Danielle “Nell” Thompson and Terrie Noland lead schools from fragmented efforts to coherent literacy practices Literacy improvement efforts have swept across the nation by policy or by passion, yet results remain uneven. One reason is clear: language and literacy have been treated as separate rather than as an integrated developmental process. Reading development is not separate from language but built on it (Snowling and Hulme, 2025). Sustained literacy improvement requires a leadership shift; it demands systems thinking from leaders who move from managing programs to aligning systems and from monitoring compliance to cultivating coherence. By intentionally placing oral language at