I have friends and adversaries alike who post that homework is harmful, that children should only learn inside the school building, and that practice outside of class is some kind of imposition. A post recently crossed my feed that captured the mood: “There’s no way that I’m supposed to be teaching my child when she comes home from SCHOOL (yk the place children are supposed to go to learn).”
I replied plainly, and I will say it again here: My Mama taught us incessantly. The world is a classroom and she used it. Parents, community members, don’t listen to this misguided take. Teach, teach, and teach like your children’s lives and our collective futures depend on it.
Because they do.
I understand the equity concerns underneath the anti-homework argument. Homework is unequal when home conditions are unequal. That is real. The wealthy have always paid for tutors, enrichment, and out-of-school learning to extend the school day for their children. That gap is real, and it is old. But the answer to unequal home conditions is not to shrink the learning life of the child. The answer is to expand the conditions that make learning possible — books in homes, libraries open longer, after-school programs that are funded and staffed, family literacy supports, the kind of citywide saturation Right2Read Philly is reaching for.
My ancestors and the educators who raised me did not wait for that gap to close before they taught us to read. They focused on their own locus of control. They fought for social justice and they made sure the children in front of them could decode a sentence — in the same week, often in the same hour. Their social justice legs started with ensuring the students in their care were literate. Anything less, they understood, was sending children into the fight unarmed.
Independent reading, monthly book reports, science projects done at home and brought back to be defended in front of peers — those were not punishments at Nidhamu Sasa. They were the architecture of a literate life. They taught us that learning belongs to us, not to the four walls of a classroom and the seven hours of a school day. The grocery store is a classroom. The bus ride is a classroom. The kitchen, the porch, the barbershop, the library, the dinner table — all classrooms, if the adults in the child’s life decide to treat them that way.
Collective Accountability, Not Collective Cover
Watching the response to the Philly senior who broadcast his peers’ struggles with literacy — the call-outs, the rumors, the institutional defensiveness, the rush to label his videos misleading — should clarify something for all of us. One student didn’t cause the literacy crisis. He documented it.
The adults who should be answering the harder questions are the ones holding the levers:
- State and local politicians who pass budgets that underfund the very classrooms they claim to champion, and who weaponize parental rights rhetoric instead of reading instruction.
- Teacher and principal preparation programs that can spend more time on theory than on the actual mechanics of teaching a child to decode a word, a critique that still rings true.
- School boards and authorizers — including charter authorizers — who renew schools without honest reading data on the table, and who let buildings stay open year after year while children move through them unable to read.
- Superintendents and principals who choose curriculum, set the master schedule, and decide what gets protected when budgets shrink.
- Classroom teachers, who deserve real preparation, real coaching, and real materials, and who also deserve to be honest with themselves and one another about which of their students cannot yet read.
- Community partners with city contracts to serve children — Big Brothers Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs, after-school providers, summer camps, mentoring programs, faith-based youth programs. Every one of them should be required to embed a science-and-research-based literacy component into their work with children. If you have a contract to serve our kids, you have a contract to help them read. Full stop.
- Parents and caregivers, who deserve real on-ramps, not finger-wagging. Free, accessible literacy certifications and training should be available to any parent or caregiver who wants to be a stronger first teacher. If Cuba could mobilize a national literacy campaign in 1961 that drove illiteracy from roughly 24% to under 4% in a single year, and Iran can run national literacy campaigns that move adult literacy from roughly 37% in 1976 to nearly 89% in recent years, the United States cannot keep pretending this is too hard.
This is not a list of villains. It is a list of grown-ups. Every name on it has a role to play, and every name on it has somewhere they can hide if the rest of us let them.
Deputize every adult, and raise adult literacy at the same time. Those are not competing projects. They are the same project. Our Freedom Schools Literacy Academy is built intergenerationally for precisely that reason — high school and college students working alongside one another, demonstrating empowerment, agency, and the ability to support 1st through 3rd graders in literacy and positive racial identity development.
