In collaboration with CommonLit, we are delighted to release a tangible, progressive public good, intended to support educational non-profits, researchers, government agencies, and citizens interested in district-level data, engagement, and systemic change. This release includes the public-facing version of CommonLit’s equity-focused district recruitment guide, as well as a state-to-state comparison dashboard featuring data including student demographics, number of schools by state, percentage of residents with access to a computer or smartphone, LGBTQ+ and culturally inclusive curricula requirements or bans, and beyond - all situated in a filterable dashboard designed for maximum insight.
Free, high-quality English Language Arts curriculum with aligned supports are critical for students and teachers, as Michelle Brown, founder of CommonLit, knows first-hand. Just over a decade ago, as a teacher in the Mississippi Delta, Michelle struggled to provide the highest quality teaching for some of the nation’s most underserved students. With a shocking dearth of resources at her disposal, she often found herself wishing there were support for teachers like her and for low-income students in high-poverty areas who need them most. In 2013, she decided to create such an organization, and CommonLit was born.
In 2021, CommonLit faced an exciting but daunting problem: they had an excellent curriculum product, and had just received funding from the Department of Education to establish efficacy. They knew that state recruitment for the study was make-or-break: a successful RCT study would be critical for long-term success. CommonLit staff were experts at being on the ground, and in creating a knockout product for teachers and students with the highest need nationwide; what they needed was top-down investment and large-scale state adoption of their curriculum, with support and expertise in identifying and recruiting the right states for implementation. They had the product, they had the plan, they had the funding. Their big question was: given our mission, vision, and the variable national landscape, how do we know what states to target in order to run an effective, large-scale RCT that sets us up for massive scale?
Through early conversations, the iF team identified the level of information that CommonLit would need for a successful trial implementation. Our primary intended deliverable was a robust recruitment guide, including best practices for district recruitment, a specific recruitment timeline and plan for CommonLit, project management pathways, and research considerations.
As we were deep in the creation of the guide, our innovative iFsters had an idea: what if we were to use emerging technology to create an interface that would allow them to leverage data from state to state? One of our team members had been experimenting with Airtable’s recently updated Interface tool, and proposed that we could create something amazing for these clients: an easily navigable database with everything CommonLit might need to consider as they approached districts for recruitment. The database could include everything from student internet access; to curricular legislation by state; to average income or district size; to student demographics. Our team conducted research on data that technically was publicly available, but was incredibly labor-intensive for an organization like CommonLit to access or parse through. By putting the identified information into the interface, CommonLit was able to put the best practices from the recruitment guide into immediate practice.
"These resources gave us the strong guidance and tools we needed to kickstart a major recruitment effort. It enabled our small team to scale our efforts and make strategic decisions on how to approach recruitment, opening the way for us to launch a game-changing research study for our organization in the coming school year. We are grateful for the iF team's careful work and attunement to our team's specific challenges and needs."
CommonLit is an extraordinary organization poised to truly help the teachers and students who need it most. By creating this recruitment guide, plan, and interface, iF created the recruitment guide, plan, an interface to 'power' CommonLit to conduct the RCT and recruitment needed to scale their curriculum nationwide. In conversation with CommonLit at the end of the project, they identified that normally, these types of assets or resources are not within reach of a non-profit or smaller educational organization, and that the philanthropic funding they received, plus the support and expertise from iF to pull it off, felt like a true game changer.
On behalf of CommonLit and Intentional Futures, we believe it is our responsibility to make portions of this project publicly available for other like-minded organizations. We are sharing two parts of this public good:
Additionally, a side-by-side comparison of individual states to each other and the national averages are generated for the following:
We hope you enjoy these resources and use them for positive impact. Please reach out to our Education Team at alisong@intentionalfutures.com if you have ideas, questions, insights on these public goods; share with your networks; or partner with us to create an interface or guide for your institution or organization.
