In October 2020, the Science of Reading—What I Should Have Learned in College Facebook group reached 50,000 members and continues to grow at a rate of about 1,000 members per week. Many, if not most of these new members, are new to the science of reading. Our mission is to continue to share with the membership opportunities to learn how the science can be implemented at home or in their classrooms.

The patterns associated with poverty in America have created a new bias in the school setting. It is difficult for teachers to see a Black student and not subconsciously associate them with the behaviors commonly exhibited by low socioeconomic students, and research confirms this.

How can educators maintain a certain sense of well-being at the start of the new year given legitimate fears about health and safety, educational gaps, and a social and emotional disconnect from students? How do we put 2020 in the past (where it belongs) and look to a happier, healthier 2021?

Results of the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are in, and the picture is not pretty when it comes to fourth grade reading scores.

Studies that emphasize both classroom instruction and supplemental intervention programs have found that all but two percent to five percent of students can learn basic reading skills in first grade, even in populations where the incidence of poor reading is very high.

Social-Emotional Learning has become a hot topic for education audiences from practitioners to researchers, and even curriculum developers. However, while the social-emotional domain is certainly a critical component of human learning and development, I push the educational and scientific communities to remove the silos and begin to grapple with the inextricable ties between social-emotional learning and other aspects of learning and skill development, particularly in the language and literacy domain.