Shanker Blog

Voter Suppression Will Not Have the Last Word

vpthomas — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:11:34 +0000

Voter Suppression Will Not Have the Last Word

vpthomas May 1, 2026

Our guest author is Reverend Dr. Cassandra Gould the national political director of the Faith in Action National Network.

Democracy aka governance by the people depends on full and equal civic participation. Free and fair elections are its foundation, ensuring that citizens choose their representatives, not the other way around. At its core, democracy rests on a simple but powerful principle: every vote carries equal weight, regardless of a person’s race, income, education, or social standing.

Yet, for Black Americans, that principle has always been contested.

From Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the present day, Black political participation has been met with coordinated resistance through law, policy, and violence. Yet, it has also been Black political action organizing, strategizing, marching, litigating, and voting that has repeatedly forced this nation closer to its democratic ideals.

That is why the Supreme Court’s April 29, 2026 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais must be understood for what it is: a decision that weakens protections against racial vote dilution and makes it easier to silence Black voters while claiming neutrality. It opens the door for politicians to choose their voters, reversing progress that was hard fought and hard won gains secured through decades of struggle and bloodshed.

This decision, coupled with the proposed SAVE Act, (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) represents a coordinated effort to contract the electorate.

The SAVE Act, under the guise of election security, would require in-person documentary proof of citizenship such as a passport or birth certificate to register or re-register to vote. In practice, it would dismantle modern voter registration systems, severely limiting online and mail-in registration. Millions of eligible voters would be impacted particularly Black communities, other communities of color, young people, low-income voters, naturalized citizens, married women with name changes, and elderly voters without ready access to documentation.

This is not about protecting democracy. It is about restricting it.

The implications are far-reaching:

Over half of U.S. citizens do not have a passport
Millions cannot easily access their birth certificates
Mail-in and online registration would be drastically curtailed
Election officials could face criminal penalties for documentation errors

These are not isolated policies; they are signals of what is coming. While “authoritarianism” may feel like new language, Black communities know this reality well. Legislative and judicial efforts to silence our voices are not new; they are part of history.

History also teaches us this: suppression has never had the final word. Black communities have resisted, organized, and expanded democracy even in the face of overwhelming opposition. That same spirit is required now.

For unions, educators, and people of faith, this moment is both political and moral. The same systems that undermine voting rights also weaken worker power, silence communities, and limit whose voices shape our collective future.

This moment demands a renewed commitment to solidarity across race, class, faith, and geography, one powerful enough to meet the scale of the threat.

We know what’s coming: more barriers, more intimidation, more attempts to divide and discourage participation and sadly more violence: But we also know this: suppression has never had the final word.

Organized people have. This is not just about defending the democracy we thought we had. It is about building the democracy we need, one where everyone belongs.

So what must we do?

Build solidarity power across sectors so that no community stands alone
Engage in ongoing political education know the ballot, the candidates, and the issues
Push for fair maps wherever state legislative processes allow
Expand the electorate by registering and training a record number of new voters
Demand accountability from election officials to ensure elections are not interrupted or compromised
Oppose restrictive legislation like the SAVE Act through coordinated advocacy
Prepare to defend elections through organized, collective action and coordination with election protection agencies and faith leaders

Democracy has always required struggle. The question before us now is whether we will meet this moment with the same courage, clarity, and collective power that brought us this far.

Issues Areas

Strengthening Democracy

by Reverend Dr. Cassandra Gould

This moment demands courage, clarity, and collective power.

Equity and Fairness Equals Civic and Business Success

vpthomas — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:53:51 +0000

Equity and Fairness Equals Civic and Business Success

vpthomas April 27, 2026

Guest author Stanley S. Litow is a professor at Columbia University, author of Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway From High School to College to Career and The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward, a columnist at Barron's, and an Albert Shanker Institute board member.

Education leaders across the US have been working overtime in response to a range of very serious changes in federal policies that seem to have a consistent goal of undermining what had been long standing commitments to both equity and diversity. Such commitments were designed to reverse a history of discrimination, not just in education, but in a host of segments of American life, including the workplace

Recently one of New York's most iconic headquartered businesses IBM, agreed to pay $17 million to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to settle a claim that their diversity, equity and inclusion programs were discriminatory and unlawful. While IBM has fully denied engaging in any practices that were discriminatory in any way, some will interpret the payment as an admission of guilt. The DOJ cited that IBM provided diversity training programs, bonuses based on achieving diversity goals, and considered diverse candidates for promotions. There was a time those practices addressing the need for more equity in the workplace were honored, rewarded, and modeled—not penalized. Over more than a century IBM has always prided itself on being a leader in addressing the need for diversity and equity in the workplace, something that was directly connected to long-term bottom-line business success. While IBM is not a perfect employer, a look at IBM’s history speaks volumes about their progress.

In the 1950's IBM sought a site for a new manufacturing plant. The Governor of Kentucky anxious for IBM to bring thousands of jobs to Lexington Kentucky offered them the best tax incentives. But in the negotiations, he also informed them that the plant would have to be racially segregated since there were zero integrated manufacturing plants below the Mason Dixon Line in the US. IBM's CEO informed the Governor that the company had a core policy enacted in 1953 that IBM "fills jobs regardless of race color or creed” and that was an essential element of opening anywhere. If the state would not support such a policy IBM would not complete the deal. Nervous about losing the jobs, the Governor relented and IBM opened what became Lexmark Computers in Kentucky with a diverse set of employees, a year before the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision and a decade before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This has always been a critical AND praiseworthy action by a US company.

Several years later JFK was elected President and moved to address the fact that workplaces across the US in a range of industries discriminated against people of color. He put together what was called "Plan for Progress” asking all companies to institute equal opportunity employment practices. Something IBM did in the 1930's. JFK tasked his Vice President Lyndon Johnson with convening major US companies at the White House to ask the companies to make voluntary commitments to end discrimination and increase minority hiring. The President got commitments from 268 companies and from 1961 to 1963 hiring of Black employees increased from 30,000 to 43,000 an increase of 13%. IBM's increase was almost double that, at 24%. President Kennedy and then President Johnson praised the company and its CEO for taking the need to end discrimination in the workplace seriously and providing a model of leadership for others to follow.

The company's commitment to diversity was directly connected to IBMs bottom line success. In the late 1960's working with then Senator Robert F. Kennedy they opened a manufacturing facility in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, at the time an economically challenged minority neighborhood. The plant had 400 employees, 300 of them being men and women of color. The plant fueled IBM’s business success and reinforced support for civil rights across the US.

More recently in 2011 IBM worked with the City of New York to create the PTECH program offering students a combined high school and community college program during grades 9-14 with students getting both a high school and community college degree concurrently, with IBM providing mentors for the students and paid internships, and placing successful completes first in line for jobs The program has grown to over 600 schools across 16 states and 28 countries with 150,000 students enrolled. States like Texas have expanded the program significantly but the initial school in Crown Heights, with a student population consisting of 99% low-income students of color, was recently judged to be the best New York City high school out of over 500 high schools that admit students without screening for admissions. It provided the company with a pipeline of exemplary hires who were skilled and diverse and once more a model for others.

But IBM policy was not only about racial equality in the workplace. In 1935 the company added women into its sales school and had an initial class of 25 women who joined 52 men in the program, which was referenced in major news articles. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. IBM’s first CEO stated, “These women would have neither handicap nor an advantage over the young men, and should expect equal pay and advancement opportunities.” On the 50th Anniversary of women getting the right to vote, the CEO of the company issued a directive against sexual discrimination in the workplace and appointed a corporate officer in charge of equal opportunity for women. In 1996 before any federal actions, IBM adopted a policy providing health and other benefits to same sex partners, making IBM the largest US company to adopt such a policy in the US.

Presidents, government, civic and community leaders and other businesses across the US praised IBM's actions, and employees, shareholders and prospective employees appreciated real leadership and a commitment to equity and fairness.

As we move toward the celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the US this is a time to pause and remember that fairness and equity in the workplace is key to both economic and societal success. Diversity needs to be a core element of education and business success. The lesson of history can inform current and future action, but it will take leadership to achieve results. It has been the case in the past and in can be and should be part of our future.

Issues Areas

Strengthening Democracy

by Stanley S. Litow

Equity and fairness is key to economic and societal success.

The Wright Hire: What Maryland's Decision Tells Us About Literacy Reform

equintero — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:30:19 +0000

The Wright Hire: What Maryland's Decision Tells Us About Literacy Reform

equintero April 7, 2026

When Maryland recruited Dr. Carey Wright to lead its public school system, the choice seemed striking: a strongly Democratic state turning to the architect of literacy reforms from a deeply Republican one. You could read that as a political story. But it might be more useful and accurate to understand it as evidence of something else: that beneath the visible layer of policy, literacy reform is spreading in ways that don't follow partisan lines.

