Shanker Blog

Encore Careers: Serving the Public Interest After 80

Our guest author is Stanley Litow, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a Shanker Institute Board Member.

At the end of the Biden Presidency there was a lot of discussion about whether people who pass the 80-year threshold should even be in public service at all, let alone be President. That view has intensified since the current White House occupant turned 80. And recent and upcoming elections have focused on replacing seniors in office, at all levels,  with a next generation of leadership. Given that I recently turned 80 and a few weeks later my older brother passed away at age 83, I have a personal view of what living past age 80 or serving the public interest, means,  and what a post-80 life means.

I retired after a 50 plus year career, including service as President of the IBM Foundation, time as NYC Deputy Schools Chancellor, founder of a major think tank and head of the Educational Priorities Panel plus City Hall service under Mayor Lindsay heading the NYC Urban Corps.  A long and satisfying set of experiences. During my service as Deputy Chancellor NYC adopted the "children of the rainbow" early grades diversity curriculum.  At IBM I helped organize three National Education Summits for the President of the United States, the nation's Governors, CEO's and school leaders, but my most significant achievement was designing a new combined high school and college model, called PTECH where students get both a high school and no cost college degree concurrently with a clear pathway to successful careers. This includes mentors and paid internships. PTECH started with one school in Brooklyn but spread globally, and now over 100,000 students across 600 schools are enrolled. Students who were not expected to achieve, are achieving at nationally high levels with mentors to aid in their school years. Just recently a new national not for profit the PTECH Alliance has formed to spread the PTECH opportunity to far more young people.

A Common Sense Approach to Demystify Universal Reading Screening with Multilingual Students

Our guest author is Lillian Durán, a professor in the Department of Special Education and Clinical Sciences at the University of Oregon. She develops language and literacy screening measures in English and Spanish and consults nationally regarding best practices in assessment with multilingual learners. 

Children learn the languages they are exposed to across their daily lives, but children acquire the ability to read in a language through formal instruction. Awareness of this fundamental difference between language and literacy skill development is at the core of making common sense decisions regarding the screening of multilingual students for reading problems. 

Universal Screening for reading development issues including dyslexia during the early elementary school years is now mandated or recommended in 49 states in the U.S. which naturally necessitates that all children are tested with the assumption that screening will accurately identify those children who will benefit from more targeted instructional support to reduce the likelihood that they will fall further behind in their reading development. The goal is to deliver effective and evidence-based reading intervention early that is likely to prevent reading failure before it becomes entrenched. 

Proficiency or Penalty? Grade Retention Policy and Its Implications for English Learners in Utah

One common goal of public education is to ensure all students reach academic mastery. In fact, most U.S. states have agreed upon a set of aligned standards of mastery through the Common Core. To that end, it may make sense to lawmakers that students repeat third grade and get another ‘at bat’ if they weren’t able to reach reading proficiency. This theory of change— accountability in action— has prompted many states to reinforce their literacy legislation with retention provisions. Eighteen states, including the District of Columbia, require grade retention for nonproficient third graders with varying good cause exemptions. Oklahoma and Utah both added retention requirements in their 2026 literacy legislation. Our study seeks to determine whether the theory of change used by lawmakers aligns with existing research on grade retention.

In the aftermath of burgeoning grade retention policies, scholars and stakeholders are questioning whether retention will improve outcomes, or if it will become another reform that unintentionally punishes marginalized families. By interviewing stakeholders in one of Utah’s most diverse school districts, Granite, we aimed to answer the following question: what are the long-term implications of retention provisions in Utah's literacy legislation for third graders? Through qualitative interviews and a literature review on the impacts of grade retention, we found that rather than targeting evidence-based interventions, the policy risks displacing responsibility onto families least equipped to absorb it. 

Time: The Missing Ingredient in Literacy Reform

Guest authors Jack Schneider and Ashley Carey are two of the co-authors of On the Clock: The Centrality of Time in Teacher Work, a new research brief published by the Albert Shanker Institute.

Across the country, states are rushing to adopt “science of reading” legislation. The motivations are sincere, and the research base is substantive. New curricula promise better outcomes; professional development workshops aim to equip teachers with evidence-based practices; data systems can help educators track student progress. From a distance, it seems comprehensive enough to close the nation’s yawning literacy gaps.

But policymakers have largely overlooked a critical ingredient that will almost certainly determine whether these reforms prove successful. And if you’re a teacher, you probably already know what it is.

Consider Ms. Smith, a second-grade teacher with a decade of classroom experience. She’s committed to her students and she understands why the new literacy approach matters. She wants to implement it well.

But she’s drowning.

