Response to Mills College at Northeastern Undermining Students’ Civil Right to Read
Northeastern’s 2022 merger with Mills College turned a legacy institution into a vehicle for ongoing community trauma and disenfranchisement, setting generations of children up for failure for years to come.
January 27, 2025
To the Oakland Community:
Here in Oakland, we know what’s at stake when it comes to education—our children’s futures depend upon it. Too often, however, powerful institutions insert themselves where they aren’t needed, driven by misguided theories and oblivious to their disconnect from the very communities they claim to serve. This time, it’s Northeastern University using the legacy of Mills College to drive debunked methods that undermine students’ civil right to read.
Our country is in crisis: two-thirds of U.S. students aren’t reading at grade level, and illiteracy is as high as 95% in districts where parents lack the resources for private tutoring. We’re fighting a systemic, uphill battle, and there’s no end in sight so long as teacher preparation programs persist in arming new educators with literacy instruction methods that simply don’t work for most children. Northeastern’s 2022 merger with Mills College turned a legacy institution into a vehicle for ongoing community trauma and disenfranchisement, setting generations of children up for failure for years to come. Once a trusted ally in the fight for social justice, Mills is being used to advance practices that go against science. Adding salt to the wound, Northeastern recently unveiled plans to provide scholarships for Oakland students to attend college for free, a move that feels as much like a pacifier as it does a gift.
The Oakland community has worked tirelessly to ensure our children learn to read.
Four years ago, The Ikuna Group, State of Black Education in Oakland, Latino Education Network, and many more joined the Oakland NAACP in demanding that Oakland Unified align literacy instruction with the Science of Reading. Reading failure disproportionately impacts Black, brown, and low-income children and perpetuates a cycle of inequity. What Mills College at Northeastern is doing goes beyond poor educational choices—it is actively undermining our children’s futures.
But this is about more than methods and pedagogy. As the NAACP and Ontario Human Rights Commission have charged, this is a matter of civil and human rights. The Department of Justice saw this coming 30 years ago. In their landmark report, they identified illiteracy as more than a mere correlation to delinquency—they identified illiteracy as a cause. They warned that universities like Mills College at Northeastern needed to be circumvented because they clung to methods that fuel the school-to-prison pipeline. Northeastern is fulfilling this grim prophecy by pushing debunked methods that leave most children, especially those whose families cannot afford private tutoring, without the foundational reading skills they need to succeed.
What makes this situation truly unconscionable is the blatant hypocrisy.
Northeastern proudly touts its status as a Research 1 (R1) institution, but how can it claim that title while peddling discredited methods like three-cueing, guided reading, leveled texts, and running records—tools that reject the reading research consensus and align with a disproven theory of how reading skills develop?
We’ve heard these concerns echoed by many, yet Northeastern has arrogantly pushed forward:
Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), has stated that Northeastern’s teacher education program fails to align with SB-488, a law designed to ensure our children are taught with the best research-backed methods.
Leaders in the academic and literacy research communities, such as Professor Sue Sears and Maryanne Wolf, have been united in their condemnation, declaring, “We can never put loyalty to past methods over loyalty to our children.”
Numerous groups, including the California Reading Coalition, Decoding Dyslexia California, and Families in Schools, brought their concerns to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC), and the president of the California Council on Teacher Education (CCTE) dismissively chastised these guardians of the community for challenging the status quo.
Northeastern has strategically tossed a few scholarships in our direction, hoping we’ll look the other way, but as the saying goes, “All money ain’t good money.”
These scholarships are a distraction from the real issue: Northeastern’s teacher education program is deeply flawed and directs our students toward failure. This saga is a reminder that policy alone is not enough. Mills College at Northeastern has shown a deliberate disregard for community voice, and a few scholarships will not outweigh the long-term costs of teacher turnover, professional dissonance, and failed literacy instruction—how can we remain quiet when the stakes are so high?
While some claim there’s little harm in arming educators with a few disparate methods, the fact is our children can’t afford it. Teachers whose college methods classes are defiantly guided by elitist "whataboutism" instead of the reading research consensus exit their programs wholly unprepared to teach students how to read. It’s time for local districts and charters to take a stand. I call on them to rethink their partnerships with Northeastern, and should they continue to hire Mills College and Northeastern graduates—fully aware of the severe knowledge gaps—the community will consider them careless, reckless, and complicit. They will be directly responsible for the lasting damage inflicted by such outdated practices, damage that is predictable, preventable, and undermines every student’s right to a Free and Appropriate Public Education.
Furthermore, I call on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to review Northeastern’s R1 status, considering more than the university’s research output and scrutinizing how its education departments—both at their founding campus and in Oakland—are impacting the communities they serve. An R1 designation should carry responsibility across all departments. Ignoring the reading research consensus on evidence-based practices undermines the educational needs of students and is unacceptable. Northeastern’s refusal to align its education methods classes to the research and its resistance to feedback from the community and educational experts not only calls its R1 status into question but also the very meaningfulness of that classification.
Our children’s futures are not for sale—it’s time for Mills College at Northeastern to start listening.
There is an opportunity here: Northeastern need not navigate this journey alone. I strongly recommend engaging The Reading League to provide consultation. They can review syllabi and work with faculty to ensure alignment with evidence-based literacy instruction.
Additionally, organizations in Oakland, including FULCRUM, are willing to offer support. We are not just critics—we can be a resource. Other educator preparation programs are also ready to partner, and there are funders willing to invest in these efforts to ensure that every child receives the reading instruction they deserve.
The door is open for Mills College at Northeastern to take a bold step forward, listen, and become a leader in the fight for excellence in education. This is not merely about avoiding harm—it’s about creating a legacy of positive change. Let’s work together to get it right for our children.
In Service,
Kareem J. Weaver
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