22nd Oct 2026
The skills in a phonics lesson are the same at 7 and at 15. What differs is the reader, and a 15-year-old won’t pick up a book that looks like it belongs in a first-grade classroom. Phonics boo…
Read The Article21st Oct 2026
Fluency screening stops in third grade in most districts. Ninth graders reading two years behind pay the price for the rest of high school. Ask a room of secondary administrators what data they have…
Read The Article6th Oct 2026
If you can fund only one thing in middle school ELA, fund this. Most secondary literacy plans treat vocabulary as a supplement. Spelling lists on Monday, quizzes on Friday, a word wall in the back of…
Read The Article23rd Sep 2026
Newcomer students and long-term English learners are not the same population, and a single program rarely serves either one well. In most districts, multilingual learners are concentrated in elementa…
Read The Article8th Sep 2026
Why the population of students with limited or interrupted formal education keeps growing, even when border arrivals slow. Most district leaders track newcomer enrollment as a single line on a dashbo…
Read The Article27th Aug 2026
What high-interest, low-readability books actually do, and why the strongest secondary reading programs use them. Walk into a ninth-grade intervention classroom and you will likely see a familiar sce…
Read The Article12th Aug 2026
Systematic phonics works at any age, but the materials built to teach it were never designed for more than one. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 31% of American fourth graders…
Read The Article23rd Jul 2026
Most American adults do not hold a bachelor’s degree. Most high school career conversations are still designed as if they will. Walk into any American high school in May and you will see senior…
Read The Article24th Jun 2026
How administrators can evaluate programs beyond the pitch deck. Most administrators who have been through a secondary reading intervention adoption know the pattern. The vendor presents Lexile gains,…
Read The Article11th Jun 2026
Why the next frontier of literacy reform is not in third grade. It is in sixth, ninth, and eleventh. When most district leaders hear "the science of reading," they picture a kindergarten classroom: s…
Read The Article12th May 2026
Why the work in middle and high school is not just about skills. It is about who students believe they are. Ask a struggling tenth grader to describe themselves as a reader, and you will rarely get a…
Read The Article9th Apr 2026
A practical framework for administrators building MTSS for middle and high school readers. Multi-Tiered Systems of Support were developed, refined, and largely deployed at the elementary level. The r…
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