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

    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.

  • What Bayard Rustin Would Do? Part 2

    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 December 31, 2025 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.

  • What Would Bayard Rustin Do? Part 1

    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 December 31, 2025 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.

  • When Educators Confront Authoritarianism

    Our guest authors are Adam Fefer, senior researcher at the Horizons Project and a political scientist; and Maria Stephan, co-Leader of the Horizons Project, a member of the Freedom Trainers, and an award-winning author and organizer.

    How Educators Strengthen Democracy
    Educators are critical to the maintenance of democratic institutions, norms, and freedoms. They provide students with knowledge (e.g., of history and the constitution), skills (critical thinking and media literacy), values (tolerance and civic virtue), and dispositions (to actively participate and deliberate in civic life). Public educators have the great advantage of being embedded in and frequently interacting with their communities, and are typically seen as trustworthy. Public schools are one of the most common places for voting to occur. Apart from educators generally, educators’ unions can strengthen democracy, for example because union members are more likely to vote. When labor unions and professional organizations push for democratic change, these movements tend to have much higher rates of success and long-term sustainability.

    Democracy is not only strengthened by educators, but academic freedom is itself a component of democracy. Indeed, a free society is incompatible with heavy-handed restrictions on what can be taught, researched, and disseminated, as well as with state control and surveillance of schools and universities. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project contains more than 10 indices that seek to measure academic freedom across time and place. One example is the “Freedom of academic and cultural expression” index, a scale between 0 (freedoms not respected) and 4 (fully respected). This index documents the following recent declines in the US: from 3.2 to 3.0 between 2016-17, an increase to 3.3 in 2021, then a decline to 2.4 in 2023 and 2.1 in 2024. These coincide with declines on similar indices, like the “Freedom to research and teach” index, as well as with much steeper declines in places as diverse as Brazil, Hungary, and Indonesia.

  • Reading Legislation in California and Massachusetts – Is There a Third Path?

    Two pieces of reading legislation - one recently enacted in California and another one under consideration in Massachusetts - mark early efforts in these states to align classroom instruction with the broad scientific consensus on how children learn to read, why some students struggle, and which components are essential for effective reading instruction.

    There is evidence that reading policies can contribute to improved student outcomes, as seen, for example, in Mississippi. A recent national analysis likewise suggests that comprehensive early literacy laws are linked to gains in elementary reading achievement. While there is no single policy formula – as Matt Barnum notes, states adopting Mississippi-like policies may see meaningful gains but perhaps should not expect Mississippi-sized improvements – it is reasonable to conclude that strong legislation can contribute to raising literacy levels. Yet, these laws' potential, rest heavily on their effective implementation and sustained commitment over time. In this sense, the laws are best understood as setting the stage for reading reform, rather than as guarantees that change will unfold exactly as written. 

    How can more states move (or continue to move) toward stronger reading laws that set a better stage for improvement efforts? How can legislation meaningfully address something as complex as reading development and the instruction it requires? And what distinguishes laws that are best positioned to succeed? While lessons can be learned from states at the forefront, different contexts will call for different approaches. In this piece, we compare the paths taken by California and Massachusetts and highlight a third, promising model from Illinois, which enacted literacy legislation in 2023.

  • School Cell Phone Bans: Listen to Researchers and Stakeholders

    In my few years of teaching, I saw more than enough evidence to support phones being banned in schools. My students were regularly sharing photos of completed homework with friends, playing phone games under their desk, and claiming that their “mom” was calling them every single class. I also spoke to many students who wanted to be present in class but were plagued by the ringing and lighting up of their screens. They expressed anxiety at not being able to check notifications, which distracted their thinking during lessons. Without a regulated phone policy at my school, my route was to build trust in the classroom environment and encourage students one on one to cut down on distractions. This was, frankly, a time-consuming and discouraging endeavor. I felt like I was constantly fighting the distractions—not just phones, but school devices too—with students who already found “buying in” to the material difficult. It’s safe to say that my attempts at getting middle schoolers away from their phones were not always successful.

    That teachers support school phone bans is not surprising. What’s more surprising is how sudden the nationwide focus toward phone banning policy occurred, and how parents are reacting to the change. Within the last year, school phone bans have exploded in state education policy. As of 2025, 26 states have implemented a complete, or bell-to-bell, ban on phones in schools and 4 more have mandated some regulation on their use. 

