her goal is for the teachers across all grades to be able to use the diagnostic skills they’ve learned through coaching and in the PLCs to group and regroup students themselves.

Singletary summed up their efforts: “Basically Holly and I just spent hours creating this process. We’ve communicated it over and over. We’ve gained a lot of traction with it this year. We’re excited to see next year when it won’t be new.”

Designing an assessment system for data-driven instruction

The literacy team at Grady created a tiered system of assessment to complement the tiered curriculum system. Their tiered assessment system includes 95 Phonemic Awareness Screener for Intervention™ (PASI™) and 95 Phonics Screener for Intervention™ (PSI™) for diagnostics for K-5 and for grades 6-12.

Singletary shared: “We are continuing to refine this process. We created an assessment process which aligns to Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 instruction. Looking at our data, we see that we have to really get stronger with Tier 1 and be more intentional in what this literacy block can look like, identifying some areas of strengths.”

“We see some areas and grade levels where our data moves and then some where it doesn’t. So now we’re just trying to hone in on that to become really intentional. We’ve looked at each part of the curriculum for 95 Percent Group programs. We’re asking ourselves:

• What are the look-fors?
• What exactly should be going on?
• Do teachers understand the purpose of a decodable reader and what that instruction looks like?

We’re just really building our own knowledge and our own education around it, as well as our teachers’ knowledge moving forward.”

Making data-driven decisions about grouping and intervention

Grady County Schools MTSS Coordinator Holly Harrison shared their beginning of year 2024 and end of year 2025 data, explaining:

“The BOY-to-EOY data has played a critical role in strengthening our leadership and teachers’ understanding of which instructional strategies are most effective. It allowed us to move away from relying on intuition and toward making informed, data-driven decisions about student grouping and interventions. Teachers are now able to clearly see the impact of consistent, aligned, tiered instruction, and the data has guided more responsive teaching—leading to greater student growth and increased reading confidence.”

Strategies for sustainability going forward…

Michael Singletary talked about their strategy for long term sustainability: “We pretty much were able to purchase everything we needed moving forward. We’re really careful about protecting those materials—we inventory the materials, and make sure when teachers leave a grade level, or maybe even leave the district, that we are securing those resources. And we have the digital piece that we continue to repurchase every year. We’ve just built it into our budget at this point. It’s one of our non-negotiables. We’ve already paid the bulk of it. We’re just renewing the digital piece at this point. We’re really careful to protect those resources. Our teachers have 100% buy-in with 95 Percent Group so they protect those materials too.”

Grady County Schools’ literacy program demonstrates the same importance we’ve seen in Fulton County and Marietta Schools of a leadership-driven focus on literacy, high quality training, school-based coaches and coaching, aligned instructional resources, enhanced district capacity, data-driven instruction, and a strong sustainability strategy in place.

To learn more, explore products used in Grady County Schools

Read more about the evidence and impact: