According to Nation’s Report Card, only 33% of fourth graders were proficient readers in 2022. While education experts have established best practices for teaching literacy, inequity surrounding the resources and opportunities of students is leading to drastic gaps in achievement in reading. Literacy is the backbone of many opportunities and decisions individuals make in their lives; when placed at a disadvantage from a young age, students begin their academic journey behind some of their peers, with little to no fault of their own.

The Unlocking Literacy project seeks to engage the populations most impacted by inequities in learning to better understand why reading proficiently has proved so difficult and why change is so intractable. Through conversations and collective action with students, caregivers, educators, and education scholars nationally and in Boston, we aim to surface new ideas for how to address low literacy, and in particular, how new technologies, including artificial intelligence, might be part of the solution.

Organized by the Museum of Science, Boston, the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University and The GovLab, and with the support of Boston Public Schools’ Chief of Teaching and Learning, our goal is to engage diverse communities in shaping the future of literacy and to create equitable environments where students can thrive. The project is supported by The Learning Agency and the Citizens Foundation.