Reading Partners

The U.S. House of Representatives is proposing to eliminate AmeriCorps, the 30-year program that provides the people power that local nonprofit, faith-based, and community organizations train and deploy to respond to our country’s most immediate and critical needs. 

 This unthinkable action would have an absolutely devastating effect on Reading Partners and the critical work we do to advance early literacy and educational equity across the country.   

Reading Partners is a national organization that mobilizes volunteer tutors across the country to provide one-on-one support to students because we believe that reading is a civil right. We also know from more than 25 years of experience that early literacy is foundational to success in school and beyond. It takes a village to support students, and Reading Partners’ 350+ AmeriCorps service members are essential in the community focused work we do to help support student literacy. Relationships are the cornerstone of our approach; building trusting relationships with students is critical and AmeriCorps members play a key role in making this happen. AmeriCorps members also play central roles in working closely with our school partners, principals and teachers to ensure our program is part of the holistic and integrated approach to learning. 

Reading Partners was founded in 1999 by three community leaders committed to improving equitable access to high-dosage literacy support for children in Menlo Park, CA. Since then, our organization has significantly expanded to serve exponentially more students in 12 metro regions across the country. Our expansion was fueled in large part by the partnership we forged with AmeriCorps starting in 2010. To date, we’ve engaged over 3,500 AmeriCorps members in a year of service and those members have been integral to Reading Partners partnering with more than 550 under-resourced public schools and more than 85,000 community tutors to provide nearly 3 million individualized literacy tutoring sessions to over 80,000 elementary school students.  

In addition to making an impact, AmeriCorps members are also being impacted by their experience at Reading Partners. Research conducted by Policy Studies Associates found that AmeriCorps members at Reading Partners emerge from their terms of service with new perspectives and other personal and professional benefits. For example, a majority of Reading Partners’ AmeriCorps alumni reported that their service experience caused them to re-examine their beliefs and more than 80 percent felt that serving with AmeriCorps exposed them to new ideas and ways of seeing the world.  

We’re facing a student literacy crisis in the US. According to the 2022 NAEP assessment, only 19 percent of our country’s fourth graders experiencing economic disadvantages are reading at grade level. Answering this need, AmeriCorps members are helping every day to ensure that children from under-resourced communities get the individualized tutoring support they need through proven nonprofits like Reading Partners. It’s why our lawmakers should invest more in AmeriCorps, not gut its funding. In the 2023-24 school year alone, Reading Partners partnered with 180 Title I schools across the country to implement our one-on-one tutoring program and deliver almost 200,000 tutoring sessions (30 sessions per student on average). As a result, 87% of our 6,655 K-5 students achieved or exceeded their individualized reading growth goals and 91% of our K-2 students developed mastery of key foundational reading skills needed to read at grade level.  

At Reading Partners we tutor young students to help them reach the level of literacy required to grow academically. But without AmeriCorps members, many of the amazing young students in our program would simply not receive the support they need to thrive as lifelong readers. That would have a negative impact not just on the students denied access to the equitable learning resources they deserve, but also on their broader communities and society at large.   

As studies have shown, AmeriCorps is an effective use of our tax dollars; every federal dollar invested in AmeriCorps yields a $17 return in community benefits. Rather than cutting AmeriCorps funding, we need to invest in expanding AmeriCorps so we can strengthen communities through service and evidence-based programs like Reading Partners. 

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