The new curriculum requires her to learn new instructional methods. The assessment system requires one-on-one reading screeners for each of her 24 students—a process that eats up two full instructional days. New data management systems demand hours of tracking and reporting. And all of this has been added to everything Ms. Smith is already doing. 

Juneteenth, Truth-Telling, and the Power of Union-Supported Educators

Our guest author is Karla Hernández-Mats, a respected voice for public education who brings a deep understanding of the education system, from inside the classroom to executive leadership who is currently Chair of Educated. We Stand and an AFT Vice President.

As we commemorate Juneteenth—-a day that marks both delayed freedom and enduring resilience—-we are reminded that history is not just something we inherit, but something we actively teach, shape, and defend.

In today’s educational landscape, that responsibility carries new weight.

Across the country, educators are navigating a growing number of policies and political pressures designed to narrow curriculum, discourage honest conversations, and promote a version of teaching that is sanitized, disconnected, and, ultimately, self-centered. These efforts do more than limit content. They attempt to redefine the purpose of public education itself, shifting it away from critical thinking, identity development, and collective understanding.

But classrooms do not thrive under silence. Students do not grow from half-truths.

The research, presented in Unionized Teachers of Color’s Interpretations of the Silencing of Diversity Discourse in Florida: An Intersectional Qualitative Study, underscores a critical truth: educators of color consistently emphasize the importance of teaching authentically by drawing on lived experiences, cultural knowledge, and historical accuracy to foster deeper student engagement and identity development. This is not supplemental work. It is essential.

The Accountability Gap: D.C. Schools and Students with Disabilities

When I first moved to D.C., it took me some time to get used to the school system. Multiple city agencies share oversight of public schools, and enrollment is split nearly evenly between traditional public and charter schools— making finding a teaching job strenuous (lots of separate fingerprint appointments!). It wasn’t until I was in the classroom that I grasped how exhausting this fragmented system is for families. Witnessing the difficulty of transitioning from a public to a charter school was one of many consequences of this fragmentation. One of my parents moved to an online charter school because she was told her family would get more targeted support, only to realize that she had to quit her job to monitor her child’s lessons adequately due to her child’s ADHD.

In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) confirmed these challenges by releasing a report from their investigation on DCPS for discrimination of students with disabilities (SWD). In this report, the Commission highlighted two findings of discrimination: DCPS relies on due process complaints to deal with injustice, and they fail to provide transportation services for SWD that require it. 

These observations contribute to a larger pattern of fragmented governance for marginalized students. The District of Columbia's education governance system is structurally fragmented in ways that obscure accountability and prevent meaningful community participation. Because D.C. functions simultaneously as a city and a state, its education agencies operate across overlapping and competing jurisdictions with no single body held democratically accountable for outcomes. This fragmentation did not flourish on its own; policy actors have prioritized market-based ideologies that treat parents like consumers in a free market. As a result of this neoliberal model, families in need are left with improper access to school resources and civic engagement. Both community and researcher voices agree that D.C.’s governance system requires structural reform to enforce democratic accountability and promote equitable access to high quality public and charter schools to all students. 

Do One-Size-Fits-All Literacy Programs Serve English Learners?

My teaching experience in a bilingual school versus a dual immersion school couldn’t be more different, although they shared one commonality: the balance between engaging and overburdening English learners (ELs) was hard to strike. 

In the bilingual school, language barriers impeded my classroom daily. Although our lessons were taught bilingually, my co-teacher and I struggled to understand each other and often dealt with miscommunications. The administration mandated that state tested subjects be taught in English exclusively, implying that bilingual aims were on the backburner to test scores. Our EL students were constantly on call to translate for the non-Spanish speakers who didn’t understand the content, which distracted them from focusing on their coursework and put improper pressure on them to synthesize and interpret lessons. 

But in the dual immersion (DLI) school, I struggled to get my EL students involved at all. I didn't even know which of my students were enrolled in the DLI program, but I wrongly assumed that because I taught almost all the ELs in my school that many of them would be enrolled to take advantage of its academic benefits. In the DLI program, students were eligible to receive a certification in bilingualism which could be leveraged for college and career advancement. I was shocked to find that despite the DLI program offering their native language, only a few of my 250 students were enrolled. The program marketed bilingualism as a career investment: but one aimed at English-dominant students acquiring a second language, not at students who were already bilingual and had the most to gain from formal recognition of that skill.

These experiences reflect a broader pattern in how state policy has approached English learners: investing in programs that promise inclusion while rarely centering the students those programs are meant to serve. The data reveals this gap, as 50% of ELs who are in the U.S. school system since kindergarten fail to reach proficiency within 6 years.

Voter Suppression Will Not Have the Last Word

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

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

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

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

Equity and Fairness Equals Civic and Business Success

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

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

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

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

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.