ABSTRACT
This is a book about effective literacy teachers and effective literacy schools. It addresses a fundamental challenge in our society of making a quality education available to all students regardless of ethnic, racial, or economic background. It puts before us the reality that we have not in the past, and are not now, serving all the children in our nation’s schools in a fair and equitable manner. The authors in this book argue that research can guide our efforts to make our schools and teaching better. They report studies that enlighten our efforts to serve students for whom the odds of success are low. We have been asked to speculate in this chapter on the book’s contribution. To do so, we focus on what we view as the single most important finding from the last 25 years of the 20th century on effective literacy teaching-the multilayered complexity of the teaching task. This finding, in turn, leads us to argue that the essential message of this book
is the need to invest in the bettering of teachers and schools, rather than betting on standards and accountability to do the job for us.
