LIFT10, Literacy Impact Forged Together, was Reading Partners’ four-year initiative to increase reading skills and put students on track to third grade reading proficiency in our Oakland partner schools from 2016-2020. With the support of our generous funders, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), the City of Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf and the Oakland Promise, as well as community partners such as the Oakland Literacy Coalition, Reading Partners San Francisco Bay Area launched the LIFT10 initiative during the 2016-17 school year.
LIFT10 was originally conceptualized as an attempt to create a system-level change in OUSD, concentrating on a cohort of kindergarteners in 2016-17, to influence their third grade reading level scores by 10 percentage points over the course of 4 years. It was an ambitious goal, and one dependent on partnerships and collaborations with other actors in the Oakland literacy space.
Over the course of the initiative, our goals evolved, and we experienced both many challenges and many successes. Ultimately, we are proud of the impact we were able to achieve by the end of the 2019-20 school year: we activated 2,500 weekly tutors from the Oakland community to serve just over 3,000 students with nearly 100,000 literacy tutoring sessions.
To learn more, download our LIFT10 final report here.