“It’s something that the students are very, very proud of,” said librarian Annelise Rodriguez, who created and manages the Millionaires Club. “We’ve had kids come in when they take tours and say, ‘I’m going to be up there some day.’ Some kids get it in 45 books, and for others, it’s taken 360 books.”

The project was created three years ago to motivate and recognize young avid readers in the of roughly 600 students. Just a few weeks ago, a grandmother who didn’t speak English bowed her head to thank Rodriguez after her grandchild’s photo finally made the display. 

Last year, Windsor Park students read 400 million words as part of the Millionaires Club. They are on track to beat that record, with over 315 million words read by the end of February. It’s one of the ways the school has attained its high reading proficiency rates, an achievement that earned its ranking on ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Bright Spots list. The highlighted schools have third grade literacy scores that are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates. 

With its 29% poverty level, nearly two-thirds of Windsor Park third graders were projected to be proficient in reading in 2024, but its actual score was 96%. That rate jumped to 99% last year. Nearly 50% of students are Hispanic, 29% are white and 15% are Asian. 

Windsor Park is a magnet school for gifted and talented children. Texas schools to screen their students, and all children in the Corpus Christi Independent School District who score in the top 3% receive an invitation to transfer to Windsor Park, said Principal Kimberly Bissell. Transportation is provided. 

The consists of multiple tests that grade students’ achievement in reading and math, as well as problem-solving and critical thinking abilities. Students can transfer in any grade to Corpus Christi’s gifted and talented schools.  

Windsor Park is also the district’s only elementary school. The worldwide educational program allows teachers to write their own curriculum and offer rigorous instruction along with inquiry-based learning.

“We have kids who are in first grade reading at a middle school or high school level,” Bissell said. “Those things have always been true, but the initiative behind their personal achievement has certainly ramped up in the last few years with our new approaches.”

The Millionaires Club, which is expanding to other schools in the 33,000-student district, is one of them. The number of words children read are tracked through Accelerated Reader, an online program that records finished books and comprehension. 

Windsor Park also recently launched a called “thinking classrooms.” Originally created for math education, it students working in small groups, solving problems while standing up at whiteboards and building on pieces of knowledge as they go. But Bissell said Windsor Park implemented this approach across all its classes. 

It especially improved students’ writing skills because the children use the whiteboards to organize text and story structure, she said. 

In Hanna Patton-Elliott’s third grade classroom on a recent morning, students became “doctors,” pulling on blue medical gloves before separating into groups of two or three. Each group had to assess a passage of text on a whiteboard — the “patient” — by finding the main idea. The children then diagnosed their “patients” by writing a conclusion for what the passage was about.

Patton-Elliott said that at the end of the class, students rotate and evaluate one another’s work as “attending doctors” — the staff who oversee the work of a medical team. 

“I’m going to give them an opportunity to write the conclusions for other people’s work, but then also go back and look at it as the first attending doctor,” she said. “So we’ve got lots of things going on. We’ve got some reading skills, we’ve got the main idea, we’ve got organization, but then also we’ve got some creative writing, too. The metaphor seems to be working for breaking this down and organizing it.”

The activity is part of the curricular materials written by Windsor Park teachers under the International Baccalaureate program. Teachers create their grade-level curriculum together to ensure that the same lessons — such as finding the main idea of a story — are taught in each classroom, even if the activities may be different. Because Windsor Park classes are interdisciplinary, teachers try to connect the same ideas in all academic subjects, so what the children learn in reading, for example, is referenced in math class.

Much of Windsor Park’s instruction uses standards from the Texas Education Agency, but infuses it with student-led learning and group collaboration. The curriculum also allows children to make decisions and manage their own instruction, such as choosing the grading rubrics for an activity. 

“We find not just for gifted learners, but as a best practice, this idea of choice and student agency really builds writing, as well as reading and everything that English Language arts envelopes,” Bissell said. “When you offer choice with expectations, they do a lot better.”

Mid-year data from Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider, shows that while the so-called “COVID cohort” of students in kindergarten, first and second grade are making progress, they haven’t caught up to where students in those grade levels were performing before schools shut down in March 2020. 

At this point in the 2019-20 school year, for example, 58 percent of first-graders were scoring at or above the grade-level goals. This time last year — when only about half of the nation’s schools were offering full-time, in-person learning — 44 percent of first-graders were on track. Now 48 percent are reaching the benchmark.

Results from fourth- and fifth-graders, however, show greater recovery, with the rates of students meeting benchmarks nearly back to the same level they were in the winter of the 2019-20 school year.

