What We Aren't Talking About When We Talk About NY Inspires

I’m writing from my seat on Amtrak 64, heading from Buffalo to Schenectady, New York today. The weather is wild—has been all summer—so I chose to ride instead of driving through it. I love taking the train.

When I arrive, I’ll spend my time with teachers and administrators who have taken the questions this post carries up in earnest, and they aren’t stopping at strategic plans. They’re developing real theories of change: theories that will help us be intentional about how we shift thinking, learning, work, culture, and perceptions of what it means to be literate. Theories that begin with recognizing and interrogating our own biases about all of it. I’ve been turning a story over in my mind since I boarded, and I want to share it with you the way I’ve been telling it to myself.

A young person I adore once left a college course unfinished over a single final project. The assignment asked students to design a complete brand identity for an imagined company, and he never submitted one, because he was running a design studio of his own at the time, and there was no time left after the client work was done to invent a pretend business for a grade.

It never occurred to him, even once, that the actual work he did for his actual business could count. When I interviewed him, he told me that when he started doing gig work, he used social media to build relationships with established designers in the field. Their advice and their practices were very different from those he learned in school, and also? They worked. He developed a solid reputation, his business began to grow, and he began valuing his own business more than the grades he spent years chasing in school.

He also told me this left him feeling conflicted and even a little ashamed. Isn’t that wild? I asked him if he ever thought to ask an instructor if his everyday work could count, and he said no. He’d learned school’s rules so thoroughly that his authentic accomplishments and work that paid his rent in a demanding city felt inadmissible.

He’d masked his way through a demanding program for high achievers in high school, performing and complying and keeping everyone around him comfortable while recognizing that something was off. He knew learning felt harder for him than it appeared to feel for others, that he was letting group partners down, and that every time someone tossed him a ball, he dropped it. He didn’t know why this was happening and didn’t want to make excuses, so he said nothing. And that silence filled him with shame.

I never noticed a problem, and I say that as someone who has known and admired this person for the whole of his life. I’m also an educator and researcher who has spent decades trying to better understand how learners and learning work…or…how they don’t.

At a highly selective university, he earned nearly perfect grades in his major while barely surviving the courses built on heavy reading and writing, and his degree finally stalled over two required composition courses. Only then did he consider the possibility of a learning disability. Once assessed, clarity arrived quickly. He’s still mourning all that went unseen for more than twenty years.

But here’s what else was true: His gifts were extraordinary. He built a business on them. Companies paid him well for the very ways of seeing and making that school never measured and those who were rewarded there rarely valued.

He was not the first learner to teach me this lesson, though he is the one who made it impossible to ignore. Years ago, I taught students who presented as reluctant in my own middle school ELA classroom. They kept their heads down and produced the minimum, and I confess that I assumed their quiet as resistance. I learned much later that several of them were composing constantly at home, drafting fan fiction in the form of graphic novels and zines, filling sketchbook after sketchbook with paneled stories and sequenced images and dialogue. They likely assumed that none of that writing counted. I had not assigned it, and my unit and lesson plans did not recognize it, and so those writers likely sat in my writing classroom believing they were not writers.

I’m thinking about how another student disengaged almost entirely from our poetry workshop a year later. The summer after he left my class, I would learned that he fronted a garage band that was invited to play one of the most beloved music halls in our hometown--Buffalo, New York. I’m friends with a few different local musicians, and I knew that was a hard gig to land. I also knew his lyrics helped land it. So yeah…an actual working poet sat politely in my poetry writing workshop where neither of us called him one.

When I tell these stories, someone usually suggests they are stories about engagement and teacher-student relationships, and I understand the impulse. I think those theories live in the shallows. The deeper problem lives in how we have defined literacy itself. For generations, we have treated literacy as the ability to read and write alphabetic print, and we have poured nearly all of our instructional and coaching energy into developing it.

Print literacy matters enormously, and I’ve devoted much of my career to helping adults and children develop it. It’s also one literacy among many. Visual, aural, spatial, gestural, and haptic modes of composition convey ideas and meaning that print cannot. Fluency in interpreting and creating across those modes is literacy too, as real as anything we keep trying to measure with tests and report with scores.

