A quiet crisis haunts our schools. Worse post-COVID, but it’s always been there.

We set out to work on dyslexia. Across the country, we are finding adolescents – grades 4-12 – who are effectively unable to read. These are children who are sweet, kind, clever, and quick. Who are busy trying to find their place in the world.

We are delighted to announce that Reading Futures will receive a $150,000 Innovation Grant from Accelerate, a national nonprofit working to make high-impact tutoring a standard feature of the American school day.

We just wrapped our sixth week serving our first full-year district schools, and our fourth week serving our first full-year charter schools. We have only one job: help the most struggling readers, including those with characteristics of dyslexia, learn to read.

There was a moment, in the run-up to our summer pilot, that Liz Kline and I started thrashing on what to call our teachers. Call them tutors? Call them interventionists? Then one day we realized we were trying too hard. They’re teachers!

We saw real growth in basic reading skills on clinical assessments, with students and parents citing increased confidence and interest in reading.

Three months in, we have our first two pilots up and running! We are serving 1st through 3rd grade children around the country, delivering virtual small-group intervention for 50 hours over five weeks.

I’m launching a company called Reading Futures. We’ll work from first principles — delivering evidence-based, high-intensity intervention for children with indications of dyslexia in the early grades. When their young brains are still plastic, when the right intervention and the right interventionist can create a reading future. Every child deserves one.