Littera Receives Gates Foundation Grant to Help School Districts Promote Equity

December 14, 2021

Last fall, as learning loss and students falling behind were the headlines dominating K-12 education, we started Littera. Our goal then and now is to enable districts to design, deliver, and monitor high-quality, cost-effective tutoring to address achievement gaps and to accelerate learning.

Over the course of our first year, we’ve made a lot of progress in building both a technology platform and a team dedicated to helping educators unlock their students’ academic potential. We have been fortunate to work with great schools and districts across the country to provide crucial academic support services for the students who need it most, personalizing the delivery of programs while enabling greater scale. 

Research shows that high-dosage tutoring - aligned with district instruction - produces large learning gains for a wide range of students, including those who have fallen behind academically. The Gates Foundation grant will allow Littera to create a round-trip analysis between academic support systems and district native assessments systems. Once complete, the outputs of district assessments systems will integrate with the Littera platform, allowing districts to measure and evaluate important drivers of effectiveness and cost such as frequency, group size, tutor profile, session focus, total dosage, and continuity of tutor-student relationships.

This allows us to help districts evaluate the relative benefit students gain from different high-quality tutoring models compared to the cost. Having better insights into what’s working - most cost-effectively - will enable ongoing, sustainable student support, especially important after stimulus-level funding recedes.

The project kicks off this month and will continue through the current school year. Starting in fall 2022, participating districts will begin their own data-driven experiments. The research findings of this work will be published and made available to any school district.

We continue to build the technology in partnership with our customers, to assemble an incredible team, and to bring our solution to districts around the country. Our goal is to enable districts to fundamentally expand access to high-quality, effective tutoring for students most in need.  

We're very grateful to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for this grant and excited to begin this important work!