“When was the last time in education anybody heard of de-implementation? All we do is pile one thing on top of another, on top of another…then we wonder why it didn't work.”

“You have to distinguish between an initiative, something that is new, and culture, something that's part of what we do every day and that is embedded. That is more important.”

“The problem is this. If you only look at the results, then you don't know what caused it. Somebody has to look at underlying causes.”

“It's really important for administrators to say, 'Hey, I can deal with some chaos. I can deal with students making mistakes.' That's real learning.”

“For this to work, we need both great teachers and great curricula.”

“The single most important thing NAEP cannot do [is that] it cannot in any definitive way explain why scores are what they are or are rising or falling.”

“When was the last time in education anybody heard of de-implementation? All we do is pile one thing on top of another, on top of another, and then we don't then, then we wonder why it didn't work.”

“If you're not gonna have deep implementation, which requires a level of focus and allocation of time and resources, then don't bother.”

“You have to have a singular focus and, and it's gotta be sustained year after year after year until it becomes part of your culture.”

“You have to distinguish between an initiative, something that is new, and culture, something that's part of what we do every day and that is embedded. That is more important.”

“The problem is this. If you only look at the results, then you don't know what caused it. Somebody has to look at underlying causes.”

“It's really important for administrators to say, 'Hey, I can deal with some chaos. I can deal with students making mistakes.' That's real learning.”

“Leaders tend to forget that you get more out of parents if you collaborate with them, if you're honest.”

“With the level and degree of training, understanding, and privilege that I had, it was still—and still continues to be—an overwhelming battle to get your child the services that they need.”

“My calling is so that children can one day stand on their own without scaffolds, that children will one day reap the benefits that literacy is liberty, that children will one day be able to teach someone else the power that only literacy can bring.”

“Think about how many young kids in school right now we are not reaching and that have that feeling that they're dumb and they can't get it. I had one kid say to me, 'Ms. Stewart, I think there's just a secret code.' And I said to him, 'You are right. There is a secret code. It's called the alphabetic code, and you can learn that easily."

“It was really our teachers who led so much of the charge to say, ‘No, this is what we want. We believe kids should be held to high expectations. We believe they're capable, we believe they deserve it.’”

“I have never met a student that did not want to learn how to read or a family that did not understand the importance of their children knowing how to read.”

“We have to listen to our young people in order to be able to move with that sense of urgency.”

"Liberation is connected to our students being literate… In order for our students to truly be free, we [need to] understand the power that reading has in their future.”

“We have to remember who we are serving and why we are serving them.”

“A lot of times when you’re in a large system and you’re leading a large system, it can become very robotic, like a machine. You do this, you get this, you do this, you get this. But there’s a human aspect that if you have not considered that human aspect, you could very well end up in the same place that you’re trying to move away from.”

“And while it’s a five-year strategic plan, we do have a sense of urgency and I’m sure within that there are gonna be benchmarks and hundred-day plans and smaller plans to make sure that we are actually doubling down again on the things that truly matter, that are gonna lead, outcomes for our students here in the school district.”

“If we’re only in the business of educating some students, then what are we really doing? It’s important to look at the students that are not benefitting and really identifying the things that work for that population of students rather than continuing with practices that aren’t meeting the needs of the students we’re serving.”

“Our mission is to educate educators on the Science of Reading because we believe that if educators have that knowledge, they can transform kids' lives.”

“Little by little you can learn to read, you can do something hard and we can do it together.”

“As a storyteller, I can go on a stage and tell a story and know, ‘Oh, that song made somebody connect to a memory,’ or ‘These two hours, they got to escape whatever is bothering them at home.’ That escapism is special and magical. But with reading buddies you get escapism and then you also get impact.”

“God bless teachers. They're incredible. And we are here to help you continue to be incredible. We're here to give you tools to excite your students and just complement everything that you are doing.”

"Our students are the state's greatest asset, and we need to invest in them with all the energy and knowledge we have to do our best to serve them with urgency, compassion, and high expectations."

"If kids can't read, that really keeps them from accessing other content areas like science, social studies, and being able to engage in story problems in mathematics."

"Being able to read is today's civil right's movement."

"With requirements comes resistance. No matter how great the opportunity is."

“The door's been cracked. It has to happen and it has to happen by having relationships with people. You just can’t walk in and just say, you know, this is the way it needs to be done. It's a slow process.”

“If you're trained in a certain way, you're only exposing yourself to those researchers doing those things and that type of information. And so you don't know other sources of information of other researchers and what else might be going on.”

“Learning the Science of Reading is not a, ‘You get it in one day.’ It's not like that. It's a journey and it takes time to assimilate everything you read and then turning that into a practice and shifting the thinking of millions of people.”

“You get better and better at it the longer you do it. So if we just stay stagnant and are closed-minded to new things that are out there, then we can't grow.”

“As a teacher, a Black woman, who speaks Black English, who knows the language, who is very well versed in structured literacy, if I overlooked this, if that caught me off guard a little bit, then that means that could potentially catch someone else off guard.”

“With language comprehension, and considering in your native language, there may be a word that doesn’t necessarily match up with a language that you are learning in the classroom. So you have to then use your incredible cognitive skills that speak two completely different codes, comprehend what is happening, and then tie that back into, of course, the Rope to become a fluent reader.”

“I consider Black English to be a very complex and complicated language…but I think typically in society it has been viewed very negatively. You can see in the media and in research where people have talked about it and used negative connotations. And I think those beliefs from society have seeped into the classroom.”

“A strength of children that are bidialectal is the similar strength to students that are bilingual—they have an ability to take language that is different from theirs and translate it. That right there is an asset.”

“The languages that we speak and bring from home also are not wrong. They’re simply different. And we’re gonna work together so that we take what we know differently and come together with a common language so that we’re communicating with one another.”

“We have got to give our students access to this code so that they can become literate and run our society one day.”

“We have to help everybody kind of collectively align our voices and help people who wanna find out more about this, find out more about it.”

“If the pieces of the system aren't all working together, then you just don't achieve sustained change.”

“Leaders have a critical function. They communicate to everybody in a state or in an organization what's important. You don't have to tell 'em what to do, but you need to tell 'em what the goal is.”

“Teachers aren't the problem. Teachers are the solution.”

“We simply can't call ourselves a great school district unless we get great results for our most challenged and least resourced students.”

“It's not a new thing to be concerned about the low achievement among low-income students but it's a relatively new thing to do something about it.”