EL Education, a national nonprofit that partners with educators to transform K–12 schools and districts into hubs of equitable opportunity, has recently announced its partnership with Kiddom, an educational platform that unites high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) with dynamic learning technology to deliver its curricula online and in print.
Educators adopting EL Education Kiddom courses will benefit from onboarding, multichannel assistance, and cutting-edge technology upgrades that speed up teaching and learning. Its hybrid learning environment also helps school and district officials with stacked dashboards that provide insights into various layers of student data.
Speaking on the collaboration, Scott Hartl, CEO of EL Education, said:
EL Education is very excited about our partnership with Kiddom. It opens the door to new relationships with schools and districts nationwide. Ultimately, more school and district partnerships mean more educators can use our evidence-based instructional materials grounded in the Science of Reading to help students achieve academic success.
EL Education’s curriculum promotes both challenge and joy in learning, offering rigorous, standards-aligned content paired with meaningful tasks that help students connect to the learning. Based on the Science of Reading and the Science of Learning and Development, the curriculum promotes student cooperation, critical thinking, and high-quality work while encouraging reflection and character development. By combining word knowledge with world knowledge and structured phonics, the platform assists students in gaining the abilities and confidence required to read complex texts and contribute to a better world.
Ahsan Rizvi, Kiddom’s co-founder and CEO, emphasized the importance of this association:
Reading is fundamental not only to academic success but also to the integrity of our country—it’s at the heart of what it means to be an informed, participatory citizen. EL Education’s evidence-based, experiential pedagogy combined with Kiddom’s digitally supercharged functionality will go a long way towards helping teachers drive change.
EL Education was founded in 1991 and currently serves 1.1 million students in various communities nationwide, including 48 states and the District of Columbia. It provides strategic planning, mentoring, and research-proven professional learning for teachers and leaders. From job-embedded coaching to self-guided online courses, it offers high-quality, actionable learning experiences. Recently, it has created a character-building and soft skills companion curriculum focusing on students’ development and well-being.
The alliance comes at a crucial time. In 2022, just 33% of fourth-graders and 31% of eighth-graders scored at or above the NAEP Proficient for reading level, and these figures have been continuously declining since 2019. Reading results for 13-year-olds declined by 4 points on average from the 2019-20 assessment. This research emphasizes the importance of using proven, high-quality instructional materials, technology tools, and professional development to execute curricula properly. Kiddom and EL Education’s collaboration sets the road for this holistic educational vision.
Kiddom was developed in 2015 as a classroom management system linked to a library of free resources. As teachers flocked to the platform in search of standards-aligned materials, the founders realized there was a larger, more serious problem plaguing school systems: a lack of rigorous and standards-aligned core curriculum and a scarcity of tools, data, and support to implement those materials with integrity.