CommonLit

Michelle Brown holds a B.A. in English Literature and Spanish from Butler University, and a master’s degree in Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Michelle began her career as a reading teacher at a high-poverty school in the Mississippi Delta. Later, as an English teacher in Boston, Michelle redesigned the existing reading curriculum and her students exceeded the state average in reading by nine percentage points. The glaring difference between access to resources in her Mississippi and Boston classrooms inspired Michelle to create CommonLit. Under Michelle’s leadership, CommonLit has grown to serve over 17 million registered teachers and students. She has received innovation awards from Teach For America, AT&T Aspire, Fast Forward, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was a finalist for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Change the World Competition.

CommonLit's mission is to ensure that all kids have the reading, writing, critical thinking, and communication skills they need to be successful in life. Through the CommonLit.org digital learning platform, we are scaling a research-based reading and writing program to reach all students, especially those in the most under-resourced schools. The ability to read, write, and communicate effectively are fundamental human rights, however a significant portion of children and adults globally are illiterate. Compounding this global literacy crisis, 67.6% of young learners around the world have seen their schooling directly impacted by the pandemic. Commonlit’s free online resources offer a high-quality distance learning solution to both students and educators, and the chance to eliminate the global literacy crisis.

School closures due to COVID-19 have impacted 124,000 schools and over 70 million students in the United States. Since March 1, CommonLit’s traffic has surged to 6x the expected levels for the time of year. Almost 3.5 million students have created accounts on CommonLit, over 24 million digital assignments have been submitted, and the site reached a new record high of 7 million unique users per month. CommonLit has become the core infrastructure of distance learning nationally in the United States including through formal, coordinated efforts with districts and states (LAUSD, Texas, Louisiana, etc.). The problem of a lack of equitable access to technology and digital learning resources has never been more apparent. CommonLit solves this problem by providing free access to high-quality, research-based reading and writing lessons that may be used digitally or in print.

CommonLit’s free platform for teachers and students provides over 2,000 digital lessons, authentic texts, rich media, paired passages, and actionable data reports. Our library includes primary and secondary source documents, news articles, speeches, and literary texts organized by topic, historical time period, and learning standard. Distance learning units, curated and written specifically for an at-home learning context, provide weeks of pre-planned instruction. The tech platform provides struggling learners with scaffolds such as read-aloud and translation into 27 languages. 

Our theory of action is that if we provide a high-quality, equitable, and free literacy curriculum, aligned formative and summative assessments, and meaningful performance data through our website, along with professional training, we build teacher capacity to use research-based instructional practices. As a result, students in grades 3-12 will develop advanced analytical reading and writing skills, even as schools remain closed.

CommonLit is particularly focused on Black and Latino students, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners. Approximately 69% of public schools served by CommonLit qualify for Title I (high-poverty) support, and we are particularly popular in the Southeast United States. Since COVID began, the top 10 most active districts include Miami Dade, Chicago Public Schools, Gwinnett County (GA), Palm Beach, Los Angeles Unified School District, and Hillsborough Public Schools. CommonLit also serves hundreds of schools and districts with more robust and direct wraparound services including assessments, consulting, and teacher coaching/PD.

Over the last decade and a half, 15 million students graduated from high school reading below the basic level. Today, only 35% of high school seniors are reading at or above proficiency, and approximately 70% need some form of remediation. This problem disproportionately affects Black, Latino, and low-income students who attend the most under-resourced schools. There are 32 million low-income children in the United States, and an overwhelming majority of them do not have access to adequate literacy instruction. These students are also the hardest hit by learning loss due to COVID-19 school closures, unless we act now.

CommonLit came to life when founder and CEO Michelle Brown devised an idea to improve adolescent literacy rates by providing free resources and the ability to analyze student performance online. Brown was inspired to start CommonLit by her experiences teaching at a high-poverty school in the Mississippi Delta several years before; her classroom was in disrepair, her students’ reading aptitudes spanned seven different grade levels, and she did not have the resources she needed to succeed. She knew she had to change the game for students in low-income schools by giving teachers the tools to reach every student—and so the idea for CommonLit was born.

A child’s 8th grade reading aptitude is one of the best indicators of life outcomes, whether we’re looking at level of education, health, access to finance, or civic involvement. Yet too many of our most vulnerable kids are being left behind. A recent national study found that only 20% of low-income students are reading on grade level. This literacy crisis bleeds over into all other subject areas, and the learning gap haunts kids for the rest of their lives. We must do better.

CommonLit is uniquely well-positioned to make a measurable impact in the lives of millions of low-income children. Third-party research has proven that kids who use CommonLit perform better on state assessments of reading and writing than their peers, and the more that students use CommonLit, the greater the learning gains they experience. We also have a scalable, cost-effective platform and program that is used in 70% of US schools, and curries exceptional goodwill in the educator community. By creating a research-backed education solution with a realistic path to massive scale, Brown and CommonLit are poised to truly move the needle on the education crisis facing the world today.

CommonLit holds a unique place in the market as a technology nonprofit. In the U.S., there are very few education technology nonprofits - the most prominent being Wikipedia and Khan Academy, which both serve tens of millions of people. There are also very few resources and accelerator programs designed specifically to help entrepreneurs that choose this unique, but super-scalable model. Michelle overcame these hurdles through sheer grit and commitment to her mission. Michelle began the organization in graduate school as a student organization and won a cash award from Harvard for her pilot study with 222 students in nine low-income schools in Boston. She worked with pro-bono lawyers to develop an innovative copyright strategy that would enable CommonLit to host copyrighted content (with permission) while giving it away for free to schools under a non-commercial share-alike license. Michelle leveraged every cent of that initial $5,000 grant along with roughly $10,000 of her own money (gifts from her recent wedding) to build an initial version of the CommonLit platform, working for free for over two years with the help of volunteers and contractors.

