When San Francisco Unified School District leaders announced plans to increase third grade literacy scores by 20 percent in two years, parents and educators were nonplussed.
More than half of San Francisco’s students are falling behind in meeting state reading goals. The farthest behind? The district’s most disadvantaged, including students who are low-income, experiencing homelessness, learning English and the district’s students of color.
A double-digit increase by 2028 felt like a pipe dream.
But preliminary state testing scores shared exclusively with Mission Local show promise for one pilot program.
Students enrolled in the Chapter One program, which provides tutoring for 2,700 students in San Francisco’s “priority schools,” are making gains at almost twice the rate of their peers not enrolled, the reading scores show.
Priority schools are those where at least half of the students are low-income or not yet meeting literacy standards. Students in the program, who are in grades kindergarten through four, are given one-on-one time with trained tutors who enter classrooms four to five times a week, tailoring reading lessons to students’ needs.
The targeted work appears to have paid off, at least for early learners. Kindergarten through second grade students who worked with a Chapter One tutor last year increased their literacy proficiency by 8.2 percent from fall 2025 to spring 2026, compared to only a 4.4 percent increase district wide. Third graders, who take a different state literacy test only once a year, had a more modest 2% increase compared to last year.
Early reading scores are determined by results on the STAR early literacy test, an assessment given to students twice a year, once in the fall and again in the spring. The data comes from last year’s test scores.
The Chapter One program is overseen by the San Francisco Education Fund nonprofit and funded by the city’s Department of Children, Youth and Their Families and the San Francisco Unified School District.
The scores showed that the greatest gains in San Francisco were for those students who historically have had the hardest time meeting their reading goals.
Hispanic students in grades kindergarten through second grade who were tutored through Chapter One improved their reading scores more than twice as fast as other Hispanic students in the district who were not enrolled in the program last year. Same goes for English language learners: Chapter One students increased literacy scores by 8.4 percent while the overall literacy scores of English learners in SFUSD actually dipped from 33.5 percent to 33.1 percent.
Ann Levy Walden, the CEO of the San Francisco Education Fund, said the growth is a testament to persistence — and having an extra educator around. Tutors are in the classroom. They work with teachers to identify which students need the most help. They spend more time with those students than they do with the students who are farther ahead. They keep showing up, day after day, all school year.
Plus, through separate SFUSD initiatives, teachers have more professional development around literacy and have standardized their curriculum, so all teachers are approaching learning the same way.
“We’ve been calling it a three legged stool,” Walden said — tutoring, curriculum, and professional development. “That is what’s going to lead our students to have this expanded growth.”
She says even with the small 2 percent increase in third grade literacy, the recent data is fueling optimism.
This school year’s cohort of third graders will take the state’s annual standardized test in the spring. Levy hopes, with more students than ever having been in Chapter One, they will score high and help the district inch closer to its 70 percent goal.
“The district is not moving away from their third grade literacy goal. A less bold district would say, ‘Ugh, this is a stretch,’ but our district is committing to it,” Levy said. “This data is an early indicator that we will have even more growth.”