A survey of state legislation by the Albert Shanker Institute found that 45 states and the District of Columbia enacted reading reform laws between 2019 and 2022 — investments in teacher training, early screening for reading difficulties, reading coaches, alignment of practices and materials with literacy research — and characterized the effort as nonpartisan and state-driven (Neuman, Quintero & Reist, 2023). The non partisan momentum is visible at the federal level too. The Science of Reading Act of 2026 (H.R. 7890) passed out of the House Education and Workforce Committee in March 2026, co-led by a Democrat and two Republicans.

But legislation is what we see, it doesn't tell us how reform takes hold inside a school system. That process is harder to see. It happens through professional networks, staffing decisions, and relationships — the kind of work that unfolds over years before it shows up in outcomes. Last year, a Maryland Democrat and a Tennessee Republican — both former teachers — made exactly this point in a joint piece, arguing that staying the course on science of reading reform requires of cross-partisan commitment.

Researchers who study how change spreads across school systems have found that professional networks and trust relationships are often better predictors of whether change takes hold than the policies themselves (Fullan, 2001; Spillane, 2004). Alan Daly and Kara Finnigan's work on social networks in education reform shows that how ideas travel through systems — who talks to whom, who learns from whom — shapes implementation in ways that policy mandates alone cannot (Daly & Finnigan, 2010). Bryk and Schneider's research on trust in schools points in the same direction: relational infrastructure is not the soft backdrop to reform; it's a core condition for it (Bryk & Schneider, 2002). Dr. Wright herself has noted this as well. Speaking at the Reading League Conference last fall, she shared, half-jokingly, that she'd had more breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with people than ever before.

The Wright hire is indeed the right one; but also, not just a pragmatic decision by a state looking for someone with a strong track record — though it is that. It's also a signal that something real is moving at a level that's harder to see. Education leaders and practitioners are crossing political lines and passing similar bills in red and blue states because people doing the work are learning from each other across those lines — through networks, relationships, and hiring decisions.

There may be value in learning to notice these early signals — a leadership hire, a cross-state collaboration, a professional network that's pulling in the same direction. These don't guarantee outcomes but they suggest that something is taking hold, and that it may be worth paying attention to even before the results are visible. In Maryland's case, state officials are starting to claim some promising results — see Governor Moore's announcement during his 2026 State of the State address.

In short, when a Democratic state hires the architect of a Republican state's literacy reforms, that's not a political story. It's evidence that the work of reform is less partisan than we sometimes assume – and in this case, demonstrably so. Other prominent voices have begun making this case, emphasizing the importance of keeping literacy tethered to evidence and away from politics. Perhaps the blue-red frame matters less than we think — and holding on to it makes it harder to see where things are shifting and what is actually working.

Blog Topics

literacy

Issues Areas

K-12 Education

by Esther Quintero

The Wright Hire: What Maryland's Decision Tells Us About Literacy Reform

When Literacy Reform Meets the Classroom

vpthomas — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:25:55 +0000

When Literacy Reform Meets the Classroom

vpthomas March 17, 2026

Our guest author is Cooper Sved, an Elementary Educator and Education Policy Analyst.

Opening

Earlier this week, in my sixth-grade general education classroom, my students and I engaged in a thoughtful, generative discussion about North American colonialism as part of our social studies curriculum. I teach at an elementary school just outside Washington, D.C., serving a uniquely multilingual population that spans the full socioeconomic spectrum. My class, in particular, is a microcosm of the diversity present in our area and across the country. My students benefit daily from the range of cultural, linguistic, and economic perspectives that surround them. Unsurprisingly, students were deeply engaged in our discussion, regardless of academic standing. While I relied on a handful of county-provided resources, our social studies curriculum allows for teacher discretion and innovation. Because I know my students well, I was able to modify texts and discussion questions to account for the wide variance in reading proficiency in my room. That short discussion was energizing for students and deeply rewarding for me as their teacher.

Roughly twenty minutes later, our literacy block began.

Last year, in response to the Virginia Literacy Act, my district adopted a scripted literacy curriculum. According to the lesson script, students were to take out their consumable booklets and read two poems, one from the nineteenth century and one from the early twentieth. Despite reviewing key vocabulary and providing extensive background knowledge, none of my students were able to meaningfully comprehend the texts. The lesson assumed students could decipher and analyze both poems within a fifteen-minute window. I was forced to go “off script,” spending nearly twenty minutes simply helping students make sense of the language. What had moments earlier been a classroom full of curious, engaged learners quickly shifted into one marked by boredom, frustration, and escalating disruption. In the span of a single lesson, motivated students became irritable, resistant, and, perhaps most concerningly, disengaged.

The Science of Reading/Virginia Literacy Act

Virginia is just one of more than forty states that have passed legislation aligned with the "Science of Reading" (a brief overview can be found here). This wave of legislation has emerged in response to declining literacy rates nationwide. Virginia’s law, the Virginia Literacy Act, mandated that all public school divisions select and implement a basal literacy program from a list approved by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE). First adopted in 2022, districts were required to implement approved programs in grades K–3 by the start of the 2024–25 school year, with grades 4–8 following in 2025–26.

My district, after selecting its program, moved quickly toward implementation in grades K–6. That summer, all elementary teachers across the county received training in the new evidence-based curriculum. In what felt like an attempt to “rip the band-aid off,” the district adopted the curriculum across all elementary grade levels at once, despite the VDOE allowing for delayed implementation in upper grades. All K–6 teachers (our elementary schools end in sixth grade) were given two days of paid professional development, facilitated by out-of-state company representatives. These sessions offered a surface-level overview of the program’s structure, resources, and digital infrastructure. Ongoing implementation support was largely delegated to school-based reading specialists.

The message to classroom teachers was clear: adhere to the lesson scripts and structures as closely as possible. At my school, the expectation was that teachers would have their guides in hand throughout the two-plus-hour literacy block. In our linguistically diverse context, this approach felt overwhelming, constraining, and, most troubling, disrespectful to struggling learners.

Professional Development

The VLA also required that all K–8 classroom teachers receive professional development in the Science of Reading. Although my teacher preparation program had trained me in structured literacy only a few years earlier, and our school had already fully adopted a Science of Reading approach, my coworkers and I were still required to participate in a series of professional development opportunities that felt unresponsive, laborious, unnecessary.

To help us understand our new curriculum, we were required to complete two days of in-person training over the summer. Conducted by out-of-state representatives, the training provided a brief overview of the program but was completely devoid of district context. We were given the resources, yet left without a clear understanding of how to implement them within our district’s established pedagogical needs and expectations.

All Virginia teachers, regardless of district, were also required to complete a series of self-paced Science of Reading modules before the start of the following school year. While I understand the intention was to establish a baseline level of literacy knowledge across the state, the general consensus among teachers was that the modules were largely unnecessary and primarily enforced to “check a box.” Even my mother, a veteran elementary educator of nearly forty years, found the process unnecessary. Anecdotally, the modules seem to have had little effect on the work my fellow teachers and I were already doing.

Curriculum Adoption

The pressure of rapid adoption, and the recognition of its inevitable shortcomings, was felt across grade levels. During the first year of implementation, I taught a first-grade special education inclusion class. After several months of growing pains, my team found the program manageable, though our primary challenges stemmed from dense texts and unrealistic assumptions about student background knowledge and skill sets. When I moved to sixth grade the following year, those challenges were amplified. Many of my current students, even strong readers, find the program incoherent, the texts inaccessible, and the assessments deliberately confusing. Despite sharing many of their critiques, I have been given no leeway in either grade to modify tier-one instruction. Most of my professional judgment is reserved for deciding which in-program resources students can access during independent work. Still, these issues with adoption are intensified with VLA mandates for consistent intervention cycles. While I agree with this mandate in theory, it proves challenging in my classroom, where nearly half of my students require differentiated reading plans. At the moment, we lack the capacity to meaningfully intervene with every student who needs the support; the stress and exhaustion we already feel as a result of the VLA is being compounded by unrealistic expectations for intervention.

For many of my students, literacy instruction has reinforced a growing distaste for school, one that has intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic. While my diagnostic assessment scores indicate real academic progress, I remain unsure whether that success should be attributed to the program itself or to how I interpret and implement it in response to the particular students in my classroom this year. I also fear that this academic success has come at the cost of my students’ overall interest in academics.

