Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO

Kata Solow:

I was initially surprised by this question for three reasons. One, it seemed far too easy for 3rd graders. Two, I questioned whether it was assessing reading proficiency in a real way. Three, I wondered why students weren’t expected to read the instructions. At this point, I actually checked to confirm that I was viewing questions written for 3rd graders. I was.

On the other hand, my first ILEARN question presented me with a short passage about “Smithsonian Sleepovers” and three accompanying visuals.

The world lost a force for good this week when Dolly Parton died.

Dolly contained multitudes and defied the odds to become a force for good in the world. It is difficult to imagine that a child born in a one room cabin that housed 12 children in Appalachia would ascend to the world stage. Her persona was wrapped in rhinestones and glitter but here giving reflected a humble desire to help kids who needed a boost. Her life was impactful on many levels.

Her talent for music and story telling led to success as a performer, writer, business woman and philanthropist. Dolly used everything she built to uplift kids, families and even whole towns.

Some notable philanthropic achievements:

• She launched a program to cover 100% of the cost for all 11,000 Dollywood employees to go to college.

• She started “The Imagination Library” 31 years ago. She worked initially to honor her Dad who could not read or write. A staggering 300,000,000+ books have been gifted since its inception.

3,000,000+ books are gifted to registered children each month.

The program is available in 5 countries.

Dolly was proud to be known as “The Book Lady”.

• School drop out rates in her hometown dropped from 35% to 6% after she started a program to pay kids to stay in school.

Dolly’s example of generosity and the commitment to children’s educational futures makes one think what colossal impact one dedicated wealthy person can make. Like James Barksdale, a tech billionaire, who shared his resources to impact Mississippi literacy, Dolly’s gifts touch the future.

“It’s hard to imagine many people having a bigger impact than Dolly Parton. She was born in a one room cabin, she earned 11 Grammys and an Emmy, built a business empire, helped millions of kids learn to read, and if that wasn’t enough -helped accelerate the research that led to the Moderna COVID vaccine.” Barack Obama

Plicara Research:

In the first quarter of 2026, 13.0% of newly written agent skills were in a language other than English, and one quarter later it was 16.3%. That is three points in three months across 255,068 skills, with confidence intervals nowhere near touching. For comparison, GitHub-wide non-English documentation took ten years to travel from 3.7% to 13.0%, so whatever is happening here is happening at a different speed entirely, and the most plausible explanation is that AI development has arrived somewhere other than San Francisco.

Reviewing the data, it turns out that the claim is stronger than the obvious version of it, because English is not a proxy for American. GitHub’s fastest-growing developer population by a wide margin is India, which writes in English, as do Nigeria and Singapore, so a language count cannot see any of them. The non-English share is therefore not a measure of how much of this ecosystem sits outside the United States. It is a floor beneath it, and everything below should be read that way.

For context, a skill is a SKILL.md file in a folder, holding instructions for an AI agent in plain prose, loaded when the agent judges the task relevant. Anthropic published the specification in October 2025, and it spreads the way a recipe spreads: somebody copies it. Nine months later there were 3.8 million of them across 282,200 public repositories, which is what the GitSkills dataset collects. Skills are strange as software, by which we mean the traditional kind, because this is one of the things AI has upended. They are written in human language and the runtime is a multilingual model, so there is no technical reason to write one in English: a developer in Shenzhen or São Paulo can state a procedure more precisely in their own language, and the agent will follow it. Whether it follows it as well is a better question, and much harder to answer than anything a file crawl can settle.

Jared Henderson:

In a 2000 meta-analysis, the National Reading Panel did find evidence that using phonics was a better way to teach reading, and it seems that the real problem with whole language learning was that it hurt the kids at the bottom the most. We withheld the most effective method from the kids who needed the most help! The averages, however, mostly remained the same. The more recent NAEP declines happened well after some schools decided to reintroduce phonics, and the decline in scores in both reading and mathematics indicates that there is something else going on. (Given the timing, COVID-19 seems like a likely candidate, though the downward trend was already starting in 2019.)

