Newlane University Manifesto--12 tenets: 1. Education should be available and accessible to every person on earth; making quality education inaccessible or exclusive is immoral. Education belongs in the same category as shelter, clean water, and basic food.

2. Education should be disconnected from geography. Students should be able to learn anything from anywhere on earth. With few exceptions, tying education to geography is a form of exclusion.
3. Education should be disconnected from a schedule. The most effective time to learn something is when the student is ready, not when the teacher or institution is available.
4. Education should not be admission- or permission-based, but freely available upon the asking. The current admission-based system is a vestige of a scarcity model that could only fit a limited number of seats in a classroom.
(4 continued) No one should have to be admitted or ask permission to learn a subject.
5. Education should not have a prescribed completion time. The amount of time it takes to learn something shouldn’t be decided before hand; some students can learn something in minutes that will take others days or years to learn.
6. Education should not be set to a specific time period in a person’s life; it should be a process like eating, drinking, and exercise: continual, habitual, and evolving. Students should not be categorized or limited by what they have studied or learned to date.
7. Education should not be competitive or judged by other students’ achievements. Students should only be assessed on whether they have mastered the stated objective or ‘not yet’. Removing competition decreases the incentive for cheating or cutting corners.
8. Educational records, including learning achievements, grades, transcripts, credentials, and degrees should be owned and managed by the student rather than an institution.
(8 continued) Students should be able to move freely between any learning institution or organization at anytime or for any reason.
9. Educational records should include universally understandable, useful, and verifiable documentation of student mastery of explicit learning objectives, rather than an institutional stamp attesting to completion of a vague curriculum.
10. Education should not have a prescribed way of teaching. Prevalent teaching approaches are often culturally, gender or socio-economically biased.
(10 continued) While clear and explicit learning objectives can be universally agreed upon, the manner in which these are achieved should be as diverse as the student body.
11. Educational learning paths should be personalized and as varied and diverse as the students pursuing them.
12. Education should not be at the service of institutions, but at the service of learning. Organizing education around institutional timelines, schedules, expertise, records & convenience is efficient for institutions, but limits the student, & by extension humanity’s potential.

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An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
Our preprint on the impact of reopening schools on reproduction number in England is now available online: https://t.co/CpfUGzAJ2S. With @Jarvis_Stats @amyg225 @kerrylmwong @KevinvZandvoort @sbfnk + John Edmunds. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED. 1/


We used contact survey data collected by CoMix (
https://t.co/ezbCIOgRa1) to quantify differences in contact patterns during November (Schools open) and January (Schools closed) 'Lockdown periods'. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 2/

We combined this analysis with estimates of susceptibility and infectiousness of children relative to adults from literature. We also inferred relative susceptibility by fitting R estimates from CoMix to EpiForecasts estimates(https://t.co/6lUM2wK0bn). NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 3/


We estimated that reopening all schools would increase R by between 20% to 90% whereas reopening primary or secondary schools alone would increase R by 10% to 40%, depending on the infectiousness/susceptibility profile we used. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 4/


Assuming a current R of 0.8 (in line with Govt. estimates: https://t.co/ZZhCe79zC4). Reopening all schools would increase R to between 1.0 and 1.5 and reopening either primary or secondary schools would increase R to between 0.9 and 1.2. NOT YET PEER REVIEWED 5/

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