Math and literacy support, at no cost to families
Since 2008, Learn To Be has matched K-12 students with volunteer tutors for free 1:1 online sessions. We are specifically focused on improving math and literacy outcomes.
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. While this data is anecdotal, it is our largest volume of feedback showing that our students are achieving measurable improvements. We have thousands of positive testimonials, many with specific quantitative data showing improvement.
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 is what our model is built on: a tutor who knows the student, sees where the gaps are, and guides them through our courses in 1:1 sessions until they are caught up. 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.