Cleveland Cavaliers Team Up With Black-Owned EdTech For Music-Powered Literacy Program

NBA team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, has partnered with Black-owned educational tech company Rhymes with Reason to help 250 students in Cleveland build their literacy and vocabulary skills through popular music.

By the age of three, children with professional parents get vocabulary exposure that is two times larger than working-class children.

As working-class children comprise the majority of American kids, the word gap persists through primary education, creating a reality where 65% of all students read below the level in 4th grade.

Rhymes With Reason was designed to change this narrative by building confidence and ensuring academic excellence is within reach through today’s most popular music.

Rhymes With Reason

Rhymes with Reason was launched in 2017 by Austin Martin to help students learn critical English words by showcasing their existence in widely-known music lyrics.

Martin’s educational journey inspired him to found the company; as he wrote, it took him a long time to become academically interested.

However, music had always been a prominent influence in his life.

Over time, his deep investment in hip-hop music and its vocabulary allowed him to excel as a reader, writer, and communicator.

This led to his passion for learning and his academic ascent to Brown University.

At Brown, he became even more invested in his education and that of students like him from diverse backgrounds.

After researching and finding that 67 of the top 100 words on the SAT are utilized in hip-hop music, he began his mission to maximize hip-hop and popular music’s potential as a vocabulary and literacy enrichment tool.

By using popular music and a bank of vocabulary known to people of all economic and racial backgrounds, the Rhymes with Reason program provides an engaging and equitable solution to vocabulary access.

The platform has now been used in over 150 schools and educational programs across the US, with Cleveland being the most recent.

Cleveland Cavaliers

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) recently published a study showing that Cleveland’s 8th graders had the most significant post-pandemic reading decline of 26 measured major US cities.

Rhymes with Reasons partnership with the basketball team, Cleveland Cavaliers, aims to reach 6th to 10th-grade students in Northeast Ohio Cleveland’s E Prep Cliffs school, Kenneth W. Clement Boys Leadership Academy, and through the Boys and Girls Club of Northeast Ohio.

The program will take students through various exercises to highlight lyrics and new words from popular song lyrics.

On November 29, Cavs in-arena host Ahmaad Crump, DJ Steph Floss, and Cavs small forward George Niang joined Cleveland’s E Prep Cliffs to see the program in full force.

Niang helped the students create their song lyrics with their newly learned words.

“Rhymes with Reason provides educational technology that will engage and inspire our scholars, enabling us to continue empowering them and enhancing their educational capabilities through music they love,” said Marc Johnson, Principal of E Prep Cliffs.