Start With What’s Working — Learning from Educators to Strengthen Literacy

Strengthening early literacy takes shared learning across classrooms, schools, districts, community partners, and higher education 

Third-grade reading is an important marker in a child’s educational journey, but strong literacy does not begin or end in third grade. It grows through the experiences, relationships, instruction, and supports children encounter across their early years. When students have limited opportunities to build those foundations, the effects can extend across later learning. Strengthening early education, therefore, requires more than responding to a single score or grade level. It requires communities to understand how the systems surrounding young children can work together more effectively. 

Partnership was essential to the Literacy Bright Spots Project because no single organization or data source could explain what was supporting stronger literacy outcomes. SAM’s Center for Early Childhood Success and Wardlaw Center for Improvement Science partnered with faculty from Clemson University’s College of Education to identify promising patterns and, most importantly, to learn from the people closest to the work. Teachers, interventionists, instructional coaches, principals, and district leaders were the experts whose voices and experiences we wanted to elevate. By listening across these roles, the project connected what educators see and do each day with the school and district conditions that help strong early literacy experiences take root and grow. 

The project began with publicly available SC READY data from 2022 through 2025. Using improvement science methods, the team identified seven elementary schools across five Spartanburg County school districts that repeatedly emerged as bright spots for third graders living in poverty. The data did not tell us why those schools were seeing stronger outcomes, nor did it capture the full story of children’s literacy development. It gave the partnership a place to listen more closely and learn how educators were strengthening literacy within their local contexts. 

So we listened. 

Through focus groups, interviews, and a review of district guidance and resources, teachers, interventionists, coaches, principals, and district leaders described how they support children as readers, writers, thinkers, and participants in literacy learning. Their experiences helped turn numbers into a richer picture of the practices, routines, relationships, and system conditions that can strengthen early education. They also reinforced a central lesson: children benefit when the adults and organizations around them share responsibility for creating coherent, high-quality learning experiences. 

This work matters because improving early literacy is a shared responsibility. Families, early childhood partners, educators, school and district leaders, researchers, and community organizations each hold part of the picture. Lasting improvement is more likely when those perspectives are connected around a shared goal, when local educators are recognized as experts, and when partners learn together rather than pushing a single program or quick fix. 

The resulting report is not a ranking of schools or a recipe to copy. It is an invitation to learn from promising patterns already present in Spartanburg County and to use that learning to strengthen the continuum of early literacy support.  

Instead, it shows what becomes possible when data, research, practitioner expertise, and community partnership are brought together: a clearer view of local strengths, a stronger foundation for collaboration, and more grounded opportunities to improve experiences for children. 

In the next blog, we will dive deeper into the four change concepts that emerged and explore how educators and their partners can turn them into small, practical tests of change. The first step is to read the report, consider what it reveals about the systems supporting young learners, and identify where stronger partnership could help promising practices reach more children. 

Read the full Literacy Bright Spots Report.