There are some challenges in schools that principals can appropriately assign to someone else. Literacy is the one we need to lead.
In 2025, fewer than 40 percent of Michigan sixth and seventh-grade students scored proficient or above in English language arts on the M-STEP. That raises a real question for those of us who lead middle and high schools: How well are students prepared to engage with the increasingly complex learning we put in front of them?
Public Act 146 gives that question new urgency. Michigan’s K-12 literacy and dyslexia law establishes expectations around evidence-based instruction, intervention, professional learning, and multi-tiered systems of support. But meeting those expectations at the secondary level will take more than extending an elementary model into grades 6-12. Middle and high schools are organized differently: Students move through multiple classrooms and disciplines each day, teachers hold specialized content expertise, and schedules and graduation requirements complicate both identifying student needs and responding to them. MTSS principles still apply, but the model cannot simply be transplanted from elementary settings.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions matter, and PA146 rightly pushes us toward stronger identification and support. But an MTSS is also supposed to help us examine the quality of learning students encounter before intervention becomes necessary. That is Tier 1, and it’s where the 6-12 Disciplinary Literacy Essentials become useful, because they start with the disciplines themselves. Literacy in a science classroom is not identical to literacy in history, math, or CTE. Each discipline asks students to make meaning, evaluate evidence, and communicate differently. Teaching literacy at the secondary level is less a set of reading strategies and more an apprenticeship into how knowledgeable people use a discipline to understand the world.
We talk often about wanting more authentic learning in secondary schools: students investigating real problems, evaluating information, making arguments. That work depends on students being able to access the language, evidence, and ways of thinking that make it possible. Literacy isn’t separate from the “real” content of a classroom. It’s part of how students get access to it. Which makes this a matter of leadership behavior, not just leadership support.
Where Fire Comes In
Behavioral science describes four core leadership drives: Earth, the drive to defend through structure and process; Water, the drive to bond and build trust; Air, the drive to learn and innovate; and Fire, the drive to acquire, compete, and push through barriers until a goal is met.
PA146 compliance work leans on Earth: screening protocols, intervention structures, professional learning plans. Building buy-in across departments leans on Water. But neither moves without Fire, the decisive, take-charge behavior that refuses to let a barrier become a stopping point. That is the risk in front of us: not that literacy work fails outright, but that it drifts, gets handed to a department, and quietly becomes one more initiative competing for attention instead of a lens the whole school uses.
Secondary schools run on specialization, so delegation is appropriate. Literacy coaches, department chairs, and interventionists all bring expertise principals should use. But there’s a difference between delegating expertise and delegating ownership, and this is where Fire has to be disciplined rather than loud. Unchecked, Fire can look like top-down mandates or burn out the very people whose expertise the work depends on. The Fire this moment needs looks less like directing and more like refusing to blink: staying decisively engaged, protecting time for the work, and not letting it get quietly reassigned.
Our behavior as principals shapes what receives attention. The time we protect, the questions we ask, what we notice in classrooms, where we direct professional learning: All of it communicates what matters. None of this requires the principal to become the school’s literacy expert. It requires enough understanding to recognize good work, ask useful questions, and keep attention on the instructional experience students are actually having. Structure from Earth, trust from Water, and decisive follow-through from Fire is what turns a compliance mandate into an instructional identity.
If literacy is going to become part of who our schools are, secondary leaders don’t need to own every piece of the work. But we do need to be part of the fire that drives it.
If you want to continue this conversation, join us for a webinar on what PA146 means for secondary leaders with my guest, Disciplinary Literacy Task Force Chair Janelle Williams. That free webinar sets up the larger conversation we’ll have at Catalyst26.
Continue the Conversation at Catalyst 2026
Catalyst 2026: MTSS Reimagined, Building Smarter Systems of Support is October 6 in Lansing. Secondary leadership teams will examine their own systems, explore the 6-12 Disciplinary Literacy Essentials, consider how AI can support stronger Tier 1 learning, and wrestle with what it means to lead this work from the principal chair.
Catalyst isn’t about finding one more program to implement. It’s a chance for teams to step back, see their system more clearly, and decide together what stronger secondary MTSS can look like.
Sources
Michigan Department of Education, 2025 State Assessment Results
Durrance, S. (2023), Implementing MTSS in Secondary Schools: Challenges and Strategies Region 6 Comprehensive Center/SERVE Center at UNC Greensboro.
Disicplinary Literacy 6-12 Essentials
MDE K-12 Literacy and Dyslexia Law Resources Michigan Legislature, Public Act 146 of 2024