But what about the longer-term story in Steubenville? Although early academic success is incredibly important, it’s only part of what students need to achieve better outcomes down the road. As Chad Aldeman pointed out in a recent analysis of Steubenville’s strategy, “Despite its near-perfect early reading scores, strong middle and high school achievement and a 96% graduation rate, the district’s post-high school results are only slightly above statewide averages in terms of college-going and completion rates and the percentage of graduates who find ‘gainful employment.’ ”

Academic preparation is a critical nut that has not fully been cracked, which is why success stories like Steubenville are noteworthy. But academics are only one part of what students need to find success. 

First, it’s critical to help students figure out what they want to do next and see relevance in what they’re learning. This means schools must support career awareness and exploration well before high school and help students begin to imagine their future selves early — with the understanding that their vision is likely to change many times on their way to finding a fulfilling career. Students should have the chance to engage in meaningful experiences in , with age-appropriate ways to start to explore what they like, what they’re good at and which potential careers might suit them. Educators and counselors also need to help students build connections between what they’re learning in school and real-world careers so that they see in their education. 

Career exposure and exploration are important, but they are not sufficient. Students also need wraparound support to enable them to successfully move on to education and training opportunities after high school.

Last year, 15 national organizations came together to help identify the conditions that districts can create to provide effective supports for students’ success in their chosen postsecondary pathways. The they laid out can serve as a roadmap for helping more students find long-term success.

One area of particular need is advising. In nearly all high schools across the U.S., counselors are overloaded, making it challenging for every student to receive the personal guidance needed to navigate the next steps beyond high school. As a result, it’s important for districts to think more creatively about expanding the “who” when it comes to advising. This can include leveraging “near-peers” who can serve as trusted sources of guidance. A number of communities — ranging from rural Appalachia in Kentucky to New York City — are to dramatically expand the number of caring young adults who can connect with students and help them find their paths to success. They can provide advice on not only which classes to take, but which work-based learning experiences to pursue, which colleges to consider, how to secure financial aid and much more. 

Because the need for navigational support doesn’t end with high school graduation, there has been a recent trend among K-12 and to invest in persistence coaches to guide recent graduates through their first year of college. Taking on a degree of responsibility for their students’ success even after they have moved on is a critical step for these schools toward ensuring that those outcomes improve. 

Finally, districts and states need to measure longer-term student outcomes, transparently report them and use them to drive decisionmaking and improvements. With a greater focus on like college enrollment and persistence, degree attainment, employment rates and wages, districts can gain a better understanding of where students are and are not succeeding and how to help more of them to get on the right path. Ohio deserves credit for the powerful it has made available; without them we would only have half the story in Steubenville. Unfortunately, in far too many states, K-12 leaders operate in the dark when it comes to how their students after graduation.

Steubenville can teach the country a great deal about helping students find academic success against the odds. Which districts will emerge as the star pioneers in long-term student outcomes? 

But what about kids living in poverty? Don’t schools need more money, and more staff, to be able to get good results?

Well, yes and no. Poverty is certainly correlated to reading scores, and the best evidence suggests money helps boost a range of student outcomes.

But that doesn’t mean the best school district in the country is the most well-resourced or the one with the fanciest buildings or most prestigious alumni. In fact, based on how much students learn — which, in my opinion, is how schools should be evaluated — there’s perhaps no better district in the country than Steubenville, Ohio.

Last fall, I worked with ����Ӱ��’s Art & Technology Director Eamonn Fitzmaurice to find districts where students had high reading scores despite serving large concentrations of low-income students. We highlighted Steubenville, a high-poverty district in Ohio’s Rust Belt, as a true outlier. (In a follow-up piece, we showed that Steubenville was also exceptional at teaching kids math.)

But I wanted to revisit the case of Steubenville after it was spotlighted recently on Emily Hanford’s award-winning “” podcast. Are its results just a one-time fluke? And if not — if the results are real — what can other districts learn from Steubenville’s success?

First, it’s quickly apparent that Steubenville is not a flash in the pan. A 2012 story noted that its success traces back to the early 2000s.

It’s also incredibly consistent over time. I used the tool from the Education Data Center to look at its recent results. The graph below compares Steubenville’s third-grade reading proficiency rates (in blue) to the statewide average (in gray). As the graph shows, Steubenville consistently gets 95% to 99% of its third graders over the proficiency bar. In 2018, it had a bad year, and “only” 93% of third graders scored proficient. But the district did not suffer much of a drop-off in the wake of the pandemic, hitting 97% in spring 2022.

