Centering Educator Voices through Authentic Partnerships

9/10/2025

At ReadWorks, we make space to look back, seeking the broader picture of our efforts. Education is a years-long process for the students we serve. We’re asking: how have our efforts to support teachers over the years added up? This year’s reflection feels especially meaningful as ReadWorks focuses on what it means to build authentic partnerships with under-resourced communities and the impact that grows from them.

What Are Authentic Partnerships?

As nonprofits, we all exist to serve unmet community needs. Yet, our tendencies can sometimes lean to following what experts, funders, and we feel are the right solutions. This work is often called “partnering,” but really, the community becomes a “receiver” rather than a partner.

Authentic partnerships flip this model: the partner communities drive the relationship. Two women have done ground-breaking work in what it means to partner authentically. First is Kim Smith, the founder of the Center for Inclusive Innovation, who defines truly inclusive innovation as “listen[ing] to and honor[ing] the perspective of the communities who have been most impacted by barriers in education systems.” The second is Heather Krause, the founder of We All Count, who leads a community dedicated to ensuring the voices of those being studied are elevated in data science.

Our Mission: Our Partners

At ReadWorks, we name our authentic partners in our mission: With a deep commitment to under-resourced communities, ReadWorks supports teacher instruction that builds the knowledge and vocabulary that drive students’ reading comprehension.

The value of partnering with these under-resourced communities then runs through our core values:

Impact & Equity: We do this by partnering with educators and students to ensure that all we do is framed by their everyday experiences, challenges, and needs.
Diversity & Inclusion: We make sure all aspects of our work, from our products to our internal culture and processes, are informed by varied and authentic voices in our workplace and wider community.
Community: We engage with our community of educators and students to ensure that their voices are heard and that our offerings are consistently meeting their needs.
Quality: We are accountable to our community of users for maintaining the highest standard of quality for our products.
Empathetic Mindset: We actively practice empathy towards our educator and student users.

Authentic Partnerships, Authentic Impact

Our work of living into our commitment to under-resourced communities by building authentic partnerships has taken many years. Building the trust that leads to honest conversations takes time.

We began our efforts in the fall of 2020 with our first Educator Advisory Council, seeking to put into practice the tenets of inclusive innovation. Nearly five years later, we have had the honor of open and honest dialogue with 26 educators, resulting in changes to our products, such as adding the option of adult educator in our teacher profiles, and the development of new resources, such as our Spanish-English Paired Texts to support English language learners.

We also have focused on developing research-practice partnerships with under-resourced communities to ensure that we know how our offerings support, or don’t support, their needs. This work has tested us most deeply in our commitment to authentic partnerships.

Thank you to our school research partners!

St. Gertrude the Great Catholic School, Bell Gardens, CA
Constance Lane Elementary School, Rockford, IL

Research studies take incredible time and commitment from partnering district leaders and educators, and we needed to center making this time commitment as valuable and as minimal as we can for our district research partners. This has first meant taking the work as slowly as the district needs so that they understand the capacity required and have the structures in place to take it on. Even more importantly, this has meant listening deeply and asking questions to understand their instructional needs, as they are the experts in what they need to know. We then use our expertise as researchers to guide a collaborative process of defining their research questions and developing a research design that is sustainable. Their research agenda becomes our research agenda.

As we look back on the years of this work, ReadWorks is so honored by the partners who have trusted and collaborated with us to help us achieve a major milestone: for the first time in ReadWorks’ long history, all of our research projects for next school year are authentic partnerships with under-resourced communities.

Under-resourced communities have truly become the foundation of our work. Through intentional efforts to welcome educators in these communities as an extension of our team, we are proud to have built authentic partnerships that have led to high-impact resources and research. We are forever indebted to our partners because they are why and how we can continually deepen our impact and meet the real needs of educators.