Over at The74, Chad Aldeman wrote an excellent article about the remarkable reading results in Steubenville, Ohio. He shows that the literacy rate among third graders in Steubenville City Schools has consistently hovered between 93 and 99 percent since 2016. In 2024, 100 percent of Black students, 99 percent of low-income students, and 92 percent of students with disabilities in Steubenville scored proficient in third-grade reading.
Steubenville must be rich, right? Nope. The poverty rate in Steubenville is among the highest in the state, which makes its literacy rate all the more impressive.
Steubenville then must have access to more funding than other districts? Wrong again. Steubenville’s per-pupil spending is below average in Ohio, and below the average in Missouri.
So how does Steubenville do it? It’s hard to be sure, but Aldeman’s article suggests an intuitive explanation: the district emphasizes literacy skills through and through. He gives several examples. Steubenville offers subsidized preschool where teachers emphasize speaking in complete sentences as language practice for later, when kids begin learning how to read. Every elementary teacher, even the physical education teacher, leads a reading class. And Steubenville kids practice reading constantly, either as part of the whole class or in small groups, and they work on their fluency skills by reading aloud to each other.
I’m not sure which aspects of Steubenville’s approach are most important, but what stands out to me is the district’s clear commitment to the purpose of teaching literacy. And sure enough, the results follow. This stands in stark contrast to what is happening in many schools today, where mission creep has led to a proliferation of objectives, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) de-emphasizing the core competencies our schools have historically emphasized, such as literacy, numeracy, science, and civics.
So, cheers to Steubenville. I hope districts elsewhere—including in Missouri—recognize its success and work to emulate Steubenville’s approach.
