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This article is part of Bright Spots, a series聽highlighting schools where every child learns to read, no matter their zip code. Explore the Bright Spots map to find out which schools are beating the odds in terms of literacy versus poverty rates.

This summer, 81% of third graders at Nashville Classical East scored proficient in reading on our rigorous state test, the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program. 

To put these results in perspective, four years ago, the third grade ELA proficiency rate was 40% 鈥� nearly 30 points below its pre-pandemic highs. Moreover, according to a Universal Reading Screener, our kindergarten to second grade students were demonstrating mastery at levels far below prior cohorts. 

As executive director of the charter school, I recognized that the problem was not a lack of effort. When our staff observed classrooms, we saw teachers and leaders working incredibly hard. However, we also saw many ineffective practices, especially in our youngest grades: centers where students colored without purpose or attention, letter sounds introduced without sufficient practice, and Youtube videos replacing the joy of books read-aloud. It was no surprise so many third and fourth grade students struggled to read fluently, write complete sentences or access complex texts. 

Over the next four years, we changed almost everything about our K-5 literacy program. Today, our Title I school ranks in the state鈥檚 top 3% for 3rd Grade ELA achievement, outscoring every district in the state of Tennessee, including districts with far less diversity and far greater resources. While these results are extraordinary, the work we did was anything but. In fact, I am confident it can be replicated by any school or district. 

Here are six practices that moved the needle most. 

The Science of Reading is the tip of the iceberg. Starting in 2022, Tennessee began to implement training and curricula rooted in the Science of Reading, which we embraced and incorporated. Along the way, we learned that this evidence-based approach rests upon a broader foundation of cognitive and social science. This research has not reached most American teachers and school districts. Over the past two years 鈥� thanks to organizations like , , and 鈥� we explored the science of learning. 

Based on what we learned, we overhauled our approach to coaching and development. Today, every teacher at Nashville Classical is trained on basic concepts like the importance of securing and harnessing attention, the difference between working and long-term memory, the importance of background knowledge and the need to support encoding and retrieval. If you walk into a third grade classroom today, you might see students with a knowledge organizer on ancient Rome, quietly self-quizzing themselves on terms like patricians and plebeians. These simple daily practices are supported by science, but implementing them is not rocket science. Very few schools or districts have shared these practices with their teachers, which is a tragedy because anyone can learn them and every teacher deserves to know them. 

Don鈥檛 teach skills 鈥� build knowledge. features a listening comprehension strand, which we use to build background knowledge. In younger grades, we reinforce key terms, timelines and vocabulary through daily oral drills, content-focused songs and frequent opportunities to repeat ideas through 鈥渢urn and talks.鈥� As students move into tested grades, they practice reading short passages and answering multiple choice questions. But we avoid teaching test tricks like 鈥渃rossing out wrong answers鈥� or lessons on 鈥渉ow to find the main idea.鈥� Instead, our teachers ask themselves 鈥淲hat background knowledge or vocabulary might prevent students from understanding this passage?鈥� and 鈥淗ow can I build their knowledge to increase their comprehension?.鈥� By eliminating time spent trying to teach abstract 鈥渃ritical thinking,鈥� we have more time to build knowledge and vocabulary, which are the actual building blocks of comprehension.

Fluency 鈥� in all its forms 鈥� unlocks growth. Our benchmark assessment system measures fluency across grade levels, including for letter sounds, word reading, oral reading and silent reading. Our team took time to deeply understand the importance of each of these domains and unpacked what a fluent reader could think and do at each stage of their development, from kindergarten to middle school. Unfortunately, , prioritizing sound or word reading fluency at the expense of fluent reading in context. Our team worked to align vision of reading excellence across grades, which meant teachers were working toward a shared picture of what proficient young readers and successful adults readers can do down to the tiniest details of exactly how many words per minute a third grader should be able to read silently and what sorts of affixes, word roots, and phrases made passages appropriate for each grade. This level of granular detail meant teachers could identify students at risk early and clearly, intervening to provide the right support to the right students. 

Writing is thinking. We invested significant time in teaching students to write, starting in kindergarten. Our approach is rooted in with a focus on three areas. First, students write about complex topics directly connected to the knowledge and content they are reading about. So, our kindergarteners learn to speak in complete sentences while explaining what happens in nursery rhymes, our first graders learn to write sentences about Aesop鈥檚 Fables, and our second graders learn to write their first paragraphs about Greek myths. Next, our teaching focuses on sentence-level activities. By third grade, students have learned to expand, distill and express their ideas in complex and complete sentences. Finally, we teach students to revise. Teachers frequently display student work on document cameras, analyze it and then prompt students to apply concepts to their own work. 

Books belong in classrooms. Across the country, and many curricula emphasize short passages or excerpts. We believe books belong in classrooms and have selected curricula 鈥� Core Knowledge, Fishtank and Reading Reconsidered 鈥� built on this belief. Great books expose children to beautiful stories that have or will stand the test of time. When a classroom of second graders reaches the end of Charlotte鈥檚 Web, there is not a dry eye in sight and they are joining a cultural conversation that stretches across grades and generations. We鈥檝e found that the experience of reading great literature has grown our children鈥檚 attention and shaped their identity in the best way possible. There is a tradition of literacy and reading at our school, which we hope students carry with them long after they graduate. 

Play the long game. We are fortunate to have an incredible team of teachers and leaders who work with our elementary students. They deserve all of the credit for these achievements and many of them stayed at our schools through a period of significant change, where we implemented new curricula, changed schedules and raised expectations. We made many mistakes along the way, but always tried to balance the pain of changing too fast with the cost of changing too slowly. While we knew that we would not see gains happen overnight, we always believed positive habits would compound each day. For our curriculum and coaching to make a difference, we needed to stop implementation of any number of distracting, shiny objects: digital tutors, complex intervention programs, AI-everything, etc. We learned that investments in the practice and delivery of instruction may not pay off the fastest, but they take you the farthest. 

Today, I鈥檓 not just the leader of our school:  I鈥檓 a parent. And something else happened around the same time our third graders took their state test 鈥� my son, a kindergartener, learned to read. This summer, while I spent a late night hunched over a laptop to analyze results, he was upstairs reading Dog Man under his covers. 

Every kid deserves the type of teaching my son got in kindergarten and will get in the years to come. The only way to make that happen is for more schools to implement the ordinary practices that create extraordinary classrooms and outcomes. 

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