Nominee: ACE: A Community for Education Program: AmeriCorps Issue Area: Education

Central Texas has the fastest growing zero-to-five year old population in the country, and, in the last decade, has experienced a 107% increase in the number of children living in poverty. The English Language Learner population has increased 105%. This has significant implications for our schools and our community. Fewer than 42% of low-income students are “kindergarten ready” by age 5. In fact, many low-income students start school already two years behind their more economically advantaged peers in the skills and experiences that predict success in school.

School districts and teachers alone cannot close this achievement gap. ACE focuses our efforts here, at the critical juncture where reading at grade level before reaching third grade is vital for successful learning beyond.

ACE: A Community for Education places highly trained AmeriCorps tutors into low-income elementary schools to ensure that children in kindergarten through 2nd grade advance to grade level in reading before third grade, setting them on a trajectory of success in school. ACE leverages the manpower of AmeriCorps tutors to provide intensive, daily, evidence-based reading tutoring to children who are behind in reading and at risk for falling further behind without early intervention. ACE is working to expand this effective, bilingual model in Texas, and served over 2,200 pre-kindergarten through second grade students in 2012-13.

ACE is an intensive, data-driven program that works to accelerate reading ability for 2,000 young children each year. This year, 75% of students tutored by ACE reached grade level benchmarks in reading and sustained their progress.

There are three key factors to ACE’s successful approach to early childhood literacy:

First, ACE is intensive—each child is seen daily for 30 minutes of one-to-one tutoring.

Second, ACE is data driven—we monitor each child’s progress weekly, and do benchmark reading assessments at the beginning, middle and end of the year.

Third, ACE tutors are well-trained and supervised—on average, ACE tutors receive over 60 hours of training in evidence-based, early reading strategies, and are supervised and supported on-site by ACE literacy experts each week.

In three years, ACE has expanded from 4 to 21 schools and from 250 to 2,200 students served. ACE has been providing early literacy intervention to young struggling readers since its inception in 1994 and is the only State*National program in Texas to be in continuing operation since AmeriCorps began in 1994.