Sarah Torian
Chief Learning Officer
Campaign for Grade-Level Reading
Worried that pandemic-precipitated learning loss could be “the hurt that lasts a lifetime,” the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (CGLR) launched the Learning Loss Recovery Challenge webinar series in May 2020. Since then, we have hosted more than 140 webinars in that series, using the GLR Learning Tuesdays platform to mobilize data-informed action at the local, state and national levels in an effort to slow, stop and reverse learning loss. In these sessions, we explored a number of “big bet worthy” programs and strategies that we believed held the promise of delivering more than the usual increments of progress and contributing to transformative change.
As we now approach the four-year anniversary of the pandemic, the sobering realities of the magnitude and longer-term implications of that learning loss demand serious, urgent and sustained attention. Despite significant public and philanthropic investment, several data reports released this summer indicate that students lag behind pre-pandemic trends and learning recovery largely stalled during the 2022–2023 school year.
That national data masks many bright spots where states and localities are seeing success in accelerating equitable learning recovery. In 2024, we will launch a new GLR Learning Tuesdays webinar series — Big Bets Working — in which we will lift up and celebrate where and how some of those “big bet worthy” approaches are enabling educators and their community partners to move the needle for children in economically challenged, fragile and marginalized families. We invite you, our partners in this work, to share the bright spots and effective strategies so that we might share them with others.
As we celebrate these bright spots and big bets, we will also acknowledge the fact that not all these efforts worked as well as we had hoped. And they certainly did not reach as many children and families in as many places as we had hoped, contributing to the concerning national trends. So we will also use this new series to drill down into implementation science as well as opportunities and barriers to the replication and scaling of effective efforts. Join us!
