It was fall 2020 and Katie Pace Miles, associate professor of early childhood education/art education had a problem. It stemmed from the arrival of COVID-19 with its attendant disruptions. But unlike many pandemic-related issues at the time, it spawned a solution that was so effective it is still in place.

Miles’ education students—both graduate and undergraduate—needed 30 hours of teaching experience for her courses on the development of literacy. With schools closed, where would they get it?

Her solution was to use a synchronous, remote tutoring program, which she helped develop, that would aid struggling early readers at public schools across the city (see “Creating an Army of Educators with New School Rules”). The program—complete with tutor training, peer support, and oversight—has since expanded to other CUNY campuses and become institutionalized as CUNY Reading Corps.

At a time of deep concern over pandemic learning loss in young children, Miles contacted a close colleague at the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE), then-Senior Executive Director of Universal Literacy Andrew Fletcher, about collaborating on the initiative. Supported by Fletcher’s connections to public schools, the idea took off that fall, funded by an initial Heckscher Foundation for Children grant and an in-kind grant from the Benedict Silverman Foundation. Miles, with key connections to private philanthropies, secured both grants.

The initiative then received a boost the following summer, when the NYCDOE chose to use the project’s early literacy interventions. Reading Rescue and Reading Ready—the latter of which Miles herself developed— became part of the city’s first Summer Rising program. That same summer, CUNY Dean for Education Ashleigh Thompson’s office threw its support behind the project and was able to leverage City Hall connections to get Summer Youth Employment Program funds through the Department of Youth and Community Development in the Mayor’s Office.

As the program grew to be a major initiative in 2021, an influx of new funding meant that it was set for further expansion. So that fall, Erin Croke, the director of literacy initiatives at CUNY Central Office of Academic Affairs, took on oversight of day-to-day operations.

Miles, Thompson, Croke, and Fletcher became what Miles calls “the leadership team” for what by now was a broader initiative called CUNY Reading Corps, a CUNY-wide expansion of the tutoring program with two different tracks: as a course requirement (with the potential for tutors to continue work on a paid basis), but also as a stand-alone paid internship. Both of these tracks have generated significant interest among CUNY students and professors—and beyond. In addition to expansion within CUNY, Miles notes that “about 14 universities have reached out to me and are attempting to replicate a much smaller version.”

One reason for this broad interest and support is the proven effectiveness of the technique. Trained as “a reading scientist” with a Ph.D. in educational psychology and a specialization in research on the acquisition of literacy, Miles has long worked “with kids for whom lifting off into reading isn’t as easy as it is for other students.” She learned from her early classroom experience, and her subsequent immersion in scholarly research, that to effectively teach students to read, she needed to show them “how to break the code” of English: to understand the relationship between letters and sounds.

This phonics-based approach characterizes Reading Rescue and Reading Ready, whose use by CUNY Reading Corps tutors has, says Miles, already generated statistically significant improvement in foundational literacy skills of participating early readers.

“I do feel like people were definitely ready for this,” says Miles. When she has given talks on the subject, many professors have come up to her to say that they had been “trying to do something like this,” she says. “I know what they’re saying, because I was, too, pre-pandemic.” In the crucible of the pandemic, creative solutions became possible that in other times might not have been. And, as Miles puts it, she had a kind of pandemic network, in which “everyone, everything came together to make this a reality.”

CUNY Reading Corps is supported by a mix of private and public funders. They include The Heckscher Foundation for Children, the Benedict Silverman Foundation, the Altman Foundation, the Tiger Foundation, the Fund for Public Schools, the Robin Hood Foundation, and an anonymous family foundation. Such has been the enthusiasm among funders, says Erin Croke, that this year “we’ve raised about $3.5 million for the program”—including $1 million from the Benedict Silverman Foundation. Funding has also come through the NYCDOE and the Mayor’s Office.