Policy Reform

Despite my clear cynicism toward the current wave of reading legislation, I do not place sole blame on legislators or school leaders. I recognize the need for a clear, coherent strategy to improve literacy instruction statewide. In many ways, the Virginia Literacy Act represents a genuine attempt to address socioeconomic inequities between districts. I work in a system with significant internal capacity to support instructional decision-making; many districts do not. Mandated basal programs can help level that playing field. I also acknowledge a practical benefit: my workload related to lesson creation has decreased significantly. There are real, tangible upsides to the legislation we are seeing. My issue is not with the intent, but with the haphazard implementation.

Could lawmakers temper implementation through more deliberate legislative design? I believe my experience, and my students’, would have been markedly different if adoption timelines were more thoughtful and patient. Districts were given little time to prepare, leaving teachers overwhelmed and under-supported. Literacy legislation should prioritize not only the quality of instruction, but also the experience of those tasked with delivering and receiving it.

Future legislation (literacy-related or otherwise) should:

Prioritize slower, more methodical adoption cycles;
Provide teachers with greater opportunities to exercise professional judgment; and
Require deeper, context-specific professional development well before classroom implementation.

Do lawmakers have an incentive to slow their own legislation? Probably not. Do these critiques suddenly make my students love the texts they find disengaging? Of course not. There is still work to be done. What I do know is that the perspective shared here is not mine alone, it is echoed by colleagues in my building and by educators across the country. For students, the experiential rewards of classroom learning are foundational to their engagement with the world, and a literacy curriculum should support, not stifle, that process.

Blog Topics

literacy

Language and Reading

Issues Areas

K-12 Education

by Cooper Sved

Literacy legislation should consider the experience educators and students.

From the Simple View of Reading to an Integrated View of Foundational Skills

vpthomas — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:39:07 +0000

From the Simple View of Reading to an Integrated View of Foundational Skills

vpthomas February 12, 2026

Our guest author is Rafely Palacios, a first-grade bilingual teacher and literacy advocate in the Bay Area, recognized by the ILA 30 Under 30 for her work improving literacy outcomes for multilingual learners.

If you’re a teacher, you’ve likely encountered the Simple View of Reading (SVR). This model shows that reading comprehension results from two essential components: decoding (word recognition) and language comprehension (understanding spoken language). In many U.S. classrooms, these components are taught in separate instructional blocks: phonics for decoding and, later, a distinct time for comprehension or oral language.

But could this separation have unintended effects on students’ development as readers?

In Elbow Room, a paper recently published by the Albert Shanker Institute, Dr. Maryanne Wolf challenges a siloed interpretation of the Simple View of Reading, shown by the separation of decoding and comprehension blocks in many classrooms. Instead, Dr. Wolf argues for a more integrated approach to foundational skills. Rather than treating decoding and language comprehension as parallel but separate strands, she emphasizes that children must develop word recognition, word meaning, syntax, and morphology as interrelated components within a coherent instructional sequence. Dr. Wolf argues that each skill, and their integration, must be taught explicitly, systematically, and cumulatively, ensuring no component is left to chance, while remaining dynamic enough to adapt pace and support to each learner's needs.

I recommend this paper to all primary-grade teachers. Dr. Wolf’s work broadens our understanding of how we act as architects for our students, revealing how every lesson and interaction reshapes a child’s mind. It answers questions we often have about why some students struggle, showing that the 'magic' happens when our instruction helps them integrate skills rather than teach them in isolation. In this post, I share key ideas from Dr. Wolf’s paper and reflect on how they are shaping my own first-grade reading instruction.

Why the Reading Wars Miss the Point

For decades, educators, researchers, parents, and policymakers have debated how best to teach reading. Two approaches are often positioned in opposition: Structured Literacy, which addresses all components of reading and emphasizes systematic, explicit instruction, especially in foundational skills such as phonology and decoding, and Whole Language, which prioritizes reading for meaning, using rich texts and context to support comprehension, with decoding often taught implicitly.

It is essential to clarify that Structured Literacy is distinct from the Science of Reading (SOR). The Science of Reading refers to the body of interdisciplinary research on how the brain learns to read. Structured Literacy is one instructional approach informed by that research, but it is not synonymous with it.

Despite decades of debate, two facts are difficult to dispute. First, national assessments reveal a critical literacy gap: over one-third of students perform 'Below Basic,' meaning they lack the fundamental skills for grade-level work. While systemic factors like poverty, school underfunding, and the effects of the pandemic compound this issue, inconsistent instructional practices remain a primary, addressable concern. When classroom methods are not aligned with literacy research, the impact is not felt equally; as Dr. Wolf argues in Elbow Room, insufficient and inconsistent instruction most disadvantages marginalized students, who are often left without the foundational tools to bridge these divides.

Second, decades of neuroscience research have given us a clearer picture of how the brain learns to read. These studies show that reading circuits are built gradually and that explicit, systematic instruction matters, including sufficient practice with texts. They also reveal something important: the distinctions we draw between instructional camps do not exist in the reading brain.

Skilled reading does not involve switching between phonics and comprehension.

Decoding, language comprehension, background knowledge, and meaning-making operate together. As Dr. Wolf argues, this reality calls for humility. No single approach offers children everything they need. Each approach has something to contribute, and students benefit when instruction integrates the strengths of both approaches, intentionally and thoughtfully (explicit and systematic).

How the Reading Brain Is Built

A child’s reading journey begins long before formal schooling. At birth, the brain contains foundational systems for language, cognition, and vision. From infancy through early childhood, these systems are shaped through rich interaction, play, conversation, and meaningful engagement with the world. The quality of a child’s language environment, regardless of language or dialect, plays a crucial role in strengthening the neural pathways that later support decoding, word recognition, comprehension, and fluent reading.

During this period, children gradually come to understand three foundational concepts: words represent ideas and objects; words are composed of individual sounds; and these sounds can be represented by letters that form written words.

But understanding these concepts is only the beginning. The brain must organize them into a functional reading circuit that links letters, sounds, words, and meaning. Children are not born with this circuit. Reading is a cultural invention, and the brain must learn it by repurposing and connecting existing neural systems. This is why teaching reading is an act of building brain circuits.

Phonics and Beyond: Building an Integrated Reading Circuit

Phonics instruction teaches children how sounds map onto letters, the code of written language. But sounding out a word does not guarantee understanding. Readers must also know what words mean, how sentences work, and how ideas connect across text.

In my first-grade classroom, this integration occurs daily. When we decode a word like replay, we don’t stop at sounding it out. We pause to ask what re- means, how it changes the base word play, and how the word functions in the sentence we’re reading. During phonics, we talk about meaning. During reading, we return to studying word structure. I plan these moments to match what we are learning in phonics, build on our work with word structure in morphology, and connect to language comprehension. This is how our students' brains process text: not as separate skills in isolation, but as interconnected systems working together.

Dr. Wolf captures this complexity with the mnemonic POSSUM, which names the interdependent processes involved in skilled reading:

P – Phonology, Phonemic Awareness, Prosody, and Pragmatics
O – Orthographic patterns
S – Semantics (meaning)
S – Syntax (sentence structure)
U – Understanding the alphabetic principle and stories
M – Morphology (meaningful word parts)

As Connie Juel noted in 2005, “The biggest mistake most early instructional approaches make is to assume that when children decode a word, they know the word.” Phonics is essential, but it is only one component of a much larger system.

This integrated view also affects how we think about fluency. Fluency is not simply about reading faster. It reflects how efficiently multiple reading processes work, both independently and together. As children strengthen decoding, morphology, and syntax, these processes become more automatic and better coordinated, freeing cognitive space for comprehension and meaning-making.

Giving the Reading Brain Elbow Room

This brings us to Wolf’s central metaphor. Just as we need physical elbow room to move comfortably, the reading brain needs cognitive and instructional space to build and integrate its many components.

The elbow analogy helps teachers visualize how instruction should shift over time

Early in reading development, foundational skills—phonics, decoding, and orthography—need the most emphasis. These are the “top arm” of the crossed-elbows model.
Comprehension, however, is never absent. Even simple texts require meaning, syntax, and word knowledge. This reflects Dr. Wolf’s expanded view of foundational skills, in which decoding and understanding are developed explicitly and systematically from the start. Once a few letter-sounds are learned, this kickstarts decoding, word recognition, and so on.
As fluency develops, deep reading comprehension processes (the bottom arm) gradually move to the foreground, while foundational skills continue to support from below.

Imagine crossing your arms, then switching which arm is on top. The arms represent the balance between basic skills and comprehension; both are always present and support each other, but the focus (i.e., which takes the lead) shifts as children develop.

