Shanker Blog

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 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.

What Bayard Rustin Would Do? Part 2

vpthomas — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:44:54 +0000

What Bayard Rustin Would Do? Part 2

vpthomas December 9, 2025

Our guest author is Eric Chenoweth, director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe and principal author of Democracy Web, an online comparative study guide for teachers, students and civic activists. He worked with Bayard Rustin in various capacities in the late 1970s and 1980s. Eric visited the new exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, “The Life of Bayard Rustin: Speaking Truth to Power,” which shines a light on Rustin’s central work in the Civil Rights Movement and his contributions to the international peace and human rights movements. It runs through February, 2026 and will form the basis of a permanent exhibition in the museum’s expansion planned for 2026. Part 1 of “What Bayard Rustin Would Do” describes the exhibition and the context to Rustin’s work up to 1965. Part 2 describes Rustin’s work and writings in the last 25 years of his life as he faced the increasing backlash to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The full article is posted on the Albert Shanker Institute’s March on Washington Resources page.

Introduction
Bayard Rustin was a man of politics and action who devoted his life to organizing and advocacy for greater freedom and democracy in the United States and abroad. Much of that organizing and advocacy was in the form of direct action (he was arrested more than twenty times in acts of civil disobedience), lobbying, and mass protest. Bayard Rustin was also a public intellectual who used the spoken and written word to advance his ideas for democratic change and social and economic justice. While he wrote frequently in his early years of activism for radical publications like Liberation, Rustin wrote more frequently and in more known publications after his organizing of the March on Washington gave him greater prominence. His words were always a guide for action.

From Protest to Politics

Rustin’s most famous essay is “From Protest to Politics,” which appeared in February 1965 in the then-liberal publication Commentary. It is sometimes characterized as Rustin turning away from direct protest actions against racial injustice to advocating political compromise for achieving incremental gains. In fact, Rustin did not advocate abandoning direct action, which had been the central basis of his organizing career to that point, nor for compromising political aims. Rather, he argued for adopting a new political strategy to achieve a “revolutionary” economic program for “democratizing American society” being proposed in Randolph’s and Rustin’s bold project to achieve greater economic equality, the Freedom Budget.

“The central challenge for the Civil Rights Movement,” he wrote, was translating the success of nonviolent protest to gain equality in law into “a lasting majority political movement for social and economic equality.” This effort would require a change in strategy because it was “vastly more complicated” than ending legal discrimination. The reason, he explained, is that:

"The very decade which has witnessed the decline of legal Jim Crow has also seen the rise of de facto segregation in our most fundamental socioeconomic institutions."

He argued that neither this institutional racism nor economic exploitation generally could be overcome through programs — however justified — targeted solely to address past or ongoing discrimination. These were necessarily “zero-sum policies” in which gains for Blacks would be seen as losses by whites. As a persecuted minority, Blacks could not expect such largesse by the majority, but instead must coalesce with other political forces to adopt broad economic programs that benefitted all workers but substantially bettering the material conditions of Blacks.¹

Protest against ongoing discrimination remained urgent, Rustin wrote, but with the legislative win of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to end legalized segregation, it was necessary to now address urgent economic needs. He advocated achieving these higher goals by mobilizing Black political power through massive voter registration and electoral participation efforts and enhancing Blacks’ electoral power through coalitions with those having “common interests and aims,” namely other workers of all races.

The Enduring Backlash

In “From Protest to Politics,” Rustin wrote that the 1964 Johnson landslide against Republican Barry Goldwater represented the possibility for the “majority liberal consensus” he hoped would bring about greater economic equality. But, even then, he warned that the possibility also existed for a “Talmadge-Goldwater” majority taking hold in a single party, one that combined segregationist Democrats and free market Republican extremists. “[T]he Johnson landslide [did not] prove the ‘white backlash’ to be a myth,” he stated. “It proved, rather, that economic interests are more fundamental than prejudice: the backlashers decided that loss of social security was, after all, too high a price to pay for a slap at the Negro.”

The question was how fundamental in the end were those economic interests. A partial answer came with major Republican gains in the 1966 midterm elections to slow civil rights progress. A more decisive answer came in 1968 with the narrow election of Richard Nixon as president on a “law and order” platform. It signaled the full transformation of the GOP into the “states’ rights” party. The white backlash proved enduring. Libraries are stacked with books on the shifting motivations of the American electorate since then, but one thing stands out: from 1966, a majority of white voters have cast their ballots for the anti-civil rights party, often in overwhelming numbers, making a lasting multiracial governing coalition more difficult.

