Schools in underserved districts experience pressure to improve achievement outcomes, trapping curricula, teachers, and students in a skills-driven literacy framework, repeatedly reinscribing a racist pedagogy. Although the research community recommends resisting skills-based literacy, researchers often neglect to commit to a research-practice…

This article revisits the Eight-Year Study, which was a set of simultaneous experiments in secondary education carried out by 30 schools from 1933 to 1941. These schools were free from the usual subject and unit requirements for college admission for a period of eight years, beginning with the class entering college in 1936. Freed from the demands…