The effect of the Colorado Early Literacy Grant on elementary student achievement

Abstract

In 2012, the Colorado Legislature passed the READ Act. Like many literacy policy interventions, the READ Act focused on phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. To support the Act, the state simultaneously established the Early Literacy Grant (ELG). The ELG targeted professional development, better use of assessment, and the implementation of approved materials, along with external consultants, to support applicant schools’ fidelity of implementation of science of reading strategies. ELG is now in the sixth cohort, having accepted 151 successful applicant schools across 64 districts for a total of nearly $53 million. We leverage the multi-year, multi-cohort implementation of the grant to measure the differential effects of treatment on Colorado Measures of Academic Success reading scores, the state’s federally aligned statewide testing regimen. We do so via a series of event study models for a total sample of nearly 20,000 grade-school-year observations. We present results for the aggregate main effect of ELG participation across all treated schools and time as well as ELG Cohort and grade-specific results. We find no statistically significant positive results for ELG participation across all analyses. After the conclusion of grant support, we find negative effects primarily driven by the performance of third graders.