From the 1968 election, Rustin understood that everything that he had struggled for and hoped to achieve was at risk. In column after column and essay after essay, Rustin lambasted Nixon’s anti-civil rights, anti-Black, and anti-union economic policies. Nixon represented “the height of reactionary politics”; he tokenized Blacks with cynical initiatives like “The Philadelphia Plan”; his Black capitalism schemes were shams serving only a narrow business elite, while not uplifting the Black working class.

Rustin was particularly worried about the direction Nixon took the Supreme Court, the main institution propelling the Civil Rights Movement from the 1940s to the 1960s. With the confirmation in 1971 of Nixon’s third appointment, William Renquist, a Goldwater acolyte, an anti-civil rights majority was solidified. Rustin wrote that the Renquist appointment was “the bleakest chapter in what has been an unremittingly sorry Nixon Administration race relations record.” The consequence was soon felt. A 1972 ruling allowed private clubs to discriminate against Blacks. Rustin wrote that the ruling meant the “end to that institution’s role as an instrument of civil rights progress and activism.” He warned of the reversals to come and argued that this made a change in civil rights strategy around economic demands even more necessary.²

The Politics of Persuasion

For Rustin, persuasion was a political corollary to nonviolent civil disobedience. He went on any number of speaking tours and addressed thousands of audiences, as indicated by the array of meeting posters shown in the “Speaking Truth to Power” exhibit. Rustin had convinced many in those audiences, Black and white, to adopt principles of nonviolence and pacifism; to put bodies on the line in civil disobedience for justice; to commit to integrating public accommodations, schools and workplaces; and later to build alliances of civil rights and religious groups, liberals and the labor movement for a better society. It was his power in persuading interracial audiences to action (my parents were among them) that led him to believe a lasting multiracial majority for social and economic justice was possible.

Rustin rarely debated political enemies but rather those he thought he could influence. Often, as when he engaged Malcolm X in debate, he spoke to audiences frustrated by the limited results of nonviolence in addressing institutional racism. In those debates, Rustin would affirm the legitimacy of the growing anger in both the North and South that Malcolm X and the growing Black Power movement represented, but he argued that anger was not constructive to guide strategy. He repeated often, “Let us be enraged about injustice, but let us not be destroyed by it.” Nonviolence, he would continue, still offered a more strategic means to address the oppression of Blacks than “any means necessary” or taking up arms. Rustin also contended that Malcolm X’s advocacy of Black separation from white society was a reactionary reprise of past failed strategies of Black separatism that accommodated or accepted segregation. Only demands for integration, he argued, had brought concrete progress for Blacks. (Rustin later welcomed the changing views of Malcolm X on integration before his death in the essay “Making His Mark.”)

Rustin remained sympathetic to the anger of young activists. Indeed, his arguments were generally not directed at militant Black Power advocates as much at those he believed were the major impediment to addressing institutional racism: white liberals and moderates refusing to go beyond civil rights legislation by seriously funding real solutions to social and economic problems centuries in the making.

In “The Watts Manifesto” (Commentary, March 1966), Rustin delivers a blistering critique of the McCone Commission Report, the California government’s official response to the 1965 rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles. He describes how he and King had gone to its destroyed areas in the wake of the 1965 unrest. Black youths they met told the civil rights leaders that their nonviolence had achieved nothing while the youths had “won” by forcing white city authorities to finally come and pay attention to their plight. To meet such desperation, Rustin argued that America’s “ghettos of despair” required nothing less than a full addressing of their needs in programs such as those included in the Freedom Budget. He continued,

"Such proposals may seem impractical and even incredible. But what is truly impractical and incredible is that America, with its enormous wealth, has allowed Watts to become what it is and that a commission empowered to study this explosive situation [comes] up with answers that boil down to voluntary actions by business and labor, new public-relations campaigns for municipal agencies, and information-gathering for housing, fair-employment, and welfare departments. . . . And what is most impractical and incredible of all is that we may very well continue to teach impoverished, segregated, and ignored Negroes that the only way they can get the ear of America is to rise up in violence."

In “Lessons of the Long, Hot Summer,” (Commentary, October 1967), Rustin again warned liberals to heed the message of unrest in Black communities and to change the nation’s warped priorities. By now, he was less optimistic: “Many white Americans who joined the March on Washington and applauded Martin Luther King’s dream of freedom seem far less enthusiastic about helping us realize that dream when it means altering our economic structure.”³

What distressed Rustin most, however, was the reactionary policy of “benign neglect” developed in a memo by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and adopted as policy by the Nixon Administration. In a public reply, he wrote, “Moynihan has written a memo to the President on the condition of Negroes without mentioning the disastrous effect the administration’s economic policies are having upon blacks. . . . He totally neglects social and economic injustice as he narrows the problem of the ghetto down to the simple and cruelly misleading remark, ‘Black Americans injure one another.’” As Rustin reviews social conditions that Moynihan terms “pathology,” he deplores Moynihan’s blaming of Blacks for the problems of poverty imposed on them. “There is an element of social pathology here,” he writes, “but it is not in the black community as it is in a society which permits a situation like this to continue.”

