While having a School of Education alumna among the ’CUSE50 Alumni Entrepreneur Award winners is rare, the recognition is fitting for Maria Murray G’96, G’09 for her work developing and growing The Reading League (TRL).
“Winning the Cuse50 Entrepreneur Award is a testament to Maria’s impactful work and entrepreneurial spirit,” says Professor Bong Gee Jang, who directs SOE’s literacy program. “We are incredibly proud of her accomplishments and celebrate this outstanding honor.”
TRL has expanded its outreach and impact over the last nine years by working closely with educators and researchers to provide resources and trainings aimed at aligning reading instruction with the Science of Reading, a body of research that outlines the cognitive and neurological processes involved in reading acquisition.
Within TRL’s first two years, Murray says, more than 4,200 teachers in Central New York and the surrounding states had attended at least one event. In 2024, the league had to relocate its annual conference from Syracuse to Charlotte, NC, because attendance had doubled from the previous year, drawing more than 2,500 attendees.
“Dr. Murray has made extraordinary contributions to literacy education as well as general educational research communities,” Jang adds. “Her dedication and innovation in founding and leading The Reading League, which has transformed literacy instruction through research-based practices, exemplify the excellence we strive to inspire.
Kitchen Table
“We really believe that there’s pretty much only one reason someone doesn’t know how to read, and it’s because they weren’t taught.”
When starting her educational journey, which focused on learning disabilities and reading education, Murray believed she would end up a reading scientist.
Instead, she has become an expert at preventing and remediating difficulties in reading intervention, as well as what she calls an “accidental CEO,” because of her drive to serve as a knowledge broker, bringing together experts who support teaching strategies that incorporate the multiple skill components required in learning to read, skills she researched while at Syracuse.
“The word ‘league’ is very intentional,” Murray says, “because it means we are a diverse group with different backgrounds.” TRL is composed of professors, researchers, classroom teachers, speech pathologists, administrators, parents, publishers, advocates, and state educational leaders. “Too many of us were working in silos before,” says Murray, noting while many came to the league in different ways, all are stakeholders, linked by the goal to promote evidence-based reading instruction.
While completing her Ph.D. at Syracuse, Murray worked alongside Trustee Professor of Education and Psychology Benita Blachman, who published extensively on early literacy and significantly contributed to the Science of Reading through the numerous federally funded grants on early reading intervention she led. Her research connecting the neurophysiological impact of evidence-based interventions became a key foundation for TRL.
Murray taught courses on reading instruction at SUNY Oswego for a decade, before leaving to fully focus on the League, which she launched with a handful of other reading experts in 2015 to support teacher instruction. Efforts started small—on a $300 budget with kitchen table gatherings—but quickly grew as interest swelled.
In 2016, TRL became a registered nonprofit with a mission to advance literacy education through research, training, and advocacy. Although TRL’s original focus was on the Central New York area, by 2017, when the alliance held its first conference, it welcomed 375 attendees, with educators traveling to Syracuse from three countries and 27 states. These early events, along with social media, helped to grow interest.
But awareness and support really escalated after an angel investor appeared.
Cinderella Story
By 2018, Founder of American Girl, Pleasant Rowland, awarded $4 million to expand TRL’s operations nationally and made an additional $5 million pledge to create an endowment fund. This gift came after Murray heard Rowland give a keynote address at the International Dyslexia Association conference.
Murray says she knew of Rowland as the inventor of the American Girl doll and of her work in Aurora, NY, to restore commercial properties near Wells College, Rowland’s alma mater, but wasn’t sure why she was selected to speak at a dyslexia conference.
That’s when Murray discovered Rowland had been a primary school teacher. “Rowland wondered why her students were struggling to read, so she invented a curriculum, which was very successful,” Murray learned.
In the keynote, Rowland noted the National Reading Panel Report, which featured Blachman’s research. The report identified five key areas—or “panels”—that are essential components of effective reading instruction: Alphabetics, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.
Murray says that for Rowland, reading the report made everything click: “That’s why my curriculum worked—it was the Science of Reading,” Murray recalls Rowland sharing in her remarks, referencing the strategies she had added when teaching her first and second graders.
Next, Murray wrote to Rowland asking for guidance on running a nonprofit. For months and months, she heard nothing back, learning later Rowland was sending members from her team to trainings and conferences to take note of TRL’s strategies.
After serious vetting, Murray says Rowland finally contacted her: “I got an email, saying she’d been following us and was impressed.” Rowland then called Murray and asked: “‘What’s your dream?’”
“When she asked me that,” Murray begins, “I said, ‘I guess to get out of my house.’”
Rowland advised Murray to take TRL national. “Her support meant a lot,” says Murray, not only because Rowland’s philanthropic foundation provided substantial financial backing but also because other funders and foundations took note. “They all realized that if she’s willing to donate to the level she did, then so are others.”
First Aid Kit
Murray did indeed take TRL national. Today, leagues exist in 33 states and Washington, DC, with at least six more to be announced in January 2025. “We all have the same mission,” Murray says, “which is to advance the awareness, understanding, and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction, because we really believe that there’s pretty much only one reason someone doesn’t know how to read, and it’s because they weren’t taught.”
“I love the analogy of a first aid kit,” says Murray, who hopes it helps people understand TRL’s philosophy.
“Let’s say you’re a hiker, and you purchase the top-rated first aid kit.” Imagine, then, hiking with a friend, and they fall off a cliff. You think, I’ve got this lifesaving first aid kit, one that was touted as the very best! So you do your best to splint the leg … but it’s hemorrhaging.
Then along comes a medic: “No, you’ve got the tourniquet too loose. It’s got to be up higher.” The expert jumps in, putting their skills and knowledge to use—”using that same first aid kit.”
Thus, in Murray’s example, having even the best tools can prove ineffective if the user doesn’t know how to properly implement them: “It’s about having the knowledge to use the tools. A curriculum … that’s just a tool.”
TRL’s training, explains Murray, stresses building foundational skills that target individual students. One example of a success is from a district with four elementary schools. Murray explains: “The lowest performing school, the one with the most disadvantaged community—within the inside of a year, they were outperforming the highest performing elementary, because the teachers, all 20 of them, had completed TRL training.”
When TRL works with a school, Murray adds, trainers spend a year with teachers to give them the knowledge. “It’s the implementation,” she stresses and not a one-size-fits-all approach to reading. “It’s correcting how that first aid kit is being used all wrong.”
By Ashley Kang ’04, G’11 (a proud alumna of the M.S. in Higher Education program)
Photos by Tristan Bey, senior at the Institute of Technology at Syracuse Central and a Syracuse Journalism Lab student