    This widespread trend began in 2023 with Florida's HB 379, which calls attention to how quickly this trend has found its way into most state’s laws. What makes this abrupt trend even more confounding is the time between the game-changing iPhone‘s release in 2007, and lawmakers’ choice to get involved: a gap of 16 years. This is time in which teachers, parents, and administrators were on their own to figure out how to navigate this new world of cell phone usage in schools.

  • The Mindsets We Bring to Understanding Reading Laws

    Earlier this summer, we published a piece clarifying common misunderstandings about reading legislation. We sought to distinguish what truly is—and is not—in the laws we've been tracking and cataloguing for the past three years. Our primary concern is that oversimplifications and selective portrayals of the legislation often divert attention from constructive push back that could genuinely improve reading policy. Still, mischaracterizations persist – not solely because of incomplete or inaccurate readings of the laws themselves, but also due to the deep-seated beliefs and assumptions we all bring into these discussions. Put simply, our pre-existing views inevitably shape our sense making of what’s in these laws.
     
    Supporters of reading legislation generally concur that: (a) U.S. students performance on reading tests is concerningly low; (b) instruction, though not the sole determinant, remains a significant factor in shaping student reading outcomes; (c) many instructional practices and materials currently in use are poorly aligned with the established research consensus on how children learn to read; and (d) aligning these practices and materials more closely with the strongest available evidence would increase reading success for more students.
     
    In contrast, critics often contend that: (a) the purported reading crisis is overstated; (b) external factors such as poverty, the chronic underfunding of schools, or increasing chronic absenteeism to name a few factors, largely shape reading outcomes; (c) many educators already use evidence-based methods and materials; and (d) increased alignment of instruction and materials to the established research base is not guaranteed to meaningfully improve outcomes.
      

  • A Dispatch from the Department of People Who Work for a Living

    Our guest author is Bernie Burnham, President of the Minnesota AFL-CIO.

    Labor Day is upon us, once again, the day set aside to celebrate and honor our labor movement. Our labor movement, where the contributions of working people are recognized as valuable participants in the development and achievements of these United States.

    In recent weeks, our AFL-CIO has been on a bus tour traversing the country to remind Americans that “It’s Better in a Union.” Across this nation, union members are standing up and speaking out against the current federal administration and its attacks on labor. 

    Since he took office, Donald Trump has taken the unprecedented action of illegally cancelling collective bargaining agreements and refusing to recognize workers’ unions at six different federal agencies. 

    The attacks by this administration on the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) are outrageous, and we must stand strong as workers and be in solidarity to fight back.

  • Revisiting the Great Divergence in State Education Spending

    A few years ago, we took a quick look at the difference in K-12 education spending between the higher- and lower-spending states, and whether that “spread” has changed since the early 1990s. We found, in short, a substantial increase in that variation, one which really started in the long wake of the 2007-09 recession. 

    Let’s update that simple descriptive analysis with a few additional years of data, and discuss why it’s potentially troubling. 

    In the graph below, each teal circle is an individual state, and each “column” of circles represents the spread of states in a given year; the red diamond is the unweighted national average. On the vertical axis, we have predicted per-pupil current spending in a district with a 10 percent Census child poverty rate (roughly the average rate), controlling for labor costs, population density, and enrollment. This measure comes from our SFID state dataset (note that the plot excludes Alaska and Vermont). 

  • When Teachers Teach Teachers, Teachers Learn

    Our guest author is Kata Solow, executive director of the Goyen Foundation, where she led its multi-year transformation process and created the Goyen Literacy Fellowship to recognize exceptional reading teachers. 

    Elementary school teachers across the country are asking for help. 

    Go on Facebook, browse Twitter, and you’ll hear a common refrain: “We want to change how we teach reading, but we don’t know where to begin. We need to see what it looks like. Give us models and examples of excellent literacy instruction.” 

    Why is this happening? For these teachers, their world has just changed. Over the last five years, as reading-related legislation has swept the country, hundreds of thousands of elementary school teachers are being required to change the way they teach reading. This is a really big deal: changing how you teach reading is a hard thing to do.

    States are trying to help teachers make these changes. Most of the newly-passed laws support professional development for in-service teachers. However, the most common PD programs like LETRS are highly theoretical. While they provide educators with a strong foundation in the components of structured literacy and the research that underlies it, they do not address what these components look like in a real classroom.    

    At the Goyen Foundation, we think that we have started to build a model that bridges this research-to-practice gap by providing teachers with concrete examples of great literacy instruction. This piece is about how you can do it in your school or district.