Our premises are:

• The research on how students learn to read is well-established.
  
• The research on which instructional techniques work is well-understood.
  
• The voices of those who know what works best -- the classroom teachers -- are rarely heard in instructional design.
  
• The power of "we" is far greater than the power of "you" or "I." ...

The goals of Free-Reading are:

1. To help educators worldwide teach kids to read
   
2. To make quality, research-based, explicit and systematic instruction for early reading widely available and free (in two senses of the word “free”: “at no charge” and “openly offered so as to be used, reused, mashed-up and shared again”)
   
3. To nurture a community of educators who share effective methods in a form that others can easily apply in their own teaching
   
4. To disrupt spending in education away from expensive textbooks and towards more customized instructional materials, more support and training for teachers, and better tools for data and knowledge management.
   
5. Ultimately, as Catherine Snow has said, for kids to be able to "read books with enjoyment while lying in a hammock under elm trees".

Though no individual skill taught here may be an end in itself, we believe each is a step on the path to that ultimate goal.