What Literacy Can Do
"In today’s society, the child who doesn’t learn to read does not make it in life. If children don’t learn to read early enough, if they don’t learn to read with comprehension, if they don’t read fluently enough to read broadly and reflectively across all content areas, if they don’t learn to read effortlessly enough to render reading pleasurable, their chances for a fulfilling life—by whatever measure: academic success, financial stability, the ability to find satisfying work, personal autonomy, self-esteem—are practically nil."
Reading Reform Across America
Reading Reform Across America is an initiative by the Albert Shanker Institute in collaboration with Susan B. Neuman (New York University) that documents how state legislatures across the country have responded to stagnant literacy levels. The project systematically tracks and analyzes literacy legislation enacted between 2019 and the present.
‘Elbow Room’: How the Reading Brain Informs the Teaching of Reading
In Elbow Room — which inaugurates the ASI’s literacy paper series — Maryanne Wolf synthesizes cognitive, linguistic, and neuroscientific research to describe how reading develops in the brain, and what this understanding implies for instruction. The paper offers a warm, generous invitation to move beyond false binaries in literacy debates and to understand reading development as rich and dynamic — requiring both the expertise teachers already have and the ongoing expansion of their knowledge, regardless of their prior training or instructional background.