Why This Matters

Phonics instruction is necessary but not sufficient. Fluency is not just about speed; it emerges when multiple processes become automatic and integrated, allowing the brain to focus on meaning rather than effort.

All children follow a shared developmental architecture for learning to read, with the same neural systems and cognitive processes involved. However, children differ in how quickly these systems develop and in the support they need. Teachers must adapt instructional pace to students' trajectories, language backgrounds, and prior knowledge.

As Dr. Maryanne Wolf writes in Elbow Room, “Phonemes need letters. Phonics needs knowledge of semantics, syntax, and morphemes. Words need stories. The reading brain connects all of these processes, and so should our teaching.

When we give ourselves elbow room, we do more than support the reading brain's processing of foundational skills. We create the conditions for children to become fluent, thoughtful readers who can integrate sound, structure, and meaning. This kind of reading does not emerge from rigid pacing or isolated skills, but from instruction that allows foundational processes to develop in a connected way for each learner. By understanding how the brain learns to read, we move beyond ideological debates and toward teaching that truly serves all children.

Blog Topics

literacy

Issues Areas

K-12 Education

by Rafely Palacios

By understanding how the brain learns to read, we move beyond ideological debates and toward teaching that truly serves all children.

When “Success” Leaves Students Behind: How Market-Based Schools Exclude Students with Disabilities

vpthomas — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:30:14 +0000

When “Success” Leaves Students Behind: How Market-Based Schools Exclude Students with Disabilities

vpthomas February 11, 2026

As a freshly licensed teacher, I entered the profession hoping to challenge common stereotypes about teaching. I was ready to defy persistent myths of the ‘jaded teacher’ who re-used their lesson plans year after year and taught from their desk chair. So, I sought an environment where teachers taught with rigor and acted as advocates for change. When I encountered a job listing for a national charter school network, it felt like the perfect place to teach: the network emphasized high expectations for both staff and students, all in the name of helping disadvantaged communities beat the system.

Once the school year started, every moment of lesson prep and execution was centered around a single goal: excellence. As the year progressed, the administration increasingly painted certain students as threats to this goal students who struggled to comply with the demanding curriculum and constant test taking. These students—many of whom were multilingual learners and had a learning disability—were many grade levels behind. The strict behavioral regime didn’t accommodate their needs, and they were often in the dean's office instead of participating in instructional time. But when I questioned what we could do to support them, I encountered pushback. They will learn to meet the expectations. We need to focus on the cuspers. Because we were compared to other charters in the district, my leadership wanted to prioritize “cuspers”—students on the verge of advancing performance categories, whose gains would most directly improve accountability metrics—over students who were severely under proficient and therefore viewed as unlikely to advance brackets.

That school year taught me a lot about the nuanced and tense views on how to help disadvantaged students succeed in a world of standardized success. However, a broader question stuck with me years after this experience: To what extent do charter and private schools exclude students with disabilities within a highly standardization education system? Existing research confirms that charter and private schools do, in fact, exclude students with disabilities—- not only by discouraging initial enrollment, but also by pushing students out after enrollment.

Due to the rapid expansion of charter schools and the widespread adoption of private school voucher programs in many states, this research is all relatively new. However, one argument that has consistently championed the charter movement is that charter schools perform slightly better than traditional public schools on standardized tests. This stance became less clear as research has muddied reported score growth when accounting for student demographic and location. More recently, political verbiage has shifted to center priorities like educational freedom and parent choice to push for market-based schools. Beyond political rhetoric, this shift raises important questions about the larger costs to public education. Here are three key patterns that demonstrate how market-based schools exclude students with disabilities.

Pre-Enrollment Exclusion: Cream-Skimming and Counseling Out

Prior to charter school enrollment, phenomena like cream-skimming and counseling out are used to discourage or prevent students with disabilities from being admitted. These tactics are often utilized by school administrators or teachers to suggest that their school is unable to provide adequate services that a large public school can. Researchers largely argue that charters employ these tactics because students with disabilities are more expensive to educate and tend to score lower on standardized tests than students without disabilities. Through a qualitative study of NYC’s small and large public schools, researcher Jessica Bacon found a problematic pattern of students with disabilities being pushed from charters to traditional public schools to avoid low test scores.

When Bacon interviewed teachers and administrators at a small charter school, she found that conversations about students with disabilities were often framed through deficit-based assumptions. One teacher described advocating for a student with a learning disability to be transferred out of the school because they couldn’t keep up academically. Despite a robust body of research demonstrating that inclusive settings better support academic growth, the teacher believed the student belonged in a self-contained classroom and convinced the parent to concede (Bacon, 2019, pg. 37). An administrator from the same school further explained that the principal chose not to open any self-contained classes due to what they described as “fear and ignorance,” noting concerns that such programs would attract students who might “take the school down” academically (Bacon, 2019, p. 36). This interaction exemplifies how counseling out is enacted through moral pressure and professional authority, and functions to protect charter schools’ academic standing.

Teachers from the large public high school described the consequences of these practices, explaining that they often absorbed students whom charter schools implicitly discouraged from enrolling. One teacher acknowledged that “a certain amount of creaming is still happening… there are schools still not taking kids across the continuum of disability and need. Certain schools send a message: ‘Don’t come here, we don’t want you’” (Bacon, 2019, pg. 39). As a result of charter schools’ exclusionary tactics, large public schools become responsible for educating a disproportionate number of students with disabilities and are subsequently labeled as failing due to lower academic standing shaped by this unequal distribution.

Structural Barriers in Admissions and Enrollment Policies

A more explicit form of exclusion exists in private schools, which are legally allowed to deny admission to any student, including students with disabilities. Many private schools require academic testing for admission, charge an average annual tuition of around $15,000, and have no requirements to provide data on school performance to parents. In fact, many parents must sign away their rights to federally regulated IDEA protections in order to admit their child to private schools.

Studies show that adequate information is not shared with parents regarding losing their federal IDEA, FAPE, and LRE rights when enrolling for a private school. The National Center for Learning Disabilities found that “many parents participating in school choice programs did not understand the impact their participation had on their IDEA rights” (NCLD, 2024, pg. 15). This pattern opposes the argument that privatization efforts support all families through increased academic performance as the numbers simply don’t represent all students' experience.

Disciplinary Practices and the De-Identification of Disability

Even when students with disabilities are enrolled in a charter or private school, they are disproportionately suspended and deidentified from their initial disability status. New Orleans touted high achievement marks after switching to an all-charter school system but also suspended a third of the city’s special needs students for disciplinary reasons. In Newark, researchers found that being in a charter school led to a decrease in students keeping their IEP services after 2-3 years. Gilmour et al. studied Newark’s charter enrollment for students with disabilities, using models to measure the casual effect of charter enrollment and receiving an IEP (Gilmour et al., 2022). They found that enrolling in a “participating charter school led to a statistically significant decrease in the probability that a student who at entry was receiving special education services still had an IEP two or three years later” (Gilmour et al., 2022, pg. 15). These findings support a broader pattern suggesting that charter schools are likely to deidentify students with disabilities, which contributes to the earlier mentioned under enrollment findings in the field.

Implications

Exclusion of students with disabilities has been proven to occur before enrollment, during enrollment, and while a student is enrolled in market-based schools (Barnard-Brak & Schmidt, 2018; Bacon, 2019; McKittrick et al., 2019; Gilmour et al., 2022; NCLD, 2024). This exclusion happens implicitly in charter schools with cream-skimming, and explicitly in private schools with exclusive admissions processes. Within these systems, teachers often become unintended agents of exclusion because of the systems’ sole focus on academic achievement. In charter schools, teachers must conform with academic pressures, which results in very negative implications like segregation (Bacon, 2019). This pressure to conform may be related to the phenomenon of students being deidentified from their disabilities after being enrolled in a charter school (Gilmour et al. 2022) which takes away their mandated support and could affect their future opportunities (Dudley-Marling & Baker, 2012).

In private schools that face no IDEA regulation, “private schools can change or eliminate a child’s services without notifying parents— and at any time” (NCLD, 2024, pg. 12). This further exacerbates families’ confusion regarding what services they are entitled to receive, while private schools benefit from their enrollment through high tuition costs. In short, although market-based schools frame themselves as offering parental choice and academic excellence, they often narrow families’ options and weaken the legal protections available to students with disabilities.

