TinyIvy

Over 65% of students fail to read proficiently at grade level, and that story is far worse for students who are poor, black, Latinx, ELLs or have special needs. 

The reason for this performance is simple: reading in English is uniquely challenging because our letters and sounds have a complex relationship. In other languages like this (Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Arabic), "training wheels" provide a perfect path to sound out every word. TinyIvy has done the same for English.

Our system enables students to learn at rates approaching those of simpler, transparent languages like Spanish or Finnish, where reading accuracy is typically mastered in six to ten months of instruction. We have developed curricula, teaching aides, and games students can play to learn to read, enabling high-quality English literacy instruction in remote, hybrid, or physical settings to close the Opportunity Gap nationwide.

The vast majority of kids in America don't read on grade level. They are trapped in a cycle of low literacy that leads directly to limited opportunity. They come from families and communities that faced the same challenges and arrived at the same outcome. 

And yet, no research, pedagogy, curriculum, or program has proven a powerful, scalable, and cost-effective solution to alter the trajectory of our reading scores as a nation. Forty-nine states show flat or declining reading proficiency scores between 2017 and 2019. Programs like Head Start have no significant effect on reading outcomes (Pages, 2020). Technology adoption has no significant effect on reading outcomes (Neitzel et al.). $3.5B in School Improvement Grants were deployed in 2010 and had no significant impact on reading outcomes (Dragoset, 2017). 

In short, the problem is not just that too many kids can't read as well as they should. It is that we have proven, through large-scale systematic interventions, that there is no scalable way to change it. 

The solution is simple, bold and innovative: we modify the ABCs to make it easier to learn to read.

TinyIvy developed a system of "TIPS" that can be added to any text to make it perfectly simple to decode. The C in RACE would appear as a Ç, the A in TUNA would be Â. Every single sound is mapped to a specific TIPS mark, so every single word can be sounded out.

This fundamental concept is embedded into our content and curriculum, (both digital and print), enabling children as young as three to become independent readers and providing a unique pathway for accelerated literacy development to students who are reading below grade level proficiency.

The challenges described above are not felt equally by all students of English. Students in the fourth quartile of English readers are disproportionately impacted by the challenges of our disjointed spelling system. They also tend to be clustered in lower-funded school systems with higher teacher turnover, larger class sizes, and significantly fewer community resources.

The research is extremely clear in showing that improving the orthography of a language directly leads to improvements the accrue primarily to those who begin the program as the lowest performers. We maintain our focus on this by turning every site we deploy into a case study (both qualitative and quantitative) to continue to learn and adapt our program.

To maintain our focus on this population, we are working to secure grants that will enable us to deploy at low/no cost to the communities that stand to benefit most from this solution. 

The most powerful benefit of TIPS is its ability to enable students to read on their own. After memorizing 17 TIPS, kids can decode 100k words. 

Building early literacy in remote or hybrid environments is incredibly difficult, especially for young children. This is particularly true when parents and peers have lower literacy skills as well and can't easily support reading activities. 

TIPS creates a new paradigm for instruction. You teach (and students learn) a small number of facts, and then work independently to make progress.  Parents can learn and support learning alongside their children, one letter at a time.

Our solution is currently live in a handful of locations across the US, including one paid contract going live this summer in Park City, Utah. We also have one large location (800 students) in India. That said, we still feel that both product and product/market fit have yet to be proven and so the Pilot stage is definitely the right option for us.

We have literally invented a new alphabet to teach English. 

Our current writing system is a textbook example of a systemic structure that undermines access to education for millions. We have, as a nation, decided on many occasions to avoid simplifying spelling in order to preserve the etymology of words. This is a decision made by those in power to preserve the status quo at the expense of creating a pathway to literacy for more than half the country. 

Should our model prove as successful as early pilots and foundational research indicate, the literacy level of the entire United States could be transformed. The gap in achievement between high and low income students, black and white students, can close. We can roll out our program to prisons and bring literacy to communities and families that deserve a clear road towards prosperity.

Schools Served

Currently Served: 3

Serving in One Year: 50 

Serving in Five Years: 25,000

Impact goals are measured using standardized assessments to indicate performance improvement in literacy. These are often done using established assessments in use by our schools.

4 Paid FTEs: Sales (2), CTO, Curriculum

1 FTE that is commission compensated in India

3 Full Time Volunteers, including CEO. All from the Silverzweig family.

1 Summer Intern from William & Mary

The work is led by Zach Silverzweig, who was CTO and Chief Product Officer in a successful healthcare technology startup, leading that business from pre-revenue to over $25M in ARR. In building that business, Zach, who is not a nurse, had to learn to listen to nurses. His superpower is in his ability to view a product through the eyes of others and adapt it to their needs, even when they don't have the language to speak those needs explicitly. Zach taught his first pilot group in East Harlem, drawing heavily on that experience to design the product.

