Air Reading awarded an Innovation Grant from Accelerate to Support High-Impact Tutoring

May 25th, 2023 | Company News

San Mateo, CA - Air Reading is one of 32 organizations selected from over 100 organizations by Accelerate, a national nonprofit working to make high-impact tutoring a standard feature of the American school day. With the $150,000 grant, Air Reading is looking forward to partnering with Districts, Accelerate and researchers to make its successful tutoring model even more effective and efficient. 

We're excited to be able to learn with and from the Accelerate network of expertise. This grant will help advance how Air Reading can make its reading program even more effective and scalable for schools. We're striving for sustainability of these learning opportunities, and with Accelerate support, we're confident we will get there. Soon.

Air Reading provides high-impact tutoring for reading instruction from Pre-K to 6th grade needs. In 1:1 sessions or small groups of up to 4 students with similar reading skills and needs, a trained Air Reading coach provides direct reading instruction following the Air Reading curriculum. Aligned with the Science of Reading and evidence based strategies of how we learn to read, the Air Reading curriculum provides students support in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, as appropriate. 

Air Reading sessions occur live, yet online, and are flexible and easy to implement during school hours, after-school or in homes. The Accelerate grant will focus on supporting implementation during school hours, and will include a research effort to inform Air Reading’s work as well as broader tutoring efforts in general. 

“The evidence behind tutoring as an intervention is strong and the field is making tremendous progress, but we still need more providers with a proven track record that can also scale,” said Accelerate CEO Kevin Huffman. “Before the federal pandemic relief dollars dry up, we have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to identify these providers and ensure they are able to deliver cost-effective programs and present evidence that they get results for kids.”

Air Reading was selected for a Call to Effective Action grant because of its commitment to developing and scaling a research-backed tutoring model that improves outcomes for all students, especially those in historically underserved communities.

Air Reading aims to make effective learning opportunities accessible and scalable to all learners. While the work we're doing now centers on reading tutoring, we believe it can positively impact the entire education system. We're excited to work with Accelerate to learn from our tutoring program and expand its impact.

About Accelerate

Accelerate is a nonprofit organization, incubated and launched by the national nonprofit America.

Achieves, that seeks to embed high-impact tutoring programs into public schools now and for the long term. Launched in April 2022 with an initial fund of $65 million, Accelerate funds and supports innovation in schools, launches high-quality research, and advances a federal and state policy agenda to support this work.  For more information, visit http://www.accelerate.us.