The U.S. Department of Education’s Striving Readers discretionary grant program funded 16 districts and states to implement and rigorously evaluate programs designed to increase reading achievement for struggling adolescent readers. Each grantee was required to conduct a randomized experiment to generate evidence of the effectiveness of the program. Abt Associates provided technical assistance to evaluators to help them address the challenges of conducting experiments in schools and to ensure that the evaluations produced high-quality evidence on the effects of their Striving Readers projects. Abt researchers also summarized the findings from the evaluations to facilitate the use of the findings by school administrators and policy makers.

Read the Abt evaluation findings.