What was also oversimplified was the idea that we only taught phonics before we switched to whole language learning. This is false. There were various competing methods, including ‘look-say,’ which was the subject of Why Johnny Can’t Read. The story of American literacy is not just the story of phonics.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t support phonics. The story of Mississippi’s rise in literacy provides some evidence that phonics-based instruction can improve childhood literacy. But this is partial evidence, and I am now slightly less confident that phonics is the universal solution.

I appreciate the terrific chat with members of the South Madison, WI Rotary club on Monday, 3 August 2026.

slides // remarks

I shared this background link prior to the talk.

“Its very clear to me that Afi understands the difference between some of what she’s doing guided by me, and that she’s getting a new skill. This is different because she is reading, like her grandchildren.”

Ruth Robarts is a lifelong teacher and community volunteer. A tireless advocate for literacy, she has been honored with several community awards including the United Way of Dane County’s Distinguished Service Award for “improving lives through literacy” and the Rotary Club’s Senior Service Award.

Robarts has taught Head Start, GED in a Wisconsin prison, social studies at Madison’s Malcolm Shabazz High School and classes at the UW law school. In addition, Ruth served for ten years on the Madison School Board.

In retirement Ruth continues to teach. Since 2010 she has volunteered at the Literacy Network discovering the joy of working with adult students. Robarts’ expertise is in citizenship courses and test preparation tutoring.

Of the four tests that citizenship candidates take just one is reading. The citizenship tests are in English and cover many aspects of US History and civics.

Citizenship students are adults who’ve been in the country for at least three to five years. Most are not native speakers. They often have had few opportunities to read or speak English.

Ruth has been working with a 72 year old grandma from Togo named Afi. These students often had little to no formal education.

Afi is very bright and speaks at least three languages which she learned orally. The 72 year old is adept at memorizing words.. Her 13 grandchildren are bilingual.

Ruth likes that the box is comprehensive and she has all the tools in one place to build a lesson. Afi likes the cards and manipulating letter tiles.

“I am pretty sensitive to what didn’t work. This (Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO) is a very well constructed set of materials.

I recommend this to anybody who’s working with people who haven’t been reading.”

3,888 (43.7%) Madison 4k to 3rd graders scored below the 25th percentile in a 2024-2025 national literacy comparison group.

The Wisconsin average is 37% or 97,414 students. Note that Madison plans to spend > $28K per student during the 2025-2026 school year.

I asked a prominent MIT “ai” professor to discuss our k-12 literacy results and prompt quality at a Madison event earlier in 2026. His response: “I’m not going to answer that question because I want to stay positive“.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience, 2004–.

I look forward to discussing Madison’s literacy challenge and what might be done about it on Monday, August 3, 2026.

Every parent wants a straight answer to one question: does this actually work, and why? We’ve put that answer in one place. Why Fast Lane Literacy Works, lays out the three principles behind every lesson:

Evidence-Based Instruction — built on Science of Reading research, with magnetic letters that let kids master phonemic awareness before handwriting adds fine-motor demands.

Efficient Instruction — no-prep, ready-to-use lessons that let adults spend less time planning and more time connecting with the child in front of them.

Child-Centered Instruction — sequenced for early wins, so kids build real confidence instead of just repeating drills.

If you’ve ever wondered why Fast Lane Literacy leans on magnetic tiles before handwriting, or why lessons stay short and focused, this page walks through the reasoning in plain language.

Read the full breakdown →

Curious about the kit itself? See what’s included at sedso.io.

Part 1 of a conversation (excerpt) with Christine Truman Janes during Wimbledon 2026. Soundtrack via Wimbledon Radio, the rest a “mash up”.

Rose Horowitch:

This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels. Some of the most popular are graphic novels: updated classics such as the Magic Tree House series for elementary-school students, and manga for middle and high schoolers.

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.