Race, Class and Labor

The A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) remained the organizational vehicle for Rustin to keep advancing his mentor’s “total vision.” The APRI organized over 200 chapters of Black trade unionists around the country to enhance Black power through voter participation campaigns and union leadership training.⁴Central to its mission was aligning the civil rights struggle with the AFL-CIO and its economic program. In “From Protest to Politics,” Rustin had explained why. “The labor movement,” he wrote, “despite its obvious faults, has been the largest single organized force in this country pushing for progressive social legislation.”

Rustin cited the “obvious faults” in articles because they were not easily overlooked by Blacks. Large parts of the labor movement had a history of discrimination and segregation. A. Philip Randolph, as the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the country’s first mass Black trade union, fought those practices for decades inside the American Federation of Labor, with allied unions like the American Federation of Teachers. In the early 1960s, he finally gained greater support from the merged AFL-CIO leadership for the civil rights cause. While significant pockets of exclusion remained, there were strong efforts finally undertaken to tackle discrimination within the labor movement. In “Blacks and the Unions” (Harper’s Magazine, May 1971), Rustin stated that the AFL-CIO was becoming one of the most integrated institutions in America, with Blacks now representing more than 10 percent of union membership (2.5 million members) and Black trade unionists winning more elections to leadership positions. The AFL-CIO was also the one major institution with a social and economic program similar to the Freedom Budget to answer the urgent problems of the Black community.

Rustin viewed these problems as mainly economic in nature. While he was sometimes criticized for downplaying race and emphasizing class, the two issues, as for King, were not a trade-off. Addressing class was addressing race as Rustin made clear in an address to the Tuskegee Institute (published in Dissent in November 1970):

"It goes without saying that Negroes are brutalized by racial prejudice and discrimination. What is not often remembered, however, is that were we to eliminate racism today we would have solved only part of the problem, and perhaps not even the major part. . . . Automation is eliminating thousands of jobs that were held by both whites and blacks. This problem does not spring from blackness but from a technological revolution that has affected all poor people, regardless of their race. We might psychoanalyze racism out of all the prejudiced white people in the country, but until we are willing to accept the principle that every able bodied man or woman has the right to a decent and well-paying job, we shall not have begun to attack the economic roots of racial injustice."

The Challenge of Coalition Politics

As they do with Martin Luther King, Jr., conservatives and self-described centrists today often use Rustin’s words to support their own attacks on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), “identity politics,” and “wokeism.” Some claim him for their support of the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action in higher education. Others believe he would reprise his debates with Malcolm X to today polemicize with Black intellectuals stressing America’s continuing racial divide in arguing for programs of redress and repair. They misread (or purposefully misrepresent) Rustin’s actual writings.

Rustin did chastise civil rights organizations for not adopting a more unified national economic program and political strategy to address institutional racism and its economic roots in class. He specifically opposed quotas, considering them “a new form of tokenism,” and he warned that some affirmative action programs, especially in times of economic scarcity, would foster white resentment. He also critiqued the “empty politics” of militant revolutionaries who took up arms or engaged in provocative direct actions to achieve separatist aims.

But Rustin did not reject race as a continuing issue to be addressed, nor contest the moral argument for redress, nor even argue against embracing Black or any other identity. In his syndicated weekly columns, he backed efforts of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to tackle discrimination in the workplace; he praised the NAACP’s John Morsell for his mid-1970s initiative to bridge the divide with white ethnic groups over affirmative action; he lobbied for HBCUs as engines for Black self-affirmation and advancement. In the 1970s, he argued for extending anti-discrimination efforts to women and other minority groups. In the 1980s, he did so especially in taking up the cause for gay rights, which he called “the central struggle of democracy” of that time.

Rustin also championed what he called “real affirmative action” programs, meaning efforts targeting Blacks and other minorities in ways to effectively integrate them into the economy and society (the point of many DEI programs). These included the organizing campaigns of the American Federation of Teachers to unionize tens of thousands of paraprofessionals in urban areas, mostly poor Black and Latino women, who were able to gain economic dignity and educational opportunities to enter the teaching force through collective bargaining contracts. (He had recommended Velma Murphy Hill to UFT President Albert Shanker to lead the first successful organizing drive in New York City in 1969-70.) Rustin himself initiated the Recruitment and Training Program that brought many thousands of black and Hispanic youths into the exclusive construction trades unions. (The government-supported program did not survive the reactionary wave of Reagan.)

