Math and literacy, at no cost to families
Since 2008, Learn To Be has matched K-12 students with volunteer tutors for free 1:1 online sessions. Math and literacy outcomes are the core of what we do.
Literacy is our largest program. In the last 12 months, students who joined Learn To Be asking for reading or writing help logged 48,891 hours across 56,061 sessions with 2,915 students, more than 43% of all tutoring hours delivered in that period.
Who these students are. Most of our students come from underserved communities and receive our tutoring for free, or on a pay-what-you-can basis. Early reading gaps compound across every subject that depends on them, and these are the students least likely to close those gaps without help.
What Families And Tutors Report
Quotes from our wall of love, submitted by families and tutors.
First and foremost, we're a tutoring platform
Each student is matched with a trained volunteer tutor and meets with the same person week after week. That consistency, and the relationship it builds, is what our model is built on: a tutor who knows the student, sees where the gaps are, and stays with them while those gaps close. Most families pay nothing; the rest pay what they can.
Early Reading Program (UFLI-Aligned)
A 128-level course that takes a child from individual letter sounds to fluent decoding, aligned with the UFLI Foundations sequence from the University of Florida Literacy Institute.
Students progress through explicit phonics lessons: meet the sound, blend it, read it in decodable words and sentences, then practice heart words. Every lesson feeds a spaced-repetition scheduler that brings skills back for review right before a student would forget them.
AI Fluency & Placement Test
A student reads a grade-level passage aloud. Our system transcribes the oral reading and scores words per minute, error rate, and the exact words the reader missed, then adapts up or down until it finds the student's true instructional level.
Tutors get a recommended starting level in the reading program and a word list to target. Re-testing over time shows whether fluency is improving, passage by passage.
Full Literacy Coursekit
Beyond the core program, students have unlimited access to a complete literacy library: Learning To Read (a 1,870-lesson phonics path), grade-level reading courses K-8, Reading Fundamentals (decoding speed and accuracy), Fry Words, Word Chaining, and writing courses from kindergarten foundations through sentence, paragraph, and essay mastery.
Data from our In-House Learning Platform
Standardized Test Scores, Just Starting To Come In
Families have submitted standardized test scores for more than 300 students. Score submission is a recent addition to our application process, so most of what we hold are baseline scores. As students continue tutoring and post-tutoring scores roll in, we are prioritizing AI-assisted aggregation and analysis of this data so we can report pre and post outcomes at cohort scale.
Below you will see data from our own platform.
Reading course utilization
A lesson only counts as mastered when our spaced-repetition scheduler confirms the student still retains the skill after three weeks or more. This is the standard memory-science threshold (FSRS stability ≥ 21 days), and it is how we know practice sticks.
Our Reading placement test
In its first four months, 717 learners took the fluency and placement test.
Reading Curriculum Usage
Our students work in our courses both during, and between tutoring sessions.
What we are still building. Our fluency measurement is four months old and the repeat-testing cohort is growing. Standardized test score collection is a priority, with more than 300 students' scores on file and post-tutoring scores rolling in. We are moving toward grade-normed benchmarks and pre/post tutoring-cycle reporting, but transparently, this can create hurdles for our students, and giving them access to the tutoring they need is our highest priority.
What a literacy journey looks like
These are real students, with every number pulled from our platform: placement results, tutoring hours, practice logs, and re-tests.
Jhenae
Joined June 2026Jhenae joined Learn To Be in June 2026 asking for reading help. Her first placement test put her at a kindergarten level. Two months of weekly tutoring and daily phonics practice later, she tested a full level up.
Starting point: kindergarten
Jhenae's application is accepted for reading support. Three days later she takes her first fluency test: she reads a kindergarten passage at 36 words per minute with zero errors. The grade 1 passage is not passed yet: she reads it at 44 words per minute but with too many errors.
29 tutoring sessions + daily practice
Through the summer Jhenae logs 25.4 hours of 1:1 tutoring and works through 192 reading and phonics exercises, mastering early phonics lessons that her spaced-repetition queue keeps resurfacing for review.
Placement moves up a full level
Eight weeks after her first test, Jhenae re-reads the kindergarten passage at 57 words per minute with zero errors, and now passes the grade 1 passage: 60 words per minute, zero errors. The test places her at grade 1 entering the school year.
Camila, Grade 3
Joined July 2025Camila's family applied for reading help in July 2025. Over 14 months she built one of the steadiest tutoring relationships on our platform, and her fluency on grade-level passages nearly doubled while her error rate fell by half.
How these numbers are computed
Every figure on this page comes from Learn To Be's production tutoring and learning platforms, or from submissions families and tutors made directly. We would rather show you the caveats than hide them.
What This Is, And Isn't
We do not yet have longitudinal studies or externally validated evaluations. The data here is operational: fluency tests we administer, coursework our students log, and self-reported scores and stories from families and tutors. Oral reading fluency is a well-established progress measure in reading research, and comparing a student to their own baseline is the correct way to use it at our scale. But it is not a controlled study, and we do not present it as one.
Fluency Gains
Words per minute and error rate are scored by our AI oral reading assessment as a student reads a grade-level passage aloud. For improvement claims we compare a student's best result on a passage at least two weeks after their first attempt on the same passage level. The repeat cohort is 12 students and 40 passages because the test launched in May 2026; we report medians because individual passage results vary with audio quality and engagement. Students are compared to their own baseline, never to a class average.
Mastery
A lesson is counted as mastered only when the FSRS spaced-repetition model estimates the student will still retain the skill after 21 or more days, following the memory research standard for durable learning. Masteries are counted per student per lesson, so a student who re-earns mastery on a lesson is not double counted.
Practice Volume
Questions, accuracy, and hours come from our learning platform's attempt logs. Practice hours are conservatively capped at two minutes per question to exclude abandoned browser tabs; uncapped logs would show roughly four times more. Accuracy is the share of questions answered correctly on first attempt within a lesson.
Tutoring Hours
Tutoring counts include only sessions verified as having occurred, with positive recorded duration. Hours for the recent 12-month window are attributed to literacy using the subject a student's family declared on their accepted application (reading or writing), since per-session subject tagging was retired in 2025. Historical tagged figures (74,054 reading hours, 32,290 writing hours) cover 2012 through April 2025 and do not overlap the 12-month window.
Test Scores And Stories
Standardized test scores are submitted by families and are mostly baselines so far; as post-tutoring scores arrive we will aggregate and analyze them, with AI assistance, and report outcomes transparently. Testimonials are self-reported stories from our wall of love. We verify that they come from real accounts on our platform, but we do not verify the academic details they describe.
Questions about this data? Contact Annie Maurer, Head of Growth, at [email protected]. Financials: learntobe.org/financials