Most of us were never taught to compose or interpret skillfully across those modes, and it’s uncomfortable to admit but also true: Those illiteracies have cost us. They cost us as individuals every time we misread the design of a space, the argument of an image, or the rhetoric of a feed engineered to foment fear or panic or rage. They’ve cost us as a culture, because a society that reasons well in only one mode is easier to mislead in all of the others. Meanwhile, many of the young people in our classrooms are composing across modes daily, outside of school, with a level of sophistication that scales our abilities to see it. They’re drafting graphic narratives, producing and mixing sound, designing brands and worlds and social spaces. Building and refining their identities. Performing. Playing. Peace-making. And too many of them are concluding, quietly and reasonably, that none of that stuff counts because it wasn’t assigned in school.

This is why the moment we are living in matters so much to me. In New York, NY Inspires is challenging us to redesign graduation pathways, opening performance based and project based opportunities, and invite communities to draft portraits of what a graduate should know and be able to do. Some of you know that similar redesigns have been underway in other states across the country. Most of the energy is moving toward the assessment shift, away from seated standardized testing, and toward the instructional shift, away from teacher driven delivery and toward learner centered inquiry. This is worthy work, and I’m fortunate to be partnering with several districts pursuing it. We’re out beyond the shallows now, and it’s not only these recent experiences but every single one that came before them that’s giving me an uncommon vantage point.

Here’s the thing: Performance and project based learning demands design. It asks learners to compose across modes, to make deliberate choices about which form carries which meaning, to interpret the multimodal work of others, and to bring an audience along. If we redesign curriculum, instruction, assessment, and culture without ever interrogating how we have defined literacy and how narrowly we have developed it, we’ll send learners into this brave new world without the kind of literacy experiences required, and then we’ll wonder why the dream dies on arrival.

The learners in my stories were already demonstrating the very competencies our Portraits of a Graduate describe. They were demonstrating them outside of school, uncredited, while inside of school they were learning to feel like failures. I was a part of that problem when I was a young teacher, so I have great empathy for those grappling with this dawning realization themselves. But it’s 2026, and we have so much more access, privilege, and power to do what’s right now. More than ever before. And I should be excited about this, I know, and I am. I’m also a bit concerned.

This evolution in how we school isn’t the work of state-led mandates or educators alone. It belongs to entire communities: caregivers, employers, community leaders, learners, teachers, and the people who lead and study learning and schooling. If we’re chasing the right questions, every community will shape and respond to them differently, and the answers should be affirming. The work should recognize, honor, and elevate each community’s strengths. It should feed their interests. It should meet their needs.

I’ll have more to say soon about facilitating this work in the spaces where I’ve been invited to. Today, I am simply asking us to see what is at stake.

When we anoint some modes of expression as somehow better than others, we practice erasure. As Jody Shipka argues, multimodality makes composition whole. I’d argue that it also makes learners whole, and our work as teachers, leaders, facilitators, and researchers is to see a greater whole of every human being who learns in our care. The young man I introduced you to at the beginnin gof this post built an entire life out of competencies his transcript never recorded. The graphic novelists in my classroom and the poet with the band were also composing all along, waiting for school--and teachers like me--to actually notice. Or maybe they weren’t. I’ll bet they weren’t. I’ll bet they gave up waiting long before 8th grade. I’ll bet they didn’t care whether or not we noticed them because other people were. People who vibed the same way they did. I need to sit with this a bit more.

So I’m carrying questions into this new season of work, and I hope you will carry them with me. Who in your rooms is composing brilliantly in forms you have not thought to ask about? What would change, for them and for you, if that work counted? And what have you been making, yourself, that you long ago concluded does not count either?

So, it’s 3:30, and I’m nearly to Schenectady now. The educators I’ll spend tomorrow with are proof that this interrogation is possible. They seem truly committed to evolving thinking, learning, work, culture, and their perceptions of literacy together, and they’re beginning with their own assumptions rather than their students’ perceived deficits. I don’t know yet what tomorrow will teach me. I know I’ll board the train home carrying more questions than I brought, and that’s a really good thing, though.