School Reform Program, Known for Science of Reading Approach, Looks to Grow

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Success For All, a teaching approach using the science of reading, could expand to 150 more schools in the next three years with the help of $13.5 million in grants from an anonymous donor.

Success For All, developed in the late 1980s by two Johns Hopkins University professors, relies heavily on phonics and group learning, with students reading whole story books instead of textbooks. 

It has shown outsized gains in some cities and was recently featured in episodes of the “Sold a Story” podcast about surprisingly high reading scores in the small, Appalachian city of Steubenville, Ohio.

Used in about 500 schools nationwide, Success for All’s foundation is offering $100,000 “scholarships” to help cover training, learning materials and teaching coaches to 50 district, charter or private schools that are adopting it in each of the next three years. 

Most of the $15 million needed for the scholarships comes from a single donation from a family foundation that wishes to be anonymous. Success For All officials said the donor gave the program $200,000 a few years ago. After being taken on a tour of schools in Virginia that use the approach, the family offered $13.5 million — their largest donation to date — to help launch the program in schools with large numbers of low-income students. 

Julie Wible, CEO of the Success For All Foundation, said the donor wanted to improve literacy for low-income students — and Success For All offered more than just a curriculum, but also a change in teaching styles as well as social-emotional help.

“This concept of supporting an entire school gave them clarity about how to guarantee improvement in schools,” Wible said. “A high quality reading model is critical but it will not be enough to significantly change an entire school.”

Most of the grants for this fall have already been awarded, but Success For All is still accepting applications for a few that remain.

Success For All estimates that schools will spend about $150,000 in the first year of adding the program, then lesser amounts the next few years. Wible said the program wanted to help schools, but still wanted them to have “skin in the game” so they would be committed to the shift.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which added Success For All at 18 of its schools in the 2023-24 school year, was awarded scholarships to bring the program to four more schools this fall. 

Robert Tagorda, chief academic officer for the archdiocese, said the archdiocese chose Success For All because they believe it will help low-income students, including many who are learning English as their second language.

The program is already showing gains, so the archdiocese will apply for additional scholarships to add more schools for the 2026-27 school year. 

Success for All received significant federal funding in the 1990s amid President Bill Clinton’s push to support students at Title I schools but was essentially shut out of President George W. Bush’s Reading First initiative, prompting a complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general. The program rebounded during the Obama administration when it received an i3 grant designed to scale up evidence-based initiatives.

More recently, the program has received attention through coverage of reading gains in Steubenville, Ohio, which started using Success For All in 2000. Once known for a well-publicized rape case involving its high school football team, the Steubenville school district drew better notice in 2016 when Stanford University researchers showed the district had much higher reading scores than expected at schools where nearly every student is considered economically disadvantaged. 

The district has also been an outlier for its lower-than-expected absenteeism rates for its socioeconomic issues. At the same time, strong test results in elementary school have faded by high school.

The “Sold a Story” podcast, widely credited with shifting national debate about reading instruction toward the science of reading, aired three episodes about Steubenville this spring. Episodes covered the district’s use of Success For All over the last 25 years and the challenges it faced in winning approval from Ohio and other states as a science of reading approach because there was no textbook that could be reviewed.

Wible said the program now has approval from most states.

Lynnett Gorman, Principal of Steubenville’s Pugliese West Elementary, a 2021 National Blue Ribbon School, credits Success For All for the district’s strong results.

“It really has helped our students be successful,” she said. “I hope schools who are interested apply for the grant scholarships. What a great opportunity.”

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