“Learning disruptions had a significant impact on our literacy outcomes,” said Susan Lambert, chief academic officer of elementary humanities at Amplify. She added that this year’s quarantines and short-term closures have likely contributed to the slow progress. “For the youngest learners to go to school for two or three days and then be out for 10 — it’s not just picking up where you left off; it’s actually starting all over again.”

Whether they skipped kindergarten and pre-K or spent much of their school years learning over Zoom, students in the primary grades didn’t have a normal introduction to reading. Educators note that less time to build vocabulary skills through socializing and disparities in children’s home lives — some had parents who read to them every night while others missed out — have contributed to the gaps. But reading experts and tutoring providers say they’re seeing students make strong gains with one-on-one support. The pandemic, they add, has only brought greater awareness to a persistent challenge. 

“What has happened in the past couple years is more dramatic, but it’s not anything new for us who work in early literacy. Children have been struggling with reading for years and years,” said Kate Bauer-Jones, who runs Future Forward, an early literacy and family engagement program that works with districts in Alabama, Georgia and Wisconsin. The program recently received a $14 million from the U.S. Department of Education to expand to eight more states.

to improve reading instruction continue to spread, but Kymyona Burk, senior policy fellow for early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, said it can take two to three years before districts start to see gains. Schools, she said, also need to identify children who might have learning disabilities and provide parents with materials to use at home.

She added that even when children returned to in-person learning, social distancing from peers and teachers still got in the way of listening and speaking, which contribute to early reading skills. 

The Amplify data also shows racial disparities, with Black and Hispanic students in K-2 not making as strong of a comeback as white students and gaps growing larger than they were before the pandemic.

Amplify assesses students with DIBELS, or Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills — a widely used measure of early reading development. The results are drawn from a national sample of 400,000 K-5 students from 1,300 schools in 37 states, allowing the researchers to compare pre-pandemic and current performance. While the schools in the research sample are more likely to be in large urban areas — and spent a longer period on remote or hybrid learning — Paul Gazzerro, Amplify’s director of data analytics, said he’s seeing similar performance across all schools using its assessment, which he described as “sobering.”

DIBELS itself doesn’t involve a lot of reading, but helps to predict how well children develop literacy skills by testing how fast and accurately they identify words, explained Rachael Gabriel, an associate professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut.

She agreed that racial gaps in the early grades are widening and that “students are coming into K and 1 with different sets of skills” than before the pandemic. But at the same time, schools are “doubling down” on remediation and using both virtual and in-person tutoring programs to help students catch up.

She urged parents without access to tutoring to keep reading and writing with their children.

“This doesn’t solve the problem,” she said, “but it’s a protective factor that makes students more resilient” when instruction doesn’t match their needs.

Future Forward’s tutors are seeing those needs up close.

“We have first-graders who can’t sing the alphabet song,” Bauer-Jones said. “We’re seeing first graders coming in with no familiarity with text.”

During remote learning, her tutors mailed magnetic letters, books and literacy materials to children’s homes. But even if students consistently participated in Zoom sessions, those were “in no way, shape or form equivalent to in-person learning,” she said. 

In fact, she added, tutors don’t see much difference in skills between young children who skipped pre-K or kindergarten in 2020-21 completely and those who spent much of that year in virtual learning.

Now that students are back in school, Bauer-Jones is concerned about the second graders who have “never had a normal school experience,” she said, asking a question also on the minds of most teachers and parents: “What in the world are we going to see from those kids when they hit the third grade benchmark next year?”

‘Undoing the trauma’

Many of this year’s third-graders also missed key opportunities to become stronger readers, said Jessica Sliwerski, CEO of Open Up Resources, a nonprofit curriculum provider, and founder of , a virtual tutoring model that offers students 15 minutes of one-on-one help over Zoom during the school day. Now in California, New York and Massachusetts, the program will serve 1,000 students by this fall. 

Sliwerski acknowledged the challenges of expanding tutoring, but noted that depending on volunteers can limit a program’s success. Her tutors aren’t volunteers; they make $20 per hour.

“You can’t affect sustainable change through reliance on volunteers,” she said. “I want people who might go work in an Amazon warehouse to come be a tutor.”

She recounted how In October, some third graders tested at kindergarten and first grade levels, when by the end of first, they should be automatically recognizing words and reading them fluently. 

Results from a pilot program at Kipp Bridge Academy in West Oakland showed that when tutors began working with the third graders on decoding skills, they responded with 77 percent accuracy on a DIBELS “oral reading fluency” test. After 53 days, their accuracy increased to 86 percent.

Sliwerski called the growth “powerful.”

“It’s changing their identities as readers and undoing the trauma that they brought into the program when they said things like, ‘I’m not a good reader’ and ‘I hate reading,’” she said. “This group of students will not necessarily leave us on grade level, but will leave us as stronger, more accurate decoders.”