Throughout, Rustin sought to rebuild the March on Washington coalition as a response to the “Talmadge-Goldwater” reaction. (“No one has proposed an effective alternative,” he wrote.) In this pursuit, what frustrated him most again were not civil rights organizations, and much less Black Power advocates, many of whom by that time had adopted the strategy of gaining local power through elections. Rather, Rustin critiqued the Republican-led effort to weaken trade unions and those in the Democratic Party who distanced themselves from the AFL-CIO and derailed labor law reform. He argued that a large Democratic Party faction’s support for policies harming union workers, like deregulation and free trade, was contrary to rebuilding a lasting electoral majority. In his view, a civil rights and liberal coalition absent the labor movement could not achieve a majority, as he believed the 1972 and 1980 elections showed.

Rustin’s last speech before his death, made to the Cleveland City Club in late July 1987, shows the consistency of his positions. He spoke with characteristic energy and sharpness to remind the largely business audience that Black conservatives they pointed to may have discovered all the right problems but had all the wrong solutions; that poverty caused the same so-called pathologies in poor white British slums as in Cleveland’s poor Black ghettos; that programs eradicating poverty would better solve the problems of both poor white and poor Black communities; and that the broad-based universal economic program he continued to advocate for was the best means to end poverty and benefit all workers. He lamented that few Democratic presidential candidates advocated such a vision and the one that did (he meant Jesse Jackson) “cannot win.” While the Democratic Party remained the party of civil rights and thus still the only political vehicle for Black progress, many of its members in Congress were nevertheless allowing “all the horrible things” Reagan was doing in budget appropriations to gut poverty programs. He concluded with a dark warning that if the Democrats did not change their approach, “I don’t know what will happen.”

A Deep Faith in Democracy

Rustin’s domestic influence waned, which led him to turn more of his focus to international work, as he had in the early 1950s organizing for the pacifist movement and for African independence.

In this later work, Randolph’s influence was again evident, with Rustin now committed more to democracy as a touchstone than pacifism. This was Rustin’s main political change over his lifetime. He continued to promote peaceful solutions to conflicts and opposed the use of arms against oppressive regimes. But Rustin wrote that he no longer saw “a political value” in pacifism “without consideration of the advance of freedom.” He redirected his actions to opposing dictatorships, advocating for human rights and humanitarian relief, and fostering democracy. He participated in dozens of missions to monitor elections and to promote the cause of refugees. Rustin also came to believe that war carried out in self-defense was just, most notably in the case of Israel. In 1973, he advocated for immediate arms deliveries when Israel’s fate was in question in the Yom Kippur War. He condemned anti-Semitism and defended Israel’s right to exist when that existence was being questioned by the very institution that established it, the United Nations, in adopting a resolution equating Zionism with racism. (In relation to today’s tragic situation, it should be noted that Rustin also supported the rights of Palestinians, called for the end to the use of violence and terror to try to achieve them, and backed all efforts at peaceful solutions to the Middle East conflict. At the core of his support for Israel was its democratic character, including its then-strong labor movement, the Histadrut.)

What was most lasting from Rustin’s Quaker upbringing was his commitment to nonviolence as a political strategy. Nonviolent resistance was then succeeding throughout the world, from the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal in 1973 to the “People Power Movement” in the Philippines in 1986. A notable case was the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980, where an entire society adopted the nonviolent strategy of sit-down strikes to gain the right to establish free trade unions from a repressive communist regime. Rustin went on a trip to Poland both to advise and learn from Solidarity leaders in May 1981 and he was a loud voice against the regime’s efforts to quash the free union movement by imposing martial law in December 1981. He strongly backed the AFL-CIO’s efforts to keep the union alive with moral, financial and political assistance. In the last four years of his life, Rustin’s main focus was organizing support for the South Africa freedom movement. He believed the greater adoption of nonviolent civil disobedience and the successful organizing of black trade unions would lead to an end to apartheid. Although he did not live to see it, democratic change did indeed come to both South Africa and Poland through adoption of nonviolent strategies.

The Rustin to Come

Bayard Rustin’s belief in nonviolent civil disobedience as a strategy for achieving human freedom was given its fullest meaning in the courage, principles and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. At the outset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955, Rustin and Randolph both recognized the possibility of King leading a national civil rights movement, now with the moral firepower of the pulpit. They organized support and raised funds in the North while Rustin went to Montgomery to offer guidance on nonviolence practices.