Rethinking Educational Success in a Standardized System

The most troubling aspect of market-based schooling is the advertised premise that it improves academic outcomes for all students. These findings not only suggest that students with disabilities are being excluded from charter and private schools nationwide, but that their exclusion is an integral part of improving academic scores and leaves many families confused about their student’s rights (Dudley-Marling & Baker, 2012; Bacon, 2019; McKittrick et al., 2019). While there are short term solutions to these exclusions, like setting up equitable enrollment preferences and ensuring transportation for students, the long-term solution must prioritize all students' education access over some students’ academic performance.

These patterns suggest that while existing research has informed efforts to reduce opportunity gaps for students with disabilities and support their parents within the current system, systemic change remains essential to remediate these gaps. Future research should compare similar states to one another and engage in longitudinal studies that track the effects of enrollment discrimination on students with disabilities over time. Ultimately, future market-based education policy must account for the students of disabilities and their families who are disadvantaged by these schools, as well as the broader consequences of exclusion, unequal access, and the prioritization of short-term academic gains over equitable education for all.

Market-based, neoliberal education reforms have commodified students in a way that moves the symbolic educational goal post from access to performance. Because of this shift, students with disabilities do not have the support to succeed in charter or private environments. These researched patterns necessitate a consideration of the standardized system of success the education system relies on. If public education is meant to serve all students, we must redefine success beyond narrow metrics and ensure that students with disabilities are given access, support, and opportunity to succeed.

Blog Topics

Charter Schools

Issues Areas

K-12 Education

by Tiffany Broadbent

Exclusion of students with disabilities occurs before and during enrollment, and while a student is enrolled in market-based schools.

What Changed My Mind About How to Teach Reading

vpthomas — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:18:54 +0000

What Changed My Mind About How to Teach Reading

vpthomas February 10, 2026

This guest essay features Claude Goldenberg, Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University, who shares how his thinking about teaching reading changed through close work with colleagues who held very different views, and how that experience points to a broader lesson about how teachers learn, how assumptions shift, and how practice can improve. It is adapted from a recent podcast episode of Literacy Across Languages. Learn more in his Substack 'We Must End the Reading Wars... Now."

When I went to college, I thought I'd go to law school or something like that. Education was not in my sights. But I found out in college there was a program you could take to get a teaching credential. My roommate told me, you know, before we go to law school, it might be good to get a teaching credential. It won't mess up your schedule. You don't have to take bulletin boards 101 or anything, and it will give you something to do for a year or two before going to law school. I said, okay, that sounds okay. As it turned out, over the remaining years I got more interested in education and less in law.

By the time I graduated from college, my parents were living in San Antonio. And I thought, well, I could go back there and teach because in addition to being interested in education, I spoke Spanish. So I thought that was sort of an additional skill I could bring to the proceedings.

I considered different places, but I always wanted to work with kids who just, you know, don't have the opportunities that I grew up with, and how many of the people in my socio-demographics grew up.

I wanted to teach history, my major in college, but I was offered a job as an eighth grade reading teacher in probably the poorest school district in Texas. Back then I thought, well, the more impossible the assignment, the more I wanted it. The students I’d teach were kids who, in eighth grade, were reading so poorly that the principal said, you can’t have your elective—you’re going to take remedial reading. And he assigned me, a first-year teacher, wet behind the ears and with very little preparation. And I struggled. I mean, it was hard. I had a lot of “ganas,” you know, a lot of wanting to help. But I realized I just didn’t know that much. I really didn’t have very good teacher preparation. Not to disparage anyone or any program, but I just wasn’t prepared. And so I decided to go back to graduate school and try to learn something—to understand why these kids were arriving in seventh and eighth grade so far behind academically.

I got my doctorate at UCLA and became immersed in education. I was very interested in bilingual education—the education of what we now call English Learners. That interest launched me into reading and reading research for English learners. I decided that I wanted my own classroom. I really was not interested in being an academic, so I didn't seek out an assistant professorship. My only postdoc goal was to teach first grade. I wanted my own classroom, and I was fortunate enough that when I finished my PhD, there was an opening at the school where I did my dissertation research. A first-grade teacher was leaving in the middle of the year, and the superintendent asked, Do you want that? And I said yes—that’s what I want.

So, for the following three and a half years, I taught, struggled, and tried to figure out how to teach reading. I was not very well prepared to teach first-grade reading, even with my freshly minted PhD. This was in the mid-80s during the height of whole language, later balanced literacy, when literature-based reading instruction was the rage.

And I was caught up in it. I thought, Yeah, this is very progressive—you don’t want kids barking at print, and all those other clichés. So I went in feet first, head first. Long story short, it didn’t quite work out the way I had expected. Kids made very slow progress.

But then my PhD turned out to be good for getting a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed me to do research half time and teach half time. I had to share a classroom with another teacher. This teacher was all about what we now call foundational literacy skills—phonics, letters, sounds, combining them, “las sílabas,” as we say in Spanish, “joining the syllables” after students learn to make them, usually by combining a consonant and a vowel.

I thought we were going to kill each other, because we were coming at reading from diametrically opposed directions. But we decided to make it work by dividing up the week. She taught the first half; I taught the second. I remember thinking, Okay, she’ll teach her syllables—ma, me, mi, mo, mu—and I’ll come in at the end of the week and do the important stuff, right? The language, the comprehension.

Well, lo and behold, when I came in at the end of the week—after a few weeks, then a few months—I realized these kids were getting the reading thing. They knew the letters, they knew the sounds, they could “juntar las sílabas.” They could read in a way that, when I had been teaching alone, was tortuous. It just wasn’t working. And now they were reading—and then I could actually do comprehension work with them. We could talk about vocabulary. We could talk about metacognitive skills. And automaticity and fluency. Combined with what she was doing at the beginning of the week, it was an extremely powerful combination.

Someone later told me, You know, that was an instantiation of Scarborough’s Reading Rope. My partner was doing the word-recognition side—decoding and so on. I was doing the language comprehension side—vocabulary, meaning. And it really was like the Reading Rope—before I had ever even heard of it. Actually, before it was even devised and published.

Almost by accident, I fell into it. In fact, what my partner did mirrored how my own mother had taught me to read. I had gone into my first-grade teaching thinking I had a new, better theory of teaching reading—especially Spanish reading. I assumed, since written Spanish is so orthographically regular, kids would surely figure out the ma-me-mi-mo-mu thing if given the right contextual scaffolding. There was no need for me to drill and practice letters, sounds, etc.

But I learned from this teacher, and from two kindergarten teachers who were also colleagues and participated in a study I had conducted (see here or here), that my theory of reading was really upside down, or at least sideways.

I then started digging into the literature, looking into it in a more detailed way that I never had in graduate school. No one ever challenged me. On the contrary, I was supported in my assumptions about meaning from the beginning, whole language and so forth.

I’m glad I went to PhD school. I learned important skills. But it was really in trying to teach first grade for nearly four years that I got a real education about teaching reading, the role of decoding and foundational skills, about comprehension, and about how those things must come and work together. That education was foundational and helped lay the foundation for just about everything I’ve done professionally and academically since.

We talk a lot about research. We do professional development. We talk about brain science, we do all these things—which I fully support. But they very rarely fundamentally change assumptions when those assumptions require rethinking.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: How do you create experiences that encourage people to examine their beliefs—how those beliefs play out in practice and whether they might unintentionally interfere with shared goals?

Everyone I know wants kids to do well in reading and beyond. There’s no disagreement there. But we hold such fundamentally different ways of thinking about reading instruction. The question is how to challenge those differences when the best evidence available suggests some positions are either not supported by the evidence or at best are incomplete, as mine was? The idea is not to make people dig in further, but to invite reflection on the evidence and the conclusions to be drawn.

I don’t have a very good answer. What changed my thinking wasn’t an article, workshop, professional development, or a research presentation. It was what I saw with my own eyes that was inconsistent with my beliefs, the result of a series of events culminating in an unlikely partnership that, if I’d had my choice, would never have happened—and the students I had in my last two years of trying to teach first-grade reading would have paid the price.

That experience has continued to shape how I think about change in education and raises a larger question: How do we create partnerships and collaborations among teachers that contribute to continuous improvement in instruction and student outcomes? There is so much disagreement within our profession about fundamentals such as teaching reading. At the same time, there is so much evidence that could help us do better but is not widely known or is actively disregarded.

One way to address this tension is by reflecting on how professionals learn, revise their thinking, and improve practice over time. Scholars of occupations have a useful concept someone recently mentioned to me, “collective autonomy,” to describe one of the defining hallmarks of mature professions. Professionals have agency and control over what they do and how, but that autonomy does not reside with individual practitioners; rather, it is exercised collectively through shared standards, a well-regarded professional knowledge base that guides practice, and peer accountability. Professionals retain judgement over their work, but this judgement is bounded and refined by professional peers and professional associations, rather than by external control (e.g., policy mandates, accountability systems).

