“Boy, did I have impostor syndrome,” she says. “Here I was in this room full of eminences, and I had been reading their work, I’d been citing them, I’d been learning from them.” She also had some hard lessons to learn as a northeastern hippie in a majority-Black school district. “I just couldn’t believe the state of affairs in these schools,” says Moats. “Libraries with no books, no doors on the lavatory, no running water in the sinks.” She labored to get the teachers to trust her. Eventually, one of her assistants took her aside. “She said, ‘You’re the director, you’ve got to look like the director,’” recalls Moats, who favors denim and heavy glasses. “I said, ‘You have any advice?’ She said, ‘Go to Ann Taylor.’” The project was a success, her nine schools’ reading rates soared, and local politicians started to drop by for photo opportunities.
Then national politicians took notice too. The No Child Left Behind Act that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 enshrined the work of Lyon’s team and the National Reading Panel. Moats was tapped to write the teacher-training component of the act’s Reading First initiative, which became LETRS.
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