In one of his last essays, “The King to Come” (The New Republic, March 9, 1987), Rustin posited that while Gandhi had pioneered nonviolence as a political means for the vast majority to overcome British colonial rule, King achieved something historically unique. He had shown the full power of strategic nonviolence by leading an oppressed minority group in a national crusade to change the unjust laws and practices of a dominant majority. He gave a model for all other minority groups facing injustice. “King’s strategy and tactics, imbued with the spirit of nonviolence, love, and affections,” he wrote, “finally made feasible the emergence, under law, of a single nation — the states truly united.”

Feasible and yet, as Rustin understood so well, still to be achieved twenty years after King’s assassination. “The second phase of King’s revolution” — the national economic program to mount the “total attack on poverty” that King was organizing at the time of his assassination — was never adopted. Rustin encouraged the next generation to achieve the “the King to come.” Even then, however, it seemed all too unlikely. Poverty was ever more entrenched in urban slums and leading to a new form of racism. “What makes the new form more insidious,” he wrote, “is its basis in observed sociological data. The new racist equates the pathology of the poor with race.” At the same time, he continued, “the Reagan administration is zealously seeking to roll back many of the gains King gave his life to achieve.”

Democratic Party candidates did win national elections again by crafting multiracial liberal-labor coalitions, including of Barack Obama as America’s first Black president and of Joe Biden as a stalwart pro-union president. But their mildly reformist administrations failed to achieve the lasting political majority that Rustin had hoped for through adoption of radical economic policies. Neither president could reverse a longstanding trend starting from the Reagan era that saw increasing economic inequality and greater concentration of wealth resulting from neoliberal economic policies. Nor could either president forestall the rise of a reactionary base of support behind an openly racist candidate.

As a result, the “Talmadge-Goldwater” political backlash has reached its apotheosis in the second Trump Administration. Emulating Old South regimes and relying on increased political influence of former Confederate states, Donald Trump asserts authoritarian power, now through the federal government. He has unleashed a repressive national police force to deport masses of immigrants with the aim to reverse America’s demographic shift away from a dominant white majority. He has gotten rid of all DEI programs, ended civil rights enforcement, and turned the EEOC and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department upside down to investigate supposed discrimination by minorities against the majority white population as violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.⁵ As part of an effort to maintain power, he and Republicans have launched an unprecedented assault on voting rights. With the cooperation of the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump is remaking the Constitution and the laws nearly without restraint in order to deconstruct government agencies and impose his anti-civil rights agenda on schools and universities, law firms, media conglomerates and business. As important, Goldwater’s free market extremism reigns supreme, with “Mrs. Murphy’s property rights” now corruptly exercised by Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, Trump himself, and the growing oligarchic class of billionaires backing him.

What Would Bayard Rustin Do Today?

What would Bayard Rustin do today? One can only surmise from his life’s actions and teachings. But with reactionary politics in full hold of the country, Rustin’s legacy of radical protest and politics offers enduring lessons.

At home and abroad, he worked to expand rights and freedoms, to take up the cause of the oppressed and disadvantaged, and to promote democratic change through peaceful means. Speaking truth to power, Rustin raised his voice against injustice and threw his body into the gears of reactionary repression in acts of peaceful civil disobedience. As an apostle of nonviolence, he refused to respond in kind against acts of state violence and exhorted others to follow his example, with the understanding that the adoption of nonviolence as a political strategy was the best means to end injustice and achieve social change. Using powers of persuasion, he inspired thousands to activism and won adherents to integration, social justice, economic equality and coalition politics. He helped build Black political power through the ballot box and the union card. He acted individually and by building organizations and national coalitions to overcome the entrenched social, economic and political forces committed to maintaining legalized segregation and imposing economic inequality.

And for twenty-five years, he continuously exhorted the nation to rebuff reactionary appeals to law and order and free market extremism and to expand its understanding of equality. “It would be no exaggeration to say that the history of American political life has been the history of the struggle for equality,” he wrote in a column decrying Reagan’s transfer of wealth “from the very poor to the very rich.” In his view, “the creation of the nation’s most significant programs like Social Security, national funding for education and unemployment insurance for the jobless” was “clear proof” that the majority of Americans considered economic equality as part of that struggle. He could not abide Reagan’s “reversal of the 50-year-trend toward social justice” as a permanent expression of the national will. He argued that a lasting majority would still be built around the idea to achieve greater social and economic equality.

