Inch by inch… state by state, but not yet time to celebrate.

A post I wrote last month expressed the hope we might be finding common ground nationally on reading instruction and the sorts of policies that encourage widespread improvements in how we teach students. The occasion for my (basically) uplifting Substack post was a blog post (originally published in Forbes) by education scholar and leader Linda Darling-Hammond.

Darling-Hammond’s blog was part of The Learning Policy Institute’s (founded by Darling-Hammond) Transforming Schools series, “which shares effective practices and foundational research for educators, students, families, and policymakers who are reimagining schools as places where students are safe and can thrive academically, socially, and emotionally.”

A well-known and influential advocate for progressive educational and political policies, Darling-Hammond forcefully argued that sound reading policy is not the exclusive domain of any political party or party color. The subtitle of her piece: “What Red and Blue States Are Doing Right.”

Both red and blue states have gotten and are getting some things right. For example, Darling-Hammond wrote:

Much like Connecticut and Massachusetts had previously done, Mississippi used insights from research to establish the components of a robust, multifaceted literacy policy [that] include the elements described in a recent synthesis of evidence from the science of reading.

Now, an important post from The Shanker Institute, “The Wright Hire: What Maryland’s Decision Tells Us About Literacy Reform,” provides a striking example of how promising policies can breach the Red-Blue divide: Mississippi’s former state superintendent of education, Dr. Carey Wright, was named Maryland’s interim state superintendent of schools in October, 2023, then, almost exactly 2 years ago, April 24, 2024, she became the permanent superintendent. (Happy second anniversary, Dr. Wright.)

The Shanker Institute is known for its comprehensive analysis of reading reform legislation that began sweeping the country in the late 2010s. But this latest blog identifies the importance of what’s below the legislative surface, generally out of sight but perhaps as important, if not more important, than highly visible attempts to make changes through legislation:

… legislation is what we see, it doesn’t tell us how reform takes hold inside a school system. That process is harder to see. It happens through professional networks, staffing decisions, and relationships — the kind of work that unfolds over years before it shows up in outcomes…. Researchers who study how change spreads across school systems have found that professional networks and trust relationships are often better predictors of whether change takes hold than the policies themselves.

Dr. Wright not only got the memo; I suspect she wrote it. According to the Shanker blog:

Speaking at the Reading League Conference last fall, she shared, half-jokingly, that she’d had more breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with people than ever before.

The blog makes clear that while state reading legislation can be impactful, it has its limits. The most important factors driving change might be out of the limelight’s glare.

Everyone knows the joke about the drunk searching for her car keys under the street light, not because she lost them there but because that’s where the best light is.

We can’t look just where the best light is because too often that’s not where the keys are—in this case, creating conditions leading to improvements in reading (or anything else). Often the keys—the “breakfasts, lunches, and dinners”—are beneath the light, below what we readily see just on the surface.

Political divisions are sharper and more dangerous today than ever in our lifetimes. Academics and the public say not since the Civil War have they been as fraught. But why should this have any bearing on how to teach all children to read?

The simple answer is that it shouldn’t.

Kathryn Solow of the Goyen Foundation has posed this question: How can we escape the polarization of this issue?

Honestly, I have no ready answers nor clear path forward. But Linda Darling-Hammond and Carey Wright are helping lead the way, each breaking down walls that impede progress and put millions of our children at risk for futures hobbled by poor reading and writing skills.

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