Philadelphia is facing a literacy crisis. According to a February 2025 report from Children First, only about one-third of the city’s third-graders can read at grade level. That means two out of three children in this city — predominantly Black and Brown children — are being left behind in the most fundamental skill necessary for academic success, economic mobility, and full participation in civic life.
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The consequences are as predictable as they are tragic. As the report emphasizes, “Children who can read proficiently by fourth grade are more likely to be successful in school and career and are more likely to grow into healthy adults and earn family-sustaining wages.”
This crisis is not new, but it is urgent. And the solution is not a simple curriculum swap or another round of testing. It requires a radical reimagining of how we teach reading — one rooted in history, in the stakes of literacy itself, and in the lived experiences of Black children navigating systems not built for their success.
In this critical (real life) context, Percival Everett’s 2024 National Book Award-winning novel James is like a literary beacon for how literacy education might operate in this urgent moment. James is a sharp and moving reimagining of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Everett’s novel radically revises a literary classic — offering a profound meditation on the relationship between literacy, liberation and survival in a white supremacist world. And it models, in one of its earliest and most powerful scenes, the very kind of learning Philadelphia’s children deserve: real-world, expeditionary learning that treats literacy not as a mechanical skill but as a life-saving, soul-affirming tool.
In James, Everett reclaims the character of Jim — the enslaved man Twain depicted in racist caricature — and restores / repairs his full humanity, intelligence and voice. Early in the novel, Everett’s protagonist, James, leads a group of enslaved children through what seems like a simple, even playful, exercise in Black vernacular code-switching. The scene signals a key conceit of the novel — that enslaved Black people are far more intelligent than they let on; that literacy and the management of one’s literate-ness is a definitive survival strategy.
Literacy is never neutral. It is never just about decoding letters on a page. It is about power, about agency … about the difference between being spoken about and speaking for oneself — being written about and writing one’s self into existence.
In the scene, James asks them to imagine what they would say if they saw a fire in a White slave owner’s kitchen. Some children suggest they should shout directly, urgently, naming the danger. But James gently corrects them, explaining that in their world, it is safer — indeed, necessary — to let White people think they are superior. “[W]e must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble,” one of the children says.
This moment is not merely a lesson in deference or etiquette. It is a crash course in survival. It is also, unmistakably, an instructional tableau that reveals the highest stakes of literacy: liberation. James is not just teaching the children to speak differently in different contexts; he is showing them how to read the room, how to navigate systems of power, and how to use language as both a shield and a sword.
What’s more, this scene is a living, breathing example of what educators today call expeditionary learning — a model that centers learning through inquiry, real-world connection, and meaningful, purposeful use of language. In the 2024-25 school year, the School District of Philadelphia adopted a new K-8 curriculum aligned with the science of reading and explicitly designed around expeditionary learning principles. As the Children First report notes, this curriculum shift is a necessary step but not a cure-all.
“Curriculum change is not a quick fix,” the report cautions. “It is only successful when teachers participate in the process and school districts provide extensive coaching, parental guidance, and the classroom supplies needed to help teachers implement it well.”
Spoiler Alert: Black knowledge as a threat to white supremacy
The novel James gives us a vision of what that curriculum could be at its best: student-centered, real-world, rooted in the lived experience of Black children who must learn not just to read books, but to read systems, read people, and read for their very survival.
But Everett’s project is not only about how Black people learned to speak under the bludgeoning oppressive force of slavery. It is also about how they learned to read, to write, to dream, and how that knowledge was treated as a direct threat to white supremacy. James is not just a master code-switcher and signifier; he is a reader, a scholar, an avid dreamer and a writer. He dreams of conversations with Voltaire and Locke, only to recognize that their lofty ideals of liberty and equality falter when confronted with the reality of race and bondage.
In one of the novel’s most harrowing and heartbreaking sequences, we see the cost of this hunger for literacy. James asks a young enslaved man, George, to steal him a pencil — a simple object that, in the context of slavery, becomes dangerous contraband. George does what James asks, but the consequences are catastrophic. George is accused of theft, whipped, and ultimately lynched. In one of the more harrowing scenes of the novel, James makes eye contact with George as he is being mercilessly whipped. It is a scene that remains indelible in the minds of James and Everett’s readers.
James absorbs this experience “like a spear piercing the back of his belly.” He carries the pencil in his pocket, along with the unbearable knowledge that George’s death is tied to his own desire to read, to write, to name himself. James assumes the name “James Faber” after the brand stamped on the side of that stolen pencil — the only act of self-naming available to him in a world determined to deny his humanity.
This detail is not incidental. It is a pointed reminder that literacy, for Black people, has always been entangled with both liberation and risk — triumph and death. It is also a call to action for those of us living in a city where far too many Black children are still being denied access to the fundamental tools of reading and writing — the tools necessary for their liberation.
If we invest in teaching literacy the way James teaches it — in the context of real life, real risk, and real joy— we can equip our children not just to pass reading tests, but to read the world and rewrite their futures.
Today, the obstacles may look different, but the stakes are no less dire. According to the Children First report, nearly half of Philadelphia’s children live in families struggling to meet their basic needs. Poverty, housing instability, trauma, and systemic underinvestment all contribute to low literacy rates. Teachers face overcrowded classrooms, inadequate resources, and curricula that often fail to connect with their students’ realities.
The District’s shift toward expeditionary learning is a promising start, but it will require sustained investment, not just in materials and training but in the social and emotional well-being of students. The Children First report points out that nearly 48 percent of young people in Philadelphia report feelings of sadness or depression. Literacy interventions cannot succeed without addressing the broader conditions in which students live and learn.
The lesson of James is that literacy is never neutral. It is never just about decoding letters on a page. It is about power, about agency, about the ability to name the world and oneself. It is about the difference between being spoken about and speaking for oneself — being written about and writing one’s self into existence.
When James entrusts a stolen notebook to a fellow Black man who is passing as White, he does so because he knows it is too dangerous to keep the notebook himself. But he also keeps the pencil — the very same one that cost George his life — tucked in his pocket like a talisman. It is not unlike the “root” Frederick Douglass describes carrying in his autobiography, a small object meant to protect him from violence. For James, the pencil is both a reminder of the sacrifices made for his literacy and a symbol of the freedom he is still fighting to attain.
Philadelphia’s literacy crisis is not merely an educational failure; it is a foundational human rights issue. Our children deserve more than phonics drills and standardized tests. They deserve an education that recognizes the full weight and power of literacy and that treats reading and writing not as technical skills but as tools of self-determination and liberation.
The literacy rate stakes are higher than skyscrapers. If we fail to act now, we consign another generation of Black and Brown children to navigate a world determined to silence them. But if we invest in teaching literacy the way James teaches it — in the context of real life, real risk, and real joy— we can equip our children not just to pass reading tests, but to read the world and rewrite their futures.
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