These principles, practices and beliefs joined Bayard Rustin together with A. Philip Randolph and are what joined them together with Martin Luther King, Jr. They are a short-term guide to mobilizing resistance to Trump’s cruel injustices and rejecting his attempt to consolidate authoritarian power. They are a longer-term guide to developing the broader organizational and political strategies for overcoming a 60-year-long reactionary backlash against the bold attempt to achieve full social and economic equality in the United States. Civil rights histories usually downplay the large synchrony of Randolph’s, Rustin’s and King’s legacies and generally overplay less meaningful disharmony. It seems time to stress the stronger synchrony, as the “Speaking Truth to Power” exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum begins to do.

Endnotes

¹In a New Yorker article reviewing the recent voluminous literature on the subject, Idrees Kahloon, Washington Bureau Chief for The Economist, concludes that approaches like the Freedom Budget would still likely be more effective than reparations in narrowing over time the wealth gap of Blacks and whites, which has not been reduced since the 1960s (“What We Miss When We Talk About the Racial Wealth Gap,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2025).

²On the Supreme Court’s retreat on civil rights under a 50-year-long conservative majority, see “The Colorblind Campaign to Undo Civil Rights Progress,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine, March 13, 2024.

³Martin Luther King, Jr. was even more trenchant. In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, also published in 1967, King wrote, “White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. . . . White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro.”

⁴Rustin delegated the running of the Institute and its programs to fellow CORE veteran Norman Hill, who had been tapped also to be the national organizer of the March on Washington. A description of the APRI’s work, along with that of earlier civil rights struggles, can be found in Hill’s recent joint memoir written with his wife Velma Murphy Hill, Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain (Regalo Press, New York: 2023).

⁵See also the article by Nikole Hannah-Jones, “How the Trump Administration Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights in Two Months,” New York Times Magazine, June 27, 2025.

Issues Areas

International Democracy

Strengthening Democracy

by Eric Chenoweth

Part II of “What Bayard Rustin Would Do” describes his work and writings in the last 25 years of his life.

What Would Bayard Rustin Do? Part 1

vpthomas — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 16:45:23 +0000

What Would Bayard Rustin Do? Part 1

vpthomas December 3, 2025

Our guest author is Eric Chenoweth, director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe and principal author of Democracy Web, an online comparative study guide for teachers, students and civic activists. He worked with Bayard Rustin in various capacities in the late 1970s and 1980s. Eric visited the new exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, “The Life of Bayard Rustin: Speaking Truth to Power,” which shines a light on Rustin’s central work in the Civil Rights Movement and his contributions to the international peace and human rights movements. It runs through February 2026, and will form the basis of a permanent exhibition in the museum’s expansion planned for 2026. Part 1 of “What Bayard Rustin Would Do” describes the exhibition and the context to Rustin’s work up to 1965. Part 2 describes Rustin’s work and writings in the last 25 years of his life as he faced the increasing backlash to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The full article is posted on the Albert Shanker Institute’s March on Washington Resources page.

We live in a reactionary age. Worldwide, the advance of freedom in the previous century did not just stall. It went into reverse. What is shocking many is that this reactionary age has taken root in the modern world’s oldest, richest and most militarily powerful democracy. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in January 2025 has put him in a position to assert largely unchecked power to reverse America’s progress towards a multiracial democracy.

This period in America would not have surprised the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. He spent decades working to end a previous period of white reactionary rule in the United States. Yet, soon after the masterwork of his career — the organizing of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — he began warning of a political backlash against the gains made to end Jim Crow rule and to make the country a full democracy ensuring the right to vote to all citizens. As he that backlash began to manifest, he argued for political strategies and policies to move the country in a radical direction towards greater equality. Whatever situation he found himself, Rustin worked to achieve a more equal, tolerant and pluralist society and a freer world through nonviolent and democratic means. His life and teachings offer guidance on how to respond to today’s global reactionary challenge. A new museum exhibition offers a launching point.

Speak Truth to Power

The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, located at the preserved Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, is shining light on Rustin’s central work in the Civil Rights Movement as well as his contributions to the international peace and human rights movements. The new exhibit, “Speaking Truth to Power: The Life of Bayard Rustin,” runs through February 2026 and will serve as the basis for a permanent exhibit as part of the museum’s expansion in 2026.

Curated by art historian Gay Feldman with photographs by David Katzenstein, “Speaking Truth to Power” offers a highly interesting collection in different media that takes one back to Rustin’s time and introduces visitors to his life’s work. The exhibit consists mostly of items from collected materials provided by Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner, who directs The Bayard Rustin Fund and has advised on a number of other projects related to Rustin’s life and work.¹ One exhibition case shows original posters from speaking events and conferences in the 1940s intertwining his pacifist and civil rights beliefs. Another includes an array of photos, materials and descriptions of Rustin’s international work, including a trip to India in the late 1940s to learn about strategic nonviolence from the Gandhian movement and to Africa in the 1950s to support the nonviolent independence struggles of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria. His range of talents and unique personality are shown with displays of original album covers of his early singing career with Josh White and examples of Rustin’s personal jewelry and cane collections (which he always wore and carried) as well as of the extraordinary collection of religious and African art that he amassed over a lifetime.

