Deborah Reck

CEO The Writers' Express

Deborah Reck co-founded The Writers’ Express (WEX) as a non-profit in 1994 to develop tools for teachers to use in literacy instruction for grades 3–12. She also led the organization’s merger with Wireless Generation in 2009.

Over the past seventeen years, Debbie has worked with thousands of teachers to discover the most powerful and efficient instructional methods for real students in real classrooms. By figuring out ways to assess students’ writing performance at least once a day and systematically track that performance in response to particular pedagogical methods, Debbie and her team have identified a unique writing sequence that accelerates the development of literacy skills for all students, from the most struggling to the highest achieving.

Debbie continues to use assessment data to refine the existing tools for teaching writing and is working to expand WEX to develop students’ ability to write about text—both non-fiction and fiction. Because of WEX’s results on student performance to date, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) awarded Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) a four-year, multi-million dollar grant to evaluate the efficacy of WEX in a randomized trial, the gold standard of educational research.

Prior to founding WEX, Debbie taught middle school social studies in the Baltimore City Public Schools and high school history (U.S. and Medieval) at Lincoln Sudbury High School in Sudbury Massachusetts. Her focus on writing grew from her experience as a teacher, where she found no better way to find out what students really know than to have them write. She and her co-founder, Arthur Unobskey, saw that students developed their ideas and learned to read and think more carefully when writing.

Debbie worked closely with the editors of the Common Core Standards to write reading and language standards, including writing, for grades K–12. She holds a B.A. degree in History and in the Humanities from Yale University and a M.Ed. in Social Studies Teaching from Brown University.