GA Partnership Releases CARES Impact CASE Study on Literacy Instruction
MEDIA CONTACT: Robert Gaines, rgaines@gpee.org, 4678-476-4491
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November 18, 2024 –
The Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education (Georgia Partnership) today released Rewriting How Literacy is Taught: How Three School Districts are Changing How Students Learn to Read, the first case study from its CARES Impact Study, a multi-year, multi-strand research project designed to examine Georgia school districts’ use of Federal COVID relief funds. The study was launched in 2021 with funding from the Georgia Department of Education. Its aim is to understand how local school districts are spending relief funds and identify best practices to help students recover from the pandemic’s negative effects on student learning and well-being. This case study follows the Baseline Report, released in January 2022, the Year-One Report, released in November 2022, and the Year-Two Report, released in November 2023. These reports describe the shift in local districts’ use of relief funds from crisis management in the first 18 months of the pandemic, which focused on providing instruction safely, to recovery mode, developing a mix of strategies to help students who were behind academically or struggling with mental health or other issues.
In March 2024, the Georgia Department of Education commissioned the Georgia Partnership to produce three case studies that identify promising practices in three areas: closing learning gaps, improving student wellbeing, and strengthening the educator workforce. This first case study, which features Fulton County Schools, Grady County Schools, and Marietta City schools, focuses on closing learning gaps through literacy reform. Despite their differences in location, size, and student demographics, their reform approaches share seven common components:
- Leadership-driven focus on literacy
- High-quality training for educators
- School-based coaches
- Aligned instructional resources
- Enhanced district capacity to support school staff:
- Data-driven instruction to meet student needs
- Sufficient funding
“Now that we are in the third year of this study, it is exciting to be sharing case studies that detail district-level strategies for addressing pandemic-related challenges,” said Georgia Partnership President Dr. Dana Rickman. “We believe that this initial case study that focuses on how school districts are implementing literacy reform will inform and engage leaders at the state and local levels about Georgia’s education challenges and provide them with solutions that could improve education and economic outcomes for all Georgians.”