A video of an interview with Naegle by the museum’s Director of History, Ryan Jones, provides a more personal account of Rustin’s life and its significance. One video section focuses on the role of Julia Rustin, the grandmother who raised Rustin and instilled in him civil rights and Quaker principles.²

As many leaders and institutions submit to Donald Trump’s demands for allegiance to his reactionary policies, the exhibition title alone is a basic lesson for our time. It refers to a pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for An Alternative to Violence, that Rustin helped write in the mid-50s for the American Friends Service Committee. Rustin is often credited for bringing “speak truth to power,” a familiar phrase in Quaker circles, to popular use in civil rights, peace and other social movements. The phrase certainly reflects how Rustin, born in 1912, lived his life over 75 years: from a first solo sit-in to integrate a local movie theater in his hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania; to the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, the first interracial freedom ride in the South to test the Supreme Court’s ban of segregation in interstate bus travel; to organizing protests across continents for a nuclear test ban treaty in the 1950s; through to his rebuke of the Democratic Party leadership for accommodating Reaganism in the 1980s. From whatever vantage point, Rustin did not let power deter him from speaking out and acting on his beliefs.

The Ten Demands

One remarkable exhibit case centers around the March on Washington that includes ephemera of many actions that Rustin helped organize leading up to it. It includes items from the original 1941 March on Washington Movement led by A. Philip Randolph to integrate defense industries and federal employment and Randolph’s 1947-48 campaign to desegregate the armed forces. Two pamphlets are featured from the Journey of Reconciliation (“We Challenged Jim Crow” and “22 Days on a Chain Gang,” Rustin’s account of his imprisonment in North Carolina). There is also a never-before-displayed original copy of Rustin’s earliest hand-written plans for a March on Washington. Drawn up in 1956, it shows the detail and purpose that Rustin considered necessary to the many direct actions he organized. It was the basis for three precursor marches from 1957 to 1959 — the National Prayer Pilgrimage and two Youth Marches for Integrated Schools — that he and Randolph organized to demand implementation of the Brown v. Board decision.

A video loop with rare footage of the 1963 march offers a glimpse of the broader strategy, discussed further below, that Randolph and Rustin brought to that time. Few remember but Rustin followed King’s powerful speech to end the march by reciting a series of demands. The massive crowd of 250,000 had come not for a vague slogan but to push for specific civil rights and economic demands on the U.S. government. Rustin printed them on a flyer titled “What We Demand” and had them distributed widely prior to the march in the North and the South. On the screen, Rustin recites the demands in his distinct diction and asks the crowd, “What do you say?” The crowd gives its resounding ascent.

The ten demands are among the most radical set of precepts for social progress in American history. The first six relate to the March’s theme of freedom, most importantly the adoption and enforcement of civil rights legislation “to guarantee all Americans access to public accommodations, decent housing, adequate and integrated education, and the right to vote.” The last four demands, around the theme of jobs, include: a “massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages”; a national minimum wage to support “a decent standard of living”; fair labor standards in “all areas of employment”; and a “federal Fair Employment Practices Act” barring discrimination by “all federal, state, and municipal governments, employers, and trade unions” (emphasis in original).

The Source

As innovative as the NCRM exhibit is, it could cover only so much. Two things stand out as largely missing — both from the exhibition and the museum. The first is Rustin’s close relationship working with Dr. King to ground the Civil Rights Movement in the principles and tactics of strategic nonviolence, both during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and in creating the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The second is the integral place of A. Philip Randolph in the work of both Rustin and King. It is in the latter relationship that one finds the source for the Ten Demands and the basis for Rustin’s work after the march.

In 1941 and 1948, Rustin had rebelled against Randolph’s national leadership. When Presidents Roosevelt and Truman each met the central demands of the March on Washington Movement and the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation, Rustin publicly criticized Randolph for not pushing further. Each time, Randolph welcomed Rustin back to his work as Rustin in turn came to appreciate Randolph’s tactical acuity in achieving concrete gains for Black Americans. He also came to identify himself more with Randolph’s foundational beliefs.

