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.
On the Clock: The Centrality of Time in Teacher Work
In the second in our series of original literacy papers, the authors propose an ecological framework with six interconnected components, demonstrating that policy does not directly shape classroom practice. Rather, policy influences the professional contexts in which teachers work, which in turn interact with individual teacher characteristics to shape how teachers allocate their time. Teachers’ allocation of time then mediates how effective they are at their jobs, and it shapes affective outcomes like emotions and attitudes. Critically, the framework frames these relationships as systemic and reciprocal: teacher effectiveness shapes professional context and individual trajectories, while affective outcomes circle back to reshape teacher identity and commitment.