6 States Win Funds for Birth-to-12th-Grade Literacy Programs

The state of federal literacy funding is in flux these days, but a little-noticed announcement from the U.S. Department of Education last week showed that there are still a handful of states receiving new federal dollars to promote programs to help children learn to read.  The department declared six winners of the Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy program: Georgia, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Texas.

The amount of the award varied by states, with Texas bringing home the biggest award, $66.5 million. The grants are designed to fund programs for three years.  Winning states have pledged to use the money for a variety of initiatives, including “data-driven” professional development for teachers, building better connections between early childhood programs and school districts, and more effective use of technology. (The Department of Education has published abstracts of their proposals.)

The Striving Readers program appears to offer one of the few opportunities for states and school districts to garner federal dollars to sustain what they started with the Early Reading First, a federal program cut from budget in 2010, and Reading First, which was eliminated in 2009.

This new iteration of Striving Readers was made possible when Congress voted to include it in its budget for fiscal year 2010. A small portion of the funding – $10 million – was divvied up as non-competitive grants available to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The rest of the money was reserved for the winners of the Striving Readers competition; states had to submit applications for the contest by May 9 and reviewers judged the proposals over the summer.

The original Striving Readers program was aimed at middle-school students and awarded an average of more than $30 million a year from 2006 to 2009.   This latest iteration of the program was designed to cover a much wider swath of ages – from birth up through 12^th grade – making it an interesting test case of how states can come up with strategies for connecting initiatives in early childhood to elementary schools, elementary schools to middle schools, and middle schools to high schools.  But it may be a short-lived experiment: Funding was not approved for fiscal year 2011 and given the present shift towards austerity, it is questionable whether it will arrive next year either.