Chan, Zuckerberg Donate $30M to Support 'Reach Every Reader'

Reading is essential for learning, yet students across the U.S. are completing elementary school with inadequate reading abilities, which often follow them throughout their academic careers. A student who fails to read in first grade has a 90 percent probability of reading poorly in fourth grade and a 75 percent probability of reading poorly in high school, with implications for success later in life. Too many reading interventions are too late or too haphazard to change these outcomes.

In the midst of this early literacy crisis, faculty at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili) are launching Reach Every Reader, a five-year initiative that will combine both institutions’ expertise in cognitive science, reading, learning technologies and evaluation to help all children thrive and succeed as readers—across schools, homes and communities.

“Reading enables achievement in every dimension of life, and we have an extraordinary opportunity to combine knowledge of how individuals learn with technologies that will put remarkable interventions within reach for students across the country,” Harvard President Drew Faust said.

In addition to HGSE and MITili, Reach Every Reader involves collaborators and researchers from the Florida Center for Reading Research and College of Communication and Information at Florida State University and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in Charlotte, NC. The initiative is supported by a $30 million grant from Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founders of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.