Steubenville’s results are also remarkably strong across student groups. Last year, for example, 100% of its Black students, 99% of its low-income students and 92% of its students with disabilities scored proficient in third grade reading.

How does Steubenville get such remarkable results? What can other districts learn from its success?

It’s not that the district has extra money or more staff. Steubenville $10,718 per student last year, which was about $1,500 less than the average Ohio district and well below many other districts in America. It also had slightly more students per teacher than other comparable districts.

Some things Steubenville does have are not easily replicable. As Robert Pondiscio pointed out in a recent column, the district can boast incredible continuity: It has been following the same reading program, called , for the last 25 years. Teacher turnover is low, and the same superintendent has been in place for a decade.

But Hanford a few things that Steubenville did differently that other schools can learn from. Steubenville, for example, offers subsidized preschool beginning at age 3. And in those early years, teachers regularly remind students to speak in complete sentences as language practice for later, when those kids will start learning to read and write.

The district also deploys staff differently than most do. Every elementary teacher, even the phys ed instructor, leads a reading class. And during that reading block — which all students have at the same time — children are grouped with peers performing at the same level, regardless of age.

Steubenville kids are also practicing constantly, either as part of the whole class or in small groups, where kids work on their fluency skills by reading aloud to each other. That stands in contrast to schools that prefer to give kids silent reading or “” time, which can be great for kids who already read well but or even harmful for children who aren’t ready for long blocks of independent free reading.

Now, it’s worth noting that Steubenville’s robust education results have not guaranteed kids a path to economic security. Despite its near-perfect early reading scores, strong middle and high school achievement and a 96% graduation rate, the district’s post-high school are only slightly above statewide averages in terms of college-going and completion rates and the percentage of graduates who find “gainful employment.”

But those early adulthood outcomes are at least partly tied to the economic climate in a given community, and it’s hard to find fault with anything that the school district itself directly controls. Most districts would envy Steubenville’s impressive results. 

I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Emily Hanford, who has done more to build demand for scientifically sound reading instruction than nearly anyone in the last decade — not just in journalism but in education at large. Her original “Sold a Story” series was a seismic shift, grabbing public attention and spurring state legislation mandating curriculum and instruction rooted in the science of reading. Now, she’s back with , as potent as ever. These tell the story of Steubenville, Ohio — a gritty steel town-turned-reading powerhouse thanks to a 25-year commitment to Success for All, a research-backed, whole-school reform model Nancy Madden and Bob Slavin began developing as reading researchers at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s. Like all of Hanford’s work, the new episodes are deeply reported, well-informed, engaging and must-hear podcasts. I binge-listened to them twice on a long drive this week. 

Here are my takeaways: 

Continuity Is King

In education, especially for schools serving disadvantaged kids, curriculum changes as often as losing baseball teams swap managers — new year, new playbook, same old slump. Not so in Steubenville, where sticking with Success for All for 25 years has been a game-changer. In fact, they haven’t changed the game in a quarter-century. Minimal churn — low teacher turnover, a decade-long superintendent and 48% of staff are local grads — breeds a stability other schools and districts can only envy. Hanford gets baffled looks when she asks Steubenville teachers if they’d ever heard of Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell or even balanced literacy. “Steubenville had no need to pursue the latest trend, to even know what the latest trend was,” she reports, “because what they were doing was working. It’s been working. For 25 years.”

Success for All Is Really Good

SFA is a standout, backed by a mountain of research that Hanford highlights. It’s not just a reading curriculum, it’s a whole-school overhaul — curriculum and instruction, professional development, leadership training, etc. — that’s lifted Steubenville’s poorest kids to nationally recognized heights, pushing reading scores two grade levels above peers’. Hanford cites research that shows eighth graders staying ahead in reading, with fewer held back or in special ed, cutting costs over time. Interestingly, SFA also shaped Success Academy’s early days, as I chronicled in my book How the Other Half Learns. A New York hedge fund manager, John Petry, wrote a charter school application after he and his partner Joel Greenblatt persuaded and paid for a Queens, New York, public school to implement SFA to great effect. They hired Eva Moskowitz to lead it. About the same time, Steubenville was looking for a new reading program. “Most people familiar with the reading research seemed to agree at the time that there were probably only two reading programs that had been tested and proven with scientific research,” Hanford reports: Success for All and Direct Instruction. 