In a mature profession, there is no such thing as being the master of your own domain, or as some have urged teachers, “Close your door and just teach.” Professional autonomy cannot be isolating or divorced from a shared knowledge base; it is exercised with and through colleagues –- especially more experienced peers and mentors – around that body of knowledge. Creating the conditions for this to happen is a, or maybe the, central challenge we face as educators today.

Blog Topics

literacy

Issues Areas

K-12 Education

School Culture

by Claude Goldenberg

"Collective autonomy" is a hallmark of mature professions.

PTECH is #1

vpthomas — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:54:51 +0000

PTECH is #1

vpthomas January 22, 2026

Our guest author is Stanley Litow, author, Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway From High School to College to Career and The Challenge for Business and Society: From Risk to Reward; columnist at Barron's; trustee at the State University of New York (SUNY); professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs; and Shanker Institute board member.

Affordability is issue number one for Americans. They want the price of groceries, gas, childcare and health care to be more affordable and want government leaders to stop being distracted and make this their number one priority. But there is a component of the affordability crisis that goes beyond the cost of goods and services and has received little attention. It's making sure more Americans have the funds to afford a middle-class lifestyle as a means of addressing affordability. This means attention on the education and workplace skills needed to ensure not just a job, but career success Better quality education is one key to solving the affordability crisis. This means our schools and colleges embracing reforms that ensure far more youth have the education and skills to achieve career and economic success. This can be done, but it requires leadership at all levels.

This brings us to some good news. Fifteen years ago, an innovative high school opened in Brooklyn, New York. The school, called PTECH, had a core goal, to create a seamless pathway from school to college to career. Instead of a grade 9-12 high school with no connection to college or career, PTECH would integrate all three. Starting in grade 9 all courses would connect high school with college credit-bearing courses via a scope and sequence so students would take and pass both college and high school courses concurrently, getting both a high school diploma and an AAS degree in 4-6 years. In addition to collaboration and partnership between higher education and K-12 there would be an industry partner providing mentors, paid internships, and priority for employment. The initial school partners were the New York City Public Schools, The City University of New York, and IBM.

On it's 15th Anniversary PTECH was ranked by the Public School Review as the #1 vocational school in NYC, the #3 ranked high school in Brooklyn overall and 14th out of all 534 high schools in the City of New York. That incredibly high ranking isn't even the whole story. When specialized exam high schools like Stuyvesant High School, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science, along with schools where students are screened for admissions based on tests and grades, are removed PTECH is #1 in America's largest city. PTECH is open enrollment and, the student population is 99 percent minority and overwhelmingly low income, again the highest in the entire city, with the majority of students beginning 9th grade significantly behind in both reading and math. College completion and career success is much higher at PTECH than the national average with many getting graduate degrees, including a young woman getting her PhD while working at IBM after her graduation from PTECH.

As we know, there are examples of successful innovations but one success isn’t as difficult as the challenge of replication. Yet, in year 15 of PTECH’s existence, the second part of the success is large progress in bringing PTECH to scale. Currently there are over 600 PTECH schools in 16 US states and 28 countries and the data demonstrating success in the initial school is borne out across the other geographies.

For example, in Colorado there are 28 PTECH schools with 5,500 students. According to a report commissioned by the legislature, PTECH "demonstrates its dual value as both a career pathway and student success model." The report goes on to state " data confirm significant improvement in attendance, discipline and postsecondary persistence" as well as "measurable gains including outstanding student outcomes." In one Colorado district, St Vrain’s, which has embraced PTECH across all its high schools, the results are particularly impressive. High School Graduation rates are 100 percent. Students in PTECH schools have significantly higher GPAs, PSAT scores, reading, math, and writing achievement plus strong college completion and career success. In fact, one of their students who immigrated at age 9 speaking no English got an AAS degree and a full scholarship to Harvard, where he completed his Bachelor's degree.

In Texas there are over 300 PTECH schools. In Dallas there's a PTECH school within a school in every Dallas high school. Last spring over 1,000 Dallas PTECH students completed high school and college degrees in 4 years. In New York, in addition to the initial school in Brooklyn, there are currently over 70 PTECH schools in every economic development district from the Canadian border through Long Island. In Newburgh, NY PTECH graduates who obtained AAS degrees in cyber security represent over 2/3 of all AAS degrees in cyber security at their community college partner, SUNY Orange. However, some students with their AAS degree pursue another direction. One young woman chose to go on and obtain a law degree and served as Assistant District Attorney in Orange County.

Data from Colorado, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Texas, other states and countries is evidence that PTECH succeeds, at minimal cost, serving students most in need of opportunity and assistance. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, college completion is much lower than it ought to be, especially for low-income students of color. PTECH schools' higher college completion rate is an important piece of evidence. Especially since a college degree is directly connected to approximately $1.3 million in additional lifetime earnings compared with earnings for those entering the workforce with only a high school diploma. That amounts to $30,000 more in earnings per year. And the earnings difference escalates with graduate degrees where lifetime earnings double to $2.4 million more over a lifetime. Second, skills and abilities required in the workforce are changing rapidly. Skills in a host of areas whether artificial intelligence, cyber security, quantum computing, biotech and others are affecting a host of industries and building those skills along with what had been referred to as "soft skills" i.e. problem solving, collaboration, writing and presentation. Creating a clear pathway from school, to college, to career requires the core elements embedded in PTECH

The obvious next question is, how did the success in Brooklyn grew so fast in just 15 years? The answer begins with commitment of faculty and administrators at the school and district level, coupled with leadership from the top. That means making sure all key stakeholders are engaged, not left out. The cost of PTECH is borne largely by repurposing existing funds. It also includes support from higher education leadership and industry. While initial industry partners came largely from the technology industry, partners have expanded to include over 400 industry partners from literally hundreds of companies in fields like, health care, business, advanced manufacturing, green jobs, and many others.

A dozen years ago with the initial PTECH school in its early stage, President Obama featured it in his State of the Union address. He then visited the Brooklyn school, touring its classrooms, speaking to students and faculty. He said, “This opportunity should be given to all U.S. students."

This brings us back to the affordability crisis. If the former U.S. President's vision were to be realized, and PTECH were available to all, not just some, millions more high school graduates would be college and career ready, entering the workforce at much higher wages, paying higher taxes, requiring less social safety net spending, and becoming the engine for U.S. economic growth. The benefit would be in hundreds of billions of dollars in growth. Affordability is of critical importance to our nation and PTECH is a critical part of the solution. It started with one school in Brooklyn and its success can drive success across the U.S.

Issues Areas

K-12 Education

Career and Technical Education

Workforce Development / CTE

by Stanley S. Litow

PTECH should be part of the solution to the affordability crisis.

When Policy Meets Practice: Why School Mandates Often Miss the Mark

vpthomas — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:30:15 +0000

When Policy Meets Practice: Why School Mandates Often Miss the Mark

vpthomas December 18, 2025

The View from the Ground Floor
It’s safe to assume that policymakers have the best intentions when proposing new provisions for schools. Initiatives for literacy, new pedagogical strategies, and requirements for professional development all sound beneficial to the school community. But what do these regulations look like from the ground floor as a teacher?

In my experience, many teachers were not fond of change at all. And I didn’t blame them. Teachers who had been at the school for 15+ years had observed nearly every type of change: from the creation of the Common core to the beginning of PLCs and even more recently bans on curriculum regarding DEI, they have seen it all. When these regulations trickle down from the state, administrators typically come up with a plan to disseminate the requirements to their staff. Teachers see the decisions being made and are told to comply with them.

I experienced this discomfort while teaching at a public middle school that needed to comply with a recent bill prioritizing literacy and critical thinking in all classrooms. In response, the administration decided that all staff must post the same vocabulary words on a word wall in their classroom, along with delivering weekly reading comprehension lessons to their homeroom students. This measure was intended to provoke students’ curiosity and level the playing field for students who didn’t know much academic language. But even the best educational ideas, when shared with teachers hastily, impede the positive impact.

On the day before school started, printers were whirring with lists of 20 words like “concur” and “refute,” teachers were concerned about where the word wall would fit in their room, and questions were unanswered on who would be responsible for creating these reading comprehension lesson plans. You might imagine that non-ELA teachers were not happy with this new responsibility—and you would be right. In fact, many teachers skipped through their reading lessons and instead gave students silent reading time. The teachers didn’t understand why this responsibility had been given to them or what effect it would have on students’ well-being, so they didn’t give it their full effort. It was never explained to them.