Our young people teaching are growing as readers, writers, and leaders while they teach. The children being taught see themselves in the teachers. The adults around them are pulled in. Everyone gets stronger at once. That is exactly what educators like Dr. Ayesha Imani at Sankofa Freedom Academy and Dr. Greg Carr of the Philadelphia Freedom Schools Movement and Howard University taught us years ago, and what they are still teaching us today.
A lot of folks would rather bury their heads in the sand and hand out cookies and hugs than confront what our children actually need: disciplined, rigorous coursework. Intense interventions for the children who are behind. More instructional time. More depth and breadth in the curriculum. Ongoing, meaningful professional development for the adults charged with delivering it.
Cookies and hugs alone are not a literacy strategy. They are a way to feel good while a child grows up unable to read a lease, a ballot, an op-ed, a political platform, a plan for community engagement, a business model they want to build, or a love letter. Our youth are framers, builders, deep thinkers, and profound creators with fierce and effective self-determination. They deserve an education that treats them like that from day one.
Let me be precise, because the binary in this debate is dishonest on both sides. I reject the claim that our children are too traumatized to learn — that is a soft form of giving up dressed in compassion language. I also reject its mirror image: that we should ignore their human needs and just hammer content into them. Both are cop-outs. Baba Changa used to remind us that we are a polyrhythmic people who have always built polyrhythmic systems. Both/and. Multiple lines moving at once, on time, in service of the same song. That is the only frame honest enough for complex humans doing the complex work of leading, learning, and loving.
Mental health and care are paramount — which is exactly why our school protected its social worker even when the budget was bleeding. And care and rigor are not opposites. We asked our staff to serve our community as warm demanders — high expectations and high warmth, in the same breath, from the same adult, for the same child. We wanted self-esteem to be high. We also knew that few things in adult life are as depressing as being illiterate and innumerate, watching door after door of opportunity close because the basics were never built. Self-esteem rooted in skill is durable. Self-esteem propped up by lowered expectations collapses the first time the world asks something real of you.
“Support schools” cannot keep being a phrase that ends the conversation. It has to be the phrase that opens it — followed by, Support them to do what, for which children, by when, measured how, and with what consequence if it doesn’t happen?
What I Owe My Village
If I am honest about how I became literate, I have to name all of it: a front porch, a teacher who took children seriously, an independent Black school that refused to lower the bar, a grandfather with a stack of magazine renewals, a household that protected attention, and a community that treated reading as a birthright rather than a luxury.
That is not nostalgia. That is a blueprint. The year-round experience I lived at Nidhamu Sasa breathes and lives today in our Freedom Schools Literacy Academy and the rest of our programming, and The Philadelphia Inquirer captured the through-line back in 2021: the same love of Black children, the same insistence on literacy and identity together, phonemic awareness and phonics, accurate history, positive racial identity, creativity, and leadership development — all woven together for the children of this generation.
We do not need to choose between rigor and love, between high expectations and cultural affirmation, between phonics and joy, between literacy and identity. The children who were on that porch with me got all of it at once, and we are still here, still reading, still teaching, still building.
Frederick Douglass learned this directly from his enslaver. When Hugh Auld discovered that his wife had begun teaching young Frederick to read, he forbade it on the spot, warning her that “if you teach that [n—–] (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Auld meant it as a threat. Douglass received it as a roadmap. From that moment on, he understood that literacy was the path to freedom, and the people invested in his bondage understood it too.
To paraphrase Douglass forward into our own century: the literate Black child — with a positive racial identity, a deep sense of purpose, and a love for their community — is much harder to enslave. That child is the ingredient for resistance, for community-building, for every fight worth winning. Our forebears understood this with their whole chests, which is why they risked their lives to learn to read and to teach others. We do not get to treat literacy as optional in their descendants.
James Baldwin told a room of teachers in 1963 that teaching Black children is a revolutionary act. I would add the qualifier our moment demands, as I have written before: it is a revolutionary act only when it is done superbly. Anything less than that is malpractice at best and, at worst, an extension of the same war on the Black mind that Auld was already waging in the 1820s. And
Maya Angelou put it plainly: “Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.” It should be. It is not.