Rustin described those beliefs in a 1969 essay, “The Total Vision of A. Philip Randolph.” First, he wrote, Randolph “has understood that social and political freedom must be rooted in economic freedom.” Second, even as Randolph felt that “Negro salvation is an internal process of struggle and self-affirmation, he has recognized the political necessity of forming alliances with men of all races and the moral necessity of comprehending the Black movement as part of a general effort to expand human freedom.” And third, “as a result of his deep faith in democracy, [Randolph] has understood that social change . . . [depends] on direct political action through the mobilization of masses of individuals to gain economic and social justice.”

The March on Washington and the scope of its demands reflected especially Randolph’s vision. As recounted in Jervis Anderson’s biographies of both men, Randolph believed that a dramatic national action was needed in the 100th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation to spotlight the continued lack of freedom and the resulting dire economic conditions facing Blacks in America. He was increasingly concerned about conditions in northern cities, where automation was undermining economic gains Blacks had made from moving north in The Great Migration.

In a meeting the two held in December 1962, Randolph tasked Rustin with planning a large protest in Washington, DC. Over six months, as plans evolved, Randolph and Rustin forged a coalition among the fractious Big 6 leaders of civil rights organizations and four leaders of unions and religious groups for a massive march around the themes of jobs and freedom. Not all organizations formally agreed to the full set of demands, but their leaders agreed that they should be presented to President Kennedy and Congress.

While King’s oratory took the day, Randolph, as the March’s opening speaker, set out its grand purpose:

"We want a free, democratic society dedicated to the political, economic and social advancement of man along moral lines. Now we know that real freedom will require many changes in the nation’s political and social philosophies and institutions. For one thing we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin. The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality.³

"It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values, because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property. It falls to us to demand new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits — for we are the worst victims of unemployment. Negroes are in the forefront of today’s movement for social and racial justice because we know we cannot expect the realization of our aspirations through the same old anti-democratic social institutions and philosophies that have all along frustrated our aspirations."

The Freedom Budget

The radical language of Randolph may surprise some but, as Rustin makes clear, it was consonant with his lifelong democratic socialist beliefs as well as the raised hopes of the time. With passage of the Civil Rights Act and President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious introduction of the War on Poverty, Randolph and Rustin believed the opportunity existed to meet their fuller goals and to create what Rustin called “equality in fact.” So did Martin Luther King, Jr., who put forward a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged in 1964 in his book Why We Can’t Wait. In the fall of 1965, the three together proposed the Freedom Budget, a $100 billion plan (equivalent to $1 trillion today) to reorient federal spending around universal jobs training, guaranteed employment, a living wage, affordable housing, and full funding for education, health care and urban renewal. It was “What We Demand” set out in specifics.

The Freedom Budget became Rustin’s main focus. As his aged mentor stepped back, Rustin took the helm of a new organization named for Randolph and dedicated to strengthening the coalition of civil rights and labor movements. He spent the next years leading the effort for the Freedom Budget’s enactment. Rustin gained the endorsement of economists, labor leaders and civil rights organizations; he lobbied the Johnson administration; he testified before Congress; he wrote articles in prominent publications; and he spoke across the country to rally public support.

Johnson achieved much of his legislative agenda with the adoption of Medicare, Medicaid, food benefits, Head Start, later the Fair Housing Act, and other programs. Over time, these did reduce poverty, especially for the elderly; the gap narrowed in graduation rates and basic skills scores between minority and white students; among other gains. In the end, though, the hope was left unfulfilled for “a proper priority of values” and the reorganization of the economy to achieve social and economic equality. Still, Rustin never stopped advocating for the Freedom Budget and the full equality for Black Americans and all Americans he believed essential to fulfilling American democracy. His work over the last 25 years of his life will be discussed further in Part II of the series.

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¹Among those many projects are Rustin, the 2023 film directed by George C. Wolfe and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama; the documentary film Brother Outsider; codirected by Nancy Kauss and Bennett Singer; the Rustin Center for Social Justice in Princeton, New Jersey, which provides resources and a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community; a young adult book called Troublemaker for Justice, co-written with Jacquelyn Houtman and Michael J. Long; and Long’s I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters (City Light Books, San Francisco: 2003).

²Naegle’s study of Julia Rustin and her own civil rights activism is part of a collection of essays edited by Michael G. Long, Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics, published by New York University Press in 2024.

³“What about Mrs. Murphy’s property rights” was the familiar refrain of segregationists and free market libertarians in debates over civil rights legislation requiring private businesses to provide equal treatment for Blacks.

Issues Areas

K-12 Education

Civic Education

Worker Rights

Strengthening Democracy

by Eric Chenoweth

Part I of “What Bayard Rustin Would Do” describes the context of Rustin’s work up to 1965.