So, while state legislators have good intentions in their policies, that doesn’t ensure that the legislation will be attuned to teachers' needs or interests, or that it will include the details needed for meaningful implementation. This may lead to a desensitization of new policies for teachers, as they watch mandates come and go without any input in what’s prioritized and why.

What Research Reveals About Teacher Influence
To provide more context as to why policymaking might feel distant for teachers, I leaned on research that coined terms to explain how substantially teachers affect policy performance.

Michael Lipsky defines teachers as “street-level bureaucrats” because of their direct impact on students and their ability to use discretion in daily work (Lipsky, 1980). He argues that teachers “engender controversy because they must be dealt with if policy is to change” (Lipsky, 1980, pg. 8). From this perspective, when street-level bureaucrats and their managers oppose each other, the former wins by performing at “less than full capacity” (Lipsky, 1980, pg. 17). Simply put, as street-level bureaucrats, teachers may impede policy implementation by putting in minimal effort if they don’t share their superiors’ objectives. Although Lipsky often uses dated and unhelpful deficit language surrounding teachers that frames teachers as the cog in the wheel that purposefully breaks, he does illuminate one important feature. The notion of street-level bureaucrats as teachers showcases the distance between teachers and their managers, and effectively the even larger gap between teachers and legislators when making decisions that affect teachers’ careers.

More recent research has framed teachers in a positive light: as change agents instead of street-level bureaucrats. Brown et al. found that when teachers can exhibit agency, they commit to making changes (Brown et al., 2022). Other studies found that the variables ‘vision’ and ‘empowerment’ are two that enabled teachers to act as change agents (Muijs & Harris, 2003), (Lai & Cheung, 2015). They conclude by calling for teachers to be given a more forward role in policy creation, stating that “teachers should be central and instrumental to educational change rather than positioned as the passive recipients of externally mandated reforms (Brown et al., 2022, pg. 12). This reflects a bottom-up approach in educational change where teachers have the means to represent their everyday experiences to be reflected in policy. If mandates continue to trickle down, teachers must see the purpose behind the change being proposed for it to be effective.

What Policy Could Look Like with Teachers at the Table
Because teachers are such an integral part of policy implementation, it is surprising how disconnected policy provisions are from teachers' needs. Even provisions aimed at alleviating teacher challenges often lack the funding and planning needed to be effective: one example being cell phone bans.

It is also important to highlight that regardless of researchers' findings, teachers make meaningful change every day. They critically consider their students’ needs during their planning, executing, and assessing. They continue to show up for their students and families regardless of new mandates and policies. But thinking back to my initial example, imagine how much more effective the word walls could have been if the administration had aligned the process with teachers’ needs. Even a simple survey or meeting to discuss how the plans lead to end goal objectives could go a long way in ensuring teachers feel empowered to execute the policy and understand it, as opposed to feeling that their opinions do not matter.

Issues Areas

Early Childhood Education

K-12 Education

by Tiffany Broadbent

Teachers should be part of the policymaking process.

Maryanne Wolf Knows Her Proust and Her P.O.S.S.U.M.

vpthomas — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:52:29 +0000

Maryanne Wolf Knows Her Proust and Her P.O.S.S.U.M.

vpthomas December 10, 2025

Our guest author is Harriett Janetos an elementary school reading specialist with over 35 years of experience. In this essay Ms. Janetos reflects on Maryanne Wolf’s paper Elbow Room: How the Reading Brain Informs the Teaching of Reading recently published by the Albert Shanker Institute. This essay originally appeared in the author's Substack Making Words Make Sense.

Multicomponent instruction means making room for ALL the components of literacy--taught at the right time in the best way. It provides the bridge between Balanced Literacy and Structured Literacy.

I have lived my life in the service of words: finding where they hide in the convoluted recesses of the brain, studying their layers of meaning and form, and teaching their secrets to the young.

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid

THAT WAS THEN: THE BIG FIVE

I discovered Maryanne Wolf’s book Proust and the Squid through a recommendation from one of the professors in my reading specialist credential program. It confirmed the importance of code-based beginning reading instruction emphasized in the books by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness, which I had discovered shortly before entering my credential program. Wolf reminds us:

Three concepts are critical and emerge over this early period:

(1) that words represent things and thoughts

(2) that words are made up of individual sounds

(3) that these sounds are represented by letters, which when written together make words

But it also explained how we develop this code knowledge as a necessary precursor to knowing what Proust knew:

Reading is that fertile miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

In a recently published paper, Elbow Room: How the Reading Brain Informs the Teaching of Reading, Wolf takes her keen understanding of the reading process and connects research to practice, the translation we desperately need that is so often missing from our preservice programs and PD sessions. First, she describes the reading circuit:

I’ll begin as Emily Dickinson might have responded, had she been a neuroscientist instead of a poet: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant; Success in Circuit lies.” In this paper, the circuit refers to the brain’s circuit for reading . . . The ‘slanted truth’ is that, unlike oral language, there is no genetic program for written language to unfold naturally in the child. Reading is not natural at all. Rather, it is an invention that the brain learns due to a wonderful design principle, which allows the developing brain to form new connections among its original, genetically programmed processes like language, cognition, and vision. In other words, when a child learns to read, the brain learns how to connect the multiple processes that contribute to a new circuit for written language.

It is one of the too little-sung miracles that young human beings can build a brand new circuit for reading that will elaborate itself over time with everything the readers read.

What is notable in this paper is how methodically and meticulously Wolf connects literacy components in order to rise above the war-ravaged reading camps which we have been entrenched in over several decades. She reveals how each camp can bring its particular strength to the discussion, allowing multicomponent instruction to prevail. From the Albert Shaker Institute’s introduction to the report:

Elbow Room is an invitation to move beyond false binaries in literacy debates and to see reading development as dynamic, requiring multiple emphases and areas of expertise in our teachers. The key for educators is knowing what to prioritize — when, and for how long — based on each learner’s strengths and needs . . . Wolf honors what educators already know, while inviting them to keep expanding that knowledge.

Therefore, please don’t read Wolf’s paper looking to find your particular thing that you prioritize in reading instruction, whether it be meaning-making at the expense of establishing foundational skills, or extensive phonics instruction without application to text, or knowledge-building that crowds out literature. Wolf states:

The key for a teacher’s ability to teach the majority of our nation’s children is a systematic expansion of knowledge about all the processes involved in decoding and comprehension, while never cherry-picking a few of the processes based on the teacher’s original method of teaching.

In my own 127-page instructional guide to reading, I use some version of the word integrate over a 100 times, which reflects my devotion to multicomponent instruction. However, once we democratize these literacy components, we also need to recognize that there is a time and place for promotion and practice of certain skills independently, instruction that evolves as children move through the grades. But like a close-knit family, the other literacy members are never far away and continue to act in supporting roles.

This point is central to the elegant elbow metaphor Wolf uses where she illustrates how the foundational skills forearm initially rests on the comprehension forearm to emphasize how the former has an active role in beginning reading instruction while relying on comprehension for support. Then, as the foundation is laid, this forearm slowly rises, allowing the supporting role of comprehension to switch places and assume an active role while the foundational skills arm acts as support. Wolf explains:

This is the visual depiction of the changing dynamic between the early emphases on the expanded foundational skills and fluency (left arm) and the gradually increasing emphases on more sophisticated comprehension processes (right arm). It is a visual mnemonic for the way the skills and processes change their emphases over time while always leaving room for the other to develop with the increasing demands of text content.

Moreover, rather than emphasize the National Reading Panel’s Big 5 (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension), both Wolf’s paper and my instructional guide reflect more elemental factors. My six chapter titles—Making Sense of Words We Hear, Say, See, Understand, Remember, Analyze—incorporate the components Wolf discusses under her acronym POSSUM (phonology, orthography, semantics, syntax, understanding, morphology). She writes:

Our understanding of foundational skills has changed over time from the more traditional view that was articulated by the National Reading Panel two decades ago . . . In a more expanded view, each of these areas is broadened, deepened, made more specific and more inclusive of spoken language processes.

THIS IS NOW: MAKE ROOM FOR THE MARSUPIAL

It is this new understanding of foundational skills that Wolf emphasizes, illuminating the interconnectedness of reading and its implications for instruction. It reminds me of the seven blind mice in Ed Young’s book—how we’ve been touching different parts of the elephant, siloing reading skills without recognizing their contribution to the whole literacy animal. Here is her goal:

I hope to illumine how the developing circuit includes the major emphases in the seemingly divergent approaches: specifically, the critical role of foundational skills (as seen in systematic, structured literacy approaches) and the critical role of word- and text-level knowledge (as seen in balanced-literacy and whole-language approaches).

