Writing, reading, language learning, and related literate activities are at the core of NCTE's mission. For decades the organization and its members have investigated and acted on questions about how students should learn, how that learning should be assessed, and what conditions should exist to support learning from pre-kindergarten through college and beyond. Recent initiatives such as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), as well as institutional, state, and local policies, have opened the possibility of innovative approaches to learning, assessment, and teacher support. These initiatives create opportunities to enact NCTE's core commitments to literacy learning across grade levels and subjects. NCTE advocates for: changes to learning and teaching conditions that create inequity for students; advanced learning and teaching conditions that create equity in literacy education; appropriate assessment and accountability systems and for uses of data that are grounded in research and experience; assessment and accountability systems that are used to make principled decisions; and conditions that recognize teacher expertise and foster connections within classes and across grade levels and sites of learning.