CommonLit, the free website for 5th- to 12th-grade literacy, is excited to announce receiving a grant of $3.9 million from the U.S. Department of Education Innovative Approaches to Literacy Program.
CommonLit was founded by Michelle Brown, a ‘14 HGSE graduate, while she was a student in the EPM program. Under Michelle’s leadership, the organization has grown to reach hundreds of thousands of students in over 12,000 schools and has received funding from Teach for America, AT&T, Fast Forward, AmerisourceBergen, and Google.org. This week, CommonLit even landed a feature story in TechCrunch.
This funding from the Department of Education allows CommonLit to extend its literacy platform and provide more open educational resources and digital tools to improve teacher practice in grades 5-12. The platform is designed to help teachers to motivate students at varying reading levels to achieve proficiency in reading. CommonLit will also expand its free digital library to more than 1000 texts with question sets.
“Two and a half years ago, CommonLit was a student organization at HGSE. It is so exciting and humbling to look back and see what we’ve accomplished. The grant from the DOE is a tremendous validation,” said Michelle Brown, Founder & CEO of CommonLit, Inc.
CommonLit’s curriculum promotes higher-order thinking, analysis and college-level discussion, ensuring that all students graduate high school with literacy they need to be successful. The online product emerges from research-proven best practices for reading instruction.
Today, CommonLit is based at the 1776 global tech incubator in Washington, D.C. Watch a demo of CommonLit’s newest features here.
For more information about job openings, visit www.commonlit.org/careers.
