This policy brief aims to problematize the curricular issues that have traditionally framed schools from the 1600s onward. These framings have taught literacy as decontextualized skills, disconnected from students' lives, their consciousness, and their joy. This tradition has resulted in poor achievement, less rigor, and a lack of intellectual advancement, identity development, and developing social and critical consciousness among youth. These problems are especially exacerbated for students and teachers of color, who have received fewer resources, curricula, or pedagogies that are connected to their genius and needs. Further, policy mandates are typically written to exclude the histories, identities, literacies, and liberation of the same students underserved by our educational system. In fact, policy has pushed the teaching of frameworks and theories that were not written by people of color, nor do they honor the lenses of Black and Brown people. When the problems of schools are coupled with the witnessing of injustices and racism in society, one can argue that schools must prepare a type of child who will have the potential to enter the world ready to disrupt and dismantle hurt, pain, and harm and advance social change. In other words, skill instruction is not enough to sustain a society imbued with inequities. In this policy brief, Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad discusses the problems of decontextualized, skills-only instruction and suggest ways policymakers can move toward more excellent forms of education.