In 2016 when CommonLit received its first significant grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Brown didn't have experience hiring or managing large teams. Nevertheless, Brown had to hire an entire team of 10+ people within weeks to kick off the work that CommonLit had committed to doing. She was able to find an exceptional group of individuals, yet something was missing. It wasn't until she took the time to sit down and think through the organization's key values that the group of individual employees turned into a coherent team. These values (Sweat the Details, Learn & Share, Align Yourself, and Yield to the Team) are something that the team now lives every day -- they are referred to in the hiring process, during the formal review process, during times of key decision-making, and even in regular 1:1 coaching meetings. Michelle knew that it was worth the time it took to create and establish CommonLit’s key values so that her team could have a common language and understanding of what’s most important, allowing the real work to begin. This has been incredibly helpful to CommonLit’s overall cultural and collaborative efforts, particularly as the organization has grown in size.

CommonLit democratizes access to educational content for millions of users. We offer a targeted and research-based approach to literacy skill development by which students learn vocabulary, analytical skills, communication skills, argument-building skills, synthesis skills and problem solving, all for free. There are several for-profit companies that provide interactive digital reading and analytics tools using a stripped-down free version of their product aimed at teachers, and a paid version that includes content and analytics. These tools are not accessible or optimized for low-income individuals and cost tens of thousands of dollars per district.

Our solution is super-scalable and cost effective. It costs us about $0.28 to deliver CommonLit to a student, and as we gain more users, this will continue to drop. By making CommonLit free, we are ensuring that more low-income students can come to rely on the platform without fearing future fees or expirations of the service.

CommonLit’s theory of change is that by providing free, unrestricted access to a high quality literacy and assessment program, teachers and school districts will build capacity, resulting in students making measurable gains in the skills they need to be successful.

CommonLit currently serves over 17 million registered teachers and students. At our current rate of growth, within the next year CommonLit will surpass 25 million registered users. Within five years, we will expand our international user base and serve over 75 million parents, teachers, and students with free learning resources.

Within the next year, CommonLit will release a full-course reading and writing curriculum for our US audience. We expect broad national adoption of this curriculum, which will be the first free, fully digital resource of its kind. CommonLit already serves users in 70% of US schools, and delivering a high-quality curriculum at scale will be a game-changing opportunity in the education field. Within the next 5 years, we will expand our international work, deepening partnerships in Latin America and replicating our success in an international context.

CommonLit’s greatest challenge is keeping up with demand for our free resources. As a small team of 33 employees--including software engineers, curriculum writers, data scientists, and product designers--we are working around the clock to support the flood of new teachers, parents, and students who are signing up for our free resources. In the last two months of the school year alone, almost 3.5 million new students registered on CommonLit. We expect the fall to present an even greater surge.

Our team has re-trained and redistributed our existing personnel to ensure that we are ready for a surge in traffic as school closures force kids around the world to continue learning from home. We have also set up tech safeguards to ensure that our site is ready to handle exponentially more traffic than it has historically had to withstand.

CommonLit partners with over 400 publishers and authors, including Scientific American, National Geographic, American Psychological Association, Malcolm Gladwell, MIT News, Nobel Foundation, Smithsonian Media, Psychology Today, RocketLit, Dr. Barbara Radner, Society for Science and the Public (Science News for Students), Cricket Media, Highlights for Children, and National Public Radio. Partnerships with these organizations allow us to provide children with high-quality reading passages.

In addition to the thousands of schools and districts CommonLit serves, we also have special partnerships with 50 pilot schools across the country using our full-year curriculum. These schools allow CommonLit to conduct classroom observations, and share before/after state testing data to measure the impact of our resources. 

Finally, in Mexico and throughout Latin America, CommonLit partners with national ministries of education (Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru), school networks (UNETE), teachers’ colleges and unions (SINADEP), and other mission-aligned organizations (Discovery Education) to disseminate information about our program.

CommonLit sells wraparound services to schools and districts, to complement our free curriculum, platform, and teacher/student resources. These services include district-wide data-analytics dashboards and consultations, teacher professional development training (virtual and in person), and student assessments delivered through a proprietary, secure testing platform. As a nonprofit organization, we will continue to rely on philanthropy to support the most innovative and R&D-focused aspects of our work, but our earned revenue will sustain our core program within 5 years. 

CommonLit’s earned revenue services are projected to sustain the organization’s core activities within 5 years.

CommonLit has invested over $10M in the research and development of the CommonLit learning platform and the digital library. Funding for this has come from supporters like Google.org, the U.S. Department of Education (Innovative Approaches to Literacy), the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (DC SOAR), the Epic Foundation, Robin Hood Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Cisco, and many other generous benefactors. CommonLit has also brought in more than $2M in earned revenue through its data analytics, professional development, and assessment services.

CommonLit is seeking to raise $15M to expand its international programs, complete the build of its full-course reading and writing curriculum for grades 3-12, and to continue improvements to its tech capabilities, including a new offline platform.

CommonLit’s expenses for 2020 will be approximately $4.8M.

The Elevate Prize would give our organization and our founder, Michelle Brown, the visibility and recognition we need in order to attract supporters to continue to scale our work.

CommonLit is seeking partnerships with mission-aligned NGOs and nonprofit organizations, as well as national ministries of education, to aid in the dissemination of our free learning resources. We are also seeking partnerships with other technology companies with a focus on delivering learning solutions to regions with little to no internet connectivity. Finally, we are seeking to partner with foundations and corporations that are interested in supporting our work in fighting the learning crisis during COVID-19 and beyond.