A Conversation About the Science of Reading: The Necessary Elements

Kareem Weaver is a Co-Founder and Executive Director of FULCRUM, which partners with stakeholders to improve reading results for students. He is the Oakland NAACP’s 2nd Vice President and Chair of its Education Committee; his advocacy is featured in the upcoming film The Right to Read. Mr. Weaver previously served as New Leaders’ Executive Director of the Western Region and was an award-winning teacher and administrator. He has undergraduate degrees from Morehouse College and a master’s in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of South Carolina. Mr. Weaver believes in the potential of all students, the brotherhood of man, and the importance of service above self. His educational heroine, for literacy instruction, is the late Marva Collins.

Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent and producer for American Public Media. Her work has appeared on NPR and in The New York Times, Washington Monthly, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She has won numerous honors including a duPont-Columbia University Award and the Excellence in Media Reporting on Education Research Award from the American Educational Research Association. Emily is a member of the Education Writers Association’s Journalist Advisory Board and was a longtime mentor for EWA’s “new to the beat” program. For the past several years, Emily has been reporting on early reading instruction. Her 2018 podcast episode “Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?” won the inaugural public service award from EWA. You can find all of her reporting on reading at apmreports.org/reading, including her new podcast, Sold a Story: How teaching kids to read went so wrong (soldastory.org). Emily is based in the Washington, D.C. area.

Michelle Hosp, Ph.D. is the director of Foundational Literacy at Renaissance and a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on reading and assessment within multi-tiered systems of support, and she is a nationally known trainer and speaker on reading and using data for problem solving. She served as the director of the Iowa Reading Research Center, and as a trainer with the National Center on Progress Monitoring and the National Center on Response to Intervention. She is currently on the technical review committee for the National Center on Intensive Intervention, and has published numerous articles, book chapters, and books.