The Structured Literacy Systems Group
Ok, so it is a group of one to start with…..man are the group meetings awkward…..
Our goal is to be your accountability partner for literacy outcomes.
My origin story as a systems-focused educator begins as a lower level curriculum writer being asked to come into a room to listen to discussion among national literacy leaders that included Dr. Reid Lyon, Dr. Sharon Vaughn, Dr. Ed Kame’enui, Dr. Deb Simmons, Dr. Roland Good and several others. I didn’t know who they were but the passionate discussion around literacy was awesome and I wondered why I was there.
30 minutes later, I was asked to be project manager on an online assessment and data collection system to the backbone of the Universal Literacy System, a Reading First aligned complete system for eradicating illiteracy in the classroom. Later to be called VPORT, this patented system was one of the first online, large scale systems used to run RTI and MTSS models, though both of those terms would come later.
6 months later, the founder of the company asked my boss’s boss’s boss to fire me because I was in over my head. (She believed in me enough to hold him off thankfully.)
1 year later, with the help of a new director of technology, we launched the first version of VPORT supporting four school districts.
5 years later the system tracked assessment, implementation and instructional data for core curriculum and reading/math intervention for over 2000 school districts.
25 years later the system and the implementation teams had served over 6000 unique school districts, supported 40 unique curricular products all steeped in explicit/systematic instruction (LANGUAGE!, Read Well, LANGUAGE! Live, Rewards, Passport and many more), as well as playing a role in professional learning programs like LETRS.
Helping Organizations Advance their Literacy Systems for 25 years
VPORT and our technology was always just a mechanism to drive constant collaboration and discussion around student outcomes with district, school and classroom leaders. The existence of the application and the passion of district/school instructional leaders launched my obsession with helping organizations produce replicable results at scale. It is the hardest work in education. Being VPORT project owner and eventually the SVP of Student Success at Voyager Sopris had almost equal upsides and downsides. By 2018, I was frustrated by the lack of breakthroughs, but I wasn't necessarily surprised. Too often, districts and leaders were and are put in situations to solve one crisis at a time or respond to a new and unique need and not enough time to dedicate to building and sustaining a full system around math or literacy.
Evidence has always pointed to The Science of Reading and Structured Literacy as the best approach to increase proficiency rates. And we have systems emerging (states, districts and organizations) that are demonstrating system coordination to achieve unprecedented results. However, due to the nature of constant change and the massive entity which is education, even The Science of Reading and Structured Literacy, which is solely the body of evidence of how to teach reading and the application of that science, may be dismissed if we not only show individual research studies, but also show system success on a scale which can't be denied.
After taking a four-year break to work in the higher ed world, I have spent the last two years as a literacy consultant focusing on building systems around great professional learning and structured literacy instruction. I have had the great fortune to learn from and listen to hundreds of districts diligently considering how to move their structured literacy systems forward. The amount of coordination at the instructional level and leadership level is so far beyond what I witnessed in the 2000s and 2010s. I think if we work collectively with great urgency, there is such great hope to demonstrate what is actually possible with Structured Literacy. SLSG exists to help in these efforts with a focused push toward 2030 as a marker to demonstrate just what can be done through a commitment to the skills and methods science dictates how we should teach literacy.
Your Structured Literacy Accountability Partner
I believe we can be helpful in this work because we have extensive experience succeeding and failing, as well as listening to districts to truly understand how to move forward one step at a time. We’ll add more profiles as the group becomes…well, a group. :)
We hope to help move your SoR/SL System forward in any way we can, please schedule a 30 minute free consultation if you want to chat!
Matt Hunter, EdD — Structured Literacy Systems Consultant