We have watched too many adults drag their feet on illiteracy, and some openly resist the work, and that should tell us something uncomfortable: a country that will not finish the literacy fight has not finished the freedom fight either. The first puts the second in permanent jeopardy.
Our friends and colleagues are answering these ancestors in real time. Dr. Karida L. Brown’s The Battle for the Black Mind traces the through-line from emancipation to Project 2025, and her thesis is exactly the one Auld and Douglass forced into the open: control of knowledge is control of people. The fight for Black minds, she shows us, runs from the schoolhouse into pulpits, media, and every framework that decides what counts as truth.
Chris Stewart, my friend and Freedom Friday podcast colleague, says it in five words: the revolution will be literate. He is right. There is no other kind. Chris has also taken a wrecking ball to every camp in this debate, naming what the right, the left, and the self-righteous center each refuse to confront — a right wing that wants choice without accountability, a left wing that will defend a model harder than it will defend the children inside it, and a center that keeps trying to average the two and call the result wisdom while Black and Brown children pay the bill. His standard is the only one that holds up: what does the evidence say works? How do we implement it faithfully, how do we measure whether it is working for every group of children, and what do we do, urgently and specifically, when it is not?
Right here in Philadelphia, Mama Toya — Toya “Gigi” Algarin, leads Grandmas4Literacy, training neighborhood grandmothers as certified literacy mentors using the Wilson Reading System and pairing them with children for a Crochet and Read program in classrooms like Henry Houston Elementary, where a fourth grader named Jordan jumped two reading levels because a grandmother chose him. That is the model. Ancestors gave us the why. Dr. Brown, Citizen Stewart, Mama Toya, and others are showing us the how, today, in our own city.
There is no excuse left.
Which means the rest of us have homework, too. Support Read by 4th and the grandmothers, parents, and educators they are mobilizing. Support Teach Plus Pennsylvania and the broader Pennsylvania Literacy Coalition pushing the science of reading into every classroom in the Commonwealth.
Give credit where it is due. Pennsylvania has already moved. SB 801 became Act 135 of 2024, setting state guidance on evidence-based reading materials, universal screeners, interventions, and professional development. Act 47 of 2025 goes further, requiring evidence-based K-3 curriculum, educator training, and universal screening by 2027-28. That is real progress. The advocates who fought for it deserve credit.
Now we have to make sure it gets and stays funded. Teach Plus PA and the Pennsylvania Literacy Coalition are calling for a $50 million investment this year to put high-quality materials, teacher training, screeners, interventions, transparent reporting, and school-embedded literacy coaches into every district that needs them. TeachPlus PA has named dedicated literacy funding as a missed opportunity in the current budget and is urging the state to fully fund Act 47 implementation. The ask is not to start over. The ask is to finish the job. Let’s push Pennsylvania’s literacy laws to ensure every district can move from compliance to classroom change. We have the policy. We now need the sustained, recurring, predictable investment, the transparency of data that shows how the investments are being used and the outcomes, and the follow-through to learn, replicate, and intervene. Policy without funding is performance. One step is not a finish line. Our children cannot wait while adults clap for partial wins.
At the end of the day, this is what this entire piece is about: Kujichagulia. Self-determination. The second principle of the Nguzo Saba — to define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves. You cannot do any of those things — not one — without literacy. You cannot define yourself if someone else has to read the definition to you. You cannot name yourself if you cannot write the name down and what you will stand for – and, what you won’t fall for. You cannot create for yourself if you cannot read and design the contracts, the codes, the histories, the sciences, the platforms, and the playbooks the work requires. You cannot speak for yourself in any sustained, public, generational way without being able to read and write with power. Literacy is the floor of Kujichagulia.
Everything we say we want for Black children — freedom, leadership, ownership, healing, joy, prophecy — lives on top of that floor. The least we owe today’s children is the same. And the rest of us should not need a viral video to tell us what the data has been telling us for a generation.
