Literacy Belongs to Everyone: Upholding the Literacy Bill of Rights

Think about the last hour of your life. You may have scrolled through a news feed, replied to a text message, read a label on a coffee creamer, or glanced at a street sign. You likely did these things without a second thought.

In fact, reading and writing are so woven into the fabric of our daily existence, into the essence of who we are, that we often forget they’re the primary tools we use to understand and interact with the world.

But take a moment, and imagine that ability was taken away. Or worse, imagine it was never offered to you in the first place because someone decided you weren’t “ready” for it.

This happens every day in classrooms across the country. Students with significant disabilities, complex communication needs, or labels like “severe” are often sidelined when it comes to comprehensive literacy instruction. They get stuck in a loop of prerequisite skills (matching shapes or identifying colors) while their peers move on to reading novels and writing stories.

The assumption is that literacy is a ladder you have to climb, rung by rung. If you can’t speak, or hold a pencil, or sit still, the logic goes, you can’t possibly read or write.

Dr. Karen Erickson and Dr. David Koppenhaver shattered that logic years ago. When they published the Literacy Bill of Rights, this wasn’t meant to be a casual suggestion. It was meant to be a line in the sand. The authors declared that every single person, regardless of their perceived ability, deserves access to literacy.

It is a fundamental human right. And treating it as anything less denies our students their voice.

The Right to Opportunity

The first hurdle to literacy isn’t the student’s ability, but instead, is our own expectations.

For decades, special education operated under a readiness model. We waited for students to prove they were ready to read. But you don’t learn to swim by waiting until you can perfectly execute a butterfly stroke on dry land. You learn by getting in the water.

The National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities (NJCLD) states that literacy is critical for social and economic well-being, yet students with significant disabilities are often the least likely to receive evidence-based reading instruction. When we decide a student “can’t” before we’ve even tried, we become the barrier.

The Literacy Bill of Rights challenges us to presume competence. This means we assume a student can learn to read and write, and it is our job to figure out how to teach them.

Access to Meaningful Materials

One of the most striking points in the Literacy Bill of Rights is the right to access materials that are age-appropriate and meaningful.

Too often, we give a fourteen-year-old student “The Cat in the Hat” because that matches their “reading level.” But a teenager doesn’t want to read about Dr. Seuss. They want to read about music, or video games, or whatever the other kids in the cafeteria are talking about.

When we restrict students to babyish materials, we kill their motivation. As Erickson and Koppenhaver point out, “Students learn better when they have reasons to put persistent effort into learning and can answer the question ‘What is in it for me?'”

If the answer is “nothing interesting,” they check out.

Providing age-respectful literature is key, but it will look different across settings. It might mean adapting a graphic novel about superheroes so the text is simplified, but the story remains cool. It might mean using news articles about current events, rewritten with visual supports.

Students make greater gains when instruction is linked to their interests and daily lives rather than isolated drills. If we want them to succeed, we have to give them content worth reading. Simple as that.

The Right to Interaction

Literacy is social: we write to share ideas, we read to understand others. Yet, instruction for students with high support needs is often incredibly isolating. It’s one-on-one, teacher-to-student, drill-and-practice.

The Bill of Rights emphasizes the right to interact with others while reading and writing. This means including students in shared reading experiences where they can comment, ask questions, or just laugh at a funny part of a story along with their peers.

Erickson and Koppenhaver outline practical ways to make this happen. One powerful strategy is “Shared Reading,” where the focus isn’t on testing the student (“What color is the dog?”), but on enjoying the book together.

You might read a page and then say, “I think that character is being really mean!” Then you wait. You give the student space to agree, disagree, or make a face. That interaction is literacy. It teaches the student that text carries meaning and sparks connection.

This also applies to writing. Writing shouldn’t be a solitary act of copying letters. It should be communicative.

This might look like a teacher starting a “complaint box” for her high school life skills class. The students use their communication devices, keyboards, or picture symbols to write down things that annoy them. One student might write “LOUD” because the bell was too noisy. Another might write”HUNGRY” at 10 AM.

Now, writing has a purpose. The students aren’t writing for a grade; they’re writing to be heard. And you better believe their spelling and sentence structure will improve faster during that project than it ever will during handwriting practice.

Instruction That Actually Works

We can’t talk about rights without talking about the quality of instruction. The Literacy Bill of Rights insists on instruction that addresses all areas of literacy: reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Historically, we’ve fragmented this. We do “sight words” on Monday and “tracing” on Tuesday. But literacy is a comprehensive system. You need phonics. You need comprehension. You need writing. You need it all, integrated together.

For example, you might spend ten minutes working on letter sounds. But immediately after, you use those same sounds to help a student write an email to their mom. You connect the skill to the real world.

We also have to stop gatekeeping writing behind handwriting. If a student has motor difficulties, holding a pencil should not be the prerequisite for writing. Give them an alternative pencil.

An alternative pencil could be a standard keyboard, an eye-gaze board with the alphabet, or a flip chart where they look at the letter they want. The tool doesn’t matter as much as the cognitive process of selecting letters to form words. When we remove the physical barrier of handwriting, we often discover that students know much more about spelling and language than we realized.

Making It a Reality in Your Classroom

The vision is beautiful. But Monday morning is busy. How do you actually do this?

Start small. You don’t need to overhaul your entire curriculum overnight.

First, download the Literacy Bill of Rights. Seriously, go do it. Print it out. Tape it to your desk, your whiteboard, or the door of your classroom. Let it be the thing you look at when you’re frustrated or tired. Let it remind you why you are doing this work.

Second, pick one student whom you feel is stuck. Look at their day through the lens of these rights. Are they accessing age-appropriate books? Writing for real reasons? Being presumed competent?

Pick one change to make for that student. Maybe you swap out a baby book for a magazine about cars. Maybe you stop doing hand-over-hand writing and give them a keyboard to explore.

Third, look at your resources. Comprehensive Literacy for All is a great place to start, since it breaks down the “how” into digestible chunks. It helps you understand the difference between emergent literacy (learning how print works) and conventional literacy (decoding and encoding), and how to teach both simultaneously.

The Ripple Effect

When we grant these rights, we aren’t just teaching reading but instead, are restoring dignity.

A student who can read a menu doesn’t have to rely on someone else to order for them. A student who can write a text message can tell their parents they love them, or that they’re mad at them, without a translator.

Literacy is power. It’s the power to advocate for yourself, to connect with others, and to participate in the world.

When we deny access to literacy, we deny access to life.

Dr. Erickson and Dr. Koppenhaver gave us the manifesto. Now it’s up to us to do the work. The Literacy Bill of Rights is a promise we make to our learners. It says: I see you. I believe in you. And I will not stop until you have the tools to tell your own story.

So, take a look at your classroom. Are those rights hanging on the wall? More importantly, are they living in your instruction?

Our learners deserve the best we can give them. And the best starts with the belief that literacy belongs to everyone. Get in touch with Advocate to Educate for more.