‘Scripted Curriculum’ Would Benefit from the Emily Hanford Effect

SFA and Direct Instruction both face a big — and, for some, insurmountable — hurdle: Both are scripted, and some teachers hate that. Teachers tend to valorize freedom over recipes, and that resistance keeps SFA and Direct Instruction niche, even with Steubenville’s success and DI’s decades of data. Could “Sold a Story” change that misperception? We’ll see. What has made Hanford’s work so impactful is that she demonstrates how teachers have been misled about what is and is not effective practice; her work casts teachers not as sinners, but as sinned against by schools of education, publishing companies and instructional gurus. The same is true about instructional design and “scripts.”  In “How to Be the Next Emily Hanford,” a piece I wrote for with my colleague Riley Fletcher last year, we encouraged education journalists to follow Hanford’s lead and cast their gaze on classroom practice — teaching and learning — rather than the policy and politics that tend to dominate education reporting. If these new episodes bolster SFA and DI’s reputations and discredit detractors, spotlighting evidence over perceptions of rigidity, it will be a big service.

Teacher Buy-In is Huge

SFA isn’t just a program — it’s a pact, insisting that teachers vote to adopt it before it takes root. Steubenville conducted a secret ballot in which 100% of the staff agreed to adopt it — proof that the buy-in was real. That’s no small thing. I’ve often rankled my fellow curriculum advocates by saying I’d rather my daughter’s teacher be a Kool-Aid-swilling acolyte of a curriculum and pedagogy I dislike than have my preferred curriculum imposed on her and implemented begrudgingly. In How the Other Half Learns, I expected to write about curriculum and instruction at Success Academy but surprised myself by writing more about school culture: The X factor that makes those schools soar is every adult in a kid’s life singing from the same hymnal. SFA gets that: Without teachers on board, even the best program flops. Steubenville’s success hinges on that buy-in, a lesson too many reform efforts — and too many top-down technocratic reformers — miss or elide. Winning hearts and minds matters. 

EdReports is a Mixed Blessing

EdReports looms large in Hanford’s latest episodes, a flawed gatekeeper in the science of reading push. In her Steubenville saga, it’s a shadow player — SFA’s evidence shines and Steubenville was implementing it long before EdReports emerged on the scene. But not long ago Ohio’s initial “approved” list of reading curriculum snubbed SFA because EdReports hadn’t reviewed it, while green-lighting programs with weaker bona fides. How is that possible? EdReports was created to aid and abet Common Core implementation, not as a science of reading arbiter, yet states like Ohio leaned on it to approve curricula. That led to picks that often flunked the evidence test. Hanford shows EdReports’ clout — 40 publishers tweaked products for its ratings, and nearly 2,000 districts followed suit — but also its flaws: It gave high marks to programs employing discredited techniques like “three-cueing,” while SFA, as a “whole-school” model, was beyond its scope. That disconnect nearly cost Steubenville its proven program. I’ve long put EdReports in the category of “things I choose to love.” If you believe, as I do, that high-quality instructional materials are critical to student success, EdReports helped pushed curriculum to the center of reform conversations. But Hanford’s reporting echoes a worry I’ve harbored: Standards alignment isn’t enough. Built for Common Core, EdReports encourages a view of reading that is neutral to agnostic on quality. A “standards-based” view of reading means you can teach Dickens or dreck. EdReports’ ratings don’t tell me if a program’s texts are worth the time. 

Another Mixed Blessing: State Lists of Approved Curriculum 

I’ve written favorably about state efforts to center curriculum in reform, like Louisiana’s push to “” by curating top-tier options. But Hanford shows critical pitfalls: Ohio banned three-cueing and built “science of reading” lists — bravo! — yet nearly axed SFA because EdReports didn’t review it. Steubenville dodged a bullet, but the misstep echoes : good intent, shaky execution. Lists can guide, but when they lean on flawed tools over hard evidence, they’re more clutter than clarity.

Steubenville proves schools can defy the odds with evidence, continuity and teacher buy-in — not just phonics. SFA and DI shine — I’ve been hyping DI and — yet state lists and EdReports risk sidelining them for flashier flops. Education is cursed with too much innovation, not enough execution. These episodes scream it louder. Hanford’s work remains a wake-up call, and these episodes raise the stakes: We’ve got the evidence, so why aren’t we using it?