The core team is deeply rooted in the world we aim to support. Our most recent hire worked as an ELL teacher at Harlem Children's Zone, an Assistant Principal at Success Academy, and at the IDEAL school for special needs students. Our sales leader was an English Language Learner who struggled through the challenges our customers face every day.

We believe that a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership is paramount to our success. This would be true in any endeavor, but is even more important given the target population we aim to serve, which is largely mapped along racial lines.

One key way in which we aim to ensure diversity in our team is to require that for every role we fill, at least two qualified candidates must be black, latino, or lgbtx. For both the marketing and sales roles, this required direct outreach and networking by our CEO and advisors. 

As to specific goals, we are currently working to add an advisor with experience leading a large, urban district to our Advisory Board. We hope that increasing our exposure through programs like the MIT Solver challenge will help us achieve that goal.

The Solver represents a unique opportunity for TinyIvy to share our story, and we are extremely excited about the opportunity to work with the MIT team on this effort. As we said, reading is really a math problem. The probability of reading any given word correctly is just too low for kids to learn to read on their own. We can fix that. Once and for all, and for all mankind. It's a big dream.

We are looking for pioneer organizations that have the capacity, vision, and same bright hope for the future to step up and shout "This could work. This should work. You [Teachers/Principals/Tutors/District Leads] have to try it. "

The data shows that despite many efforts and massive funding on a variety of programs, there has been no change in literacy for 30 years. Until this year, when things became horribly worse and inequity ran rampant due to the pandemic.

We are looking for external validation, which Solver can help bring. We are looking for connections to schools and districts that are open to trying something new, which Solver can facilitate. We are looking for partners interested in researching various aspects of our program. We are looking for partners and distribution channels to help scale our solution over time. And, as we prove successful, we want to ensure access to high-quality, long-term capital that views our potential for social impact as the primary value of the company.

There are three areas of support we are looking for: The first is in helping to add an additional member to our advisory board to better reflect the communities we aim to serve. 

Second, we are looking to expand our product to include licensed content from publishers and could use support/guidance in how to accomplish this type of deal.

Finally, we would look for advice, guidance, introductions, and support in expanding our customer base to additional sites. 

There are a number of partnerships that would be helpful, but the most important would be through the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. This program has had contact with a huge number of educators and educator influencers around the world. We believe there could be potential to create content together that could be distributed through these channels to expand visibility into our work. 

Similarly, we think there could be potential channels for collaboration working with Ilana Schoenfeld and the Reach Every Reader project.

We believe in the power of the English language as a fundamental driver of global integration and unity, and see an amazing potential to work with Andan to identify areas where our unique method of instruction can be used to help refugee communities integrate and thrive in their new communities.

The $100,000 prize would be used to develop a series of books that help explain and contextualize the refugee experience, and create an Adult ESL program to compliment our early childhood education program. We would work to identify a group where we could pilot and conduct research on the efficacy of our teaching model in these communities, and document the benefits of English education on improving refugee outcomes in their host countries. 

This project would be particularly beneficial to various countries in Africa or communities in India, where English is the medium of instruction and supports a large portion of the economic opportunities. 

Our approach to teaching reading, using our TIPS diacritics to make decoding trivial, would be uniquely valuable in this context. It requires minimal teacher education, even volunteers could be effective in teaching reading. It also can be done extremely effectively via remote instruction.

The technology we have proposed in our application is like a wheel or a lever. It is a basic, fundamental instrument around which minimal forces can be applied with remarkable impact. When you redefine the ABCs and make reading in English transparent, everything changes.

We would like to apply for the AI for Humanity Prize with a proposal to use this funding to create a series of AI/ML solutions that leverage our technology and find unique, powerful ways to deliver on it's promise at scale.

In particular, our system of TIPS allows for a more refined collection of data related to letter-sound correspondence among children than ever before. We can utilize AI/ML algorithms to determine the quality of a vocal response to a given cue, and automate the coaching process or choice selection to better assist the learner.

We can also develop AI/ML solutions to be more adaptive and create more helpful difficulty progressions in the complexity of our reading program. The ultimate goal here would be the full AI automation of instruction in reading for children, with results far surpassing that capable by traditional means of instruction in traditional contexts for that instruction.

The technology we have proposed in our application is like a wheel or a lever. It is a basic, fundamental instrument around which minimal forces can be applied with remarkable impact. When you redefine the ABCs and make reading in English transparent, everything changes.

We would like to apply for the AI for Humanity Prize with a proposal to use this funding to create a series of AI/ML solutions that leverage our technology and find unique, powerful ways to deliver on it's promise at scale.

In particular, our system of TIPS allows for a more refined collection of data related to letter-sound correspondence among children than ever before. We can utilize AI/ML algorithms to determine the quality of a vocal response to a given cue, and automate the coaching process or choice selection to better assist the learner.

We can also develop AI/ML solutions to be more adaptive and create more helpful difficulty progressions in the complexity of our reading program. The ultimate goal here would be the full AI automation of instruction in reading for children, with results far surpassing that capable by traditional means of instruction in traditional contexts for that instruction.