“[CGLR’s] focus on solutions is very much the intent behind an initiative I’ve been working on this past year as chair of the National Governors Association called Disagree Better. Disagree Better aims to help people work through their differences without all the hate.”
Spencer Cox, Governor, State of Utah
The inaugural session of CGLR’s Building on Common Ground, “A Governors’ Conversation,” took place during GLR WEEK 2023. This year, Utah Governor Spencer Cox shared a video acknowledging CGLR’s bipartisan approach and highlighting his Disagree Better initiative.
Launched in 2010, the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (CGLR) was the grateful beneficiary of what was then broad and bipartisan support for sound education policy and a deep consensus around ensuring early literacy. Even as the Common Core State Standards movement stalled and then imploded, CGLR continued to win strong endorsements from a majority of sitting governors — Democrats, Republicans and Independents.
CGLR’s commitment to being both clear-eyed and optimistic requires us to acknowledge today’s environment is decidedly more difficult to navigate. We have no reason to challenge Education Next’s 2022 public opinion survey, which reports that voter attitudes on issues such as teacher salaries, charter schools and teaching about race increasingly track along party lines. Even so, we are buoyed by the Hunt Institute’s 2023 Across the Aisle survey findings that voters and parents care more about whether schools are safe, teach real-world skills, provide mental health supports for students, and address learning loss and literacy. These findings align with their 2022 survey and our own ongoing crowd-sourcing of CGLR networks of stakeholder coalitions in 46 states.
That crowd-sourcing illuminates several issues and challenges around which to find and build common ground: finding effective ways to promote meaningful family engagement and productive partnerships between parents and educators; expanding pathways to success by investing in 21st-century career and technical education; ensuring digital connectivity for all students; and making schools safe.
