Shanker Blog

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

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. 

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

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. 

What Changed My Mind About How to Teach Reading

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.

PTECH is #1

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.