P.O.S.S.U.M

P. Phonology, Phoneme Awareness, Prosody, Pragmatics

O. Orthographic Patterns

S. Semantics

S. Syntax

U. Understanding the alphabetic principle and meanings within text

M. Morphology

Wolf explains how an outsized emphasis on either code-based or meaning-based instruction can diminish the development of skilled reading by crowding out important literacy components. The balance emphasized in the National Reading Panel (NRP) report never quite saw the light of our classrooms where insufficient training—or in some cases, sheer intractability—kept us off-balance. From the NRP:

Teachers must understand that systematic phonics instruction is only one component—albeit a necessary component—of a total reading program; systematic phonics instruction should be integrated with other reading instruction in phonemic awareness, fluency, and comprehension strategies to create a complete reading program . . . It will also be critical to determine objectively the ways in which systematic phonics instruction can be optimally incorporated and integrated in complete and balanced programs of reading instruction.

Wolf expands upon this concern:

Most phonics instruction does not give sufficiently explicit attention to connecting decoding processes to the various semantic, syntactic, and morphological aspects of word knowledge, all of which contribute to fluency at both the word and connected text levels. Further, there is often insufficient attention to immediately applying fluent decoding skills to stories and connected text – an area where balanced literacy and whole-language trained teachers excel. The skills of these teachers should never go unutilized.

FROM WORD TO WORLD: THE CODE AND THE CONTEXT

In the recent webinar, The Science of Reading in Real Life, Sharon Vaughn (Executive Director of The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at The University of Texas at Austin) explains the interconnectedness of literacy components as spanning word to world. Like Maryanne Wolf, Sharon Vaughn is rejecting the dichotomy that has polarized our discussion related to the reading wars, which—like so many other aspects of life—cannot be conveniently colored black or white. Can we let the Goldilocks Effect guide our teaching instead of being bound by binary thinking or bullied into stating our support for one reading camp or another? Here is Wolf’s rationale for multicomponent instruction:

Why we teach the code:

As demonstrated in decades of research, this developmental process is jump-started through approaches that emphasize the direct teaching of the connections between the visual representations of letters and the phoneme-based representations of the sounds of their language. Phonics-based approaches revolve around building up these connections.

Why we teach the context:

The upshot, therefore, is the need to connect explicit knowledge about decoding principles to explicit knowledge about the meanings of words (and their multiple meanings in different contexts—polysemy); how they are used grammatically; how morphemes change their meaning and use; and how they all work together in connected text and literature.

The decodable books—many in mint condition—that I send home for my students to read to a print partner are from the Reading First era two decades ago that followed the NRP recommendations. These books contain high-interest stories with varying degrees of decodability, so I’m very glad I salvaged them when we shifted to a new ELA program ten years later. Then—when we shifted yet again, I asked the district’s warehouse to send me all their boxes of unused books. This means I have access to three different series to give my students plenty of opportunities to interact with both fiction and nonfiction text.

One series in particular has excellent informational pieces, which supports knowledge-building in my second-grade intervention sessions so that my phonics instruction targets decoding impediments related to reading multisyllabic words within the context of disciplinary content. The decodable books my district adopted ten years ago to align with the Common Core State Standards have made this possible with accessible (albeit challenging) informational text interspersed with more easily decoded stories. Here are the topics I can choose from—disconnected, sadly—but supporting knowledge-building nevertheless: Native Americans, U.S. geography, natural resources, Civil War, laws, U.S. landmarks, money, fossils, planets, gravity, rocks and minerals, inventions, communication, sound, farm tools, extreme weather, energy, matter, penguins, animal habitats, germs, libraries

I mention this resource because my lessons revolve around books of various types to meet my instructional goals. I am convinced that this context is crucial for my students’ engagement as well as their reading development. Depending on my grade-level goals and the skill levels of my students, my routines look like this:

Dictation of word chains (shifting by just one phoneme to reflect minimal contrast) formed from the words in the decodable story to be read, thus integrating phonemic awareness with orthographic patterns as well as semantics.
Application of phoneme-grapheme connections through invented spelling during independent writing.
Integration of phonology, orthography, morphology, and semantics in all word-learning activities to promote orthographic mapping and facilitate automatic word recognition, beginning with monomorphemic words for emergent readers and progressing as quickly as possible to multimorphemic words.
Coordination of semantic maps to integrate vocabulary with knowledge-building in order to facilitate a deep understanding of text.
Implementation of partner reading of both decodable and grade-level text to practice orthographic patterns taught and promote fluency with complex vocabulary and syntax in order to facilitate comprehension.
Utilization of paragraph shrinking for multi-paragraph text, which involves being able to decode the words, understand the words, and analyze the syntax of individual sentences—as well as the relationship between sentences—to unlock the structure and meaning of the paragraphs.

The best part of multicomponent instruction for the time-strapped teacher is that it is not only effective but also efficient, and this efficiency allows students more time to engage in wide reading. I have seen silent phonics lessons (an oxymoron) involving filling in worksheets with various spelling patterns where the words were not voiced; and I have also seen vocabulary taught with reference only to orthography and semantics —ignoring the phonology of the words— which is necessary for orthographic mapping. Integrating phonology with phonics—and both with vocabulary instruction—facilitates automatic word recognition and frees up time for reading connected text.

Maryanne Wolf asks us to think of these processes that underlie comprehension like an orchestra playing a symphony. She notes that the various processes are like different instruments coming in and out to interact with each other to contribute to the whole.

I appreciate a similarly evocative description of multicomponent instruction from Jan Wasowicz (The Language Literacy Network) who also compares reading instruction to conducting an orchestra. In a recent post on the SPELLTalk listserv, she writes:

Multicomponent literacy instruction and instructional simultaneity does not mean ‘everything, everywhere all at once.’ It’s more like preparing an orchestra: at first, instruction works with a smaller section of instruments (e.g., phonology, orthography, and meaning to read and spell words), while other sections (e.g., morphology, syntax, and higher-order language skills) are being tuned separately. As students gain proficiency, more instruments are added until eventually the full ensemble is ready to perform together in harmony.

And to complete this analogy to an orchestra, the image is also reflected in the introduction to the paper:

At different points in development, one emphasis may carry the melody while the other plays harmony, yet neither is ever absent from instruction.

THE PEACENIKS FORGE A PATH FORWARD

For over half a century a divisive, Hydra-headed type of debate over the teaching of reading continues to divide our nation’s educators.

--Maryanne Wolf

Jan Wasowicz and Maryanne Wolf are members of a group called The Peaceniks. In an article about speech-to-print vs. print to speech, they are described as a group of researchers and practitioners who are looking to end the divisiveness of the ‘reading wars’ — and help children learn to read and write with competence and pleasure.

Maryanne Wolf’s paper is the closest thing to a peace treaty I’ve come across to end these wars. At the very least, she provides a convincing rationale for declaring a ceasefire and putting all of our energy toward a truce. We now have enough evidence supporting the importance of laying a solid foundation in code-knowledge in order for our students to unlock the meaning of text, so an emphasis on the importance of phonics instruction has not been displaced by her proposal, merely given its proper place within the entire spectrum of the reading experience.

We know that we must not give foundational skill development any more time than it requires (get in, get out—move on—as Mark Seidenberg advises), and we must never sideline the importance of any literacy component. The foundational skills and comprehension processes inherent in reading instruction exhibit active coordination, not competition.

The teacher, like a good coach, understands the synergistic roles of reading components and sends the right unit out at the right time to achieve the team’s ultimate goal: helping students finish in the win column.

Can we put down our old reading glasses and pick up a new pair that is neither rose-colored nor reductionist? As Esther Quintero from the Albert Shanker Institute—who shared this impactful paper with me along with her own valuable insights (for which I am very grateful)—summarizes:

I think understanding Elbow Room requires easing some of the mindsets and language we usually bring to conversations about reading. It’s not about throwing out what’s established, but about freeing that knowledge from the straitjackets that have formed around it. The paper feels like an invitation to think with more flexibility — to let connections, rather than divisions, come into view. It feels like a fresh start.

Here’s to a fresh start to teaching reading!

Phonemes need letters. Phonics needs semantics, syntax, and morpheme knowledge. Words need stories. The reading brain connects all of these processes, and so should our teaching.

--Maryanne Wolf

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.

Blog Topics

literacy

Issues Areas

Early Childhood Education

by Harriett Janetos

Multicomponent instruction means making room for ALL the components of literacy.