Sold A Story, Part 2: Review and Discussion

When neuroscience intervened, that odd GW Bush coincidence, and what French Immersion has to do with all of this

Episode three of Sold A Story opens in California, in 1996, when a former Superintendent of Public Instruction had a reckoning which can be loosely classified as Science Versus.

Back in the 1980s (like many other states and districts across the US) California had widely adopted the Whole Language Approach to teach reaching, based on Marie Clay’s research.

But by the 1990s, cognitive neuroscience caught up and provided new research about how we learn to read. What brain science taught us is that our brains puzzle through each letter of the word; which makes a phonics-based reading approach ideal for new readers.

But this was incompatible with the theory developed by Marie Clay and put to use in her Whole Language Approach.

After leaving office, the former superintendent discovered this cognitive research, specifically, the part about how phonics-based instruction had earned scientific backing, and this became a come-to-Jesus moment in his testimony.

He was convinced that science would prevail, and that the choice he steered in the 1980s would be corrected for the future students of California.

His prognosis, however, didn’t exactly come true. What began, instead, was a creation of ‘camps;’ these two competing ideas of how to teach young children how to read had in fact become belief systems, rooted as deeply as religion and politics. This would divide educators and policymakers, politicians and senators, for the decades to come.

The net result would be that some 60 percent of 4th Graders tested below grade level in 2019.

Remember that fateful morning, on September 11, 2001?

Then-President George W. Bush visited a classroom in Florida, where he sat and read a story about a goat with some 2nd Graders. The President was there to show his support for a reading program called “Direct Instruction,” which was originally developed in the 1960s. It was a phonics-based approach to reading, and after this underprivileged district switched to Direct Instruction, their test scores started to go up. It caught the attention of policy makers in the GW Bush era as a way to support his Reading First plan, which is how he ended up there that day.

Politics is not supposed to take sides in education, it’s supposed to be partisan. But that’s not the way it actually works; and the reason is that big money is on the line. GW Bush had passed his $8 billion Reading First Initiative during his first week in office. That kind of money had every educational publisher trying to figure out how they could get a piece of that national pie.

But mid way through the goat story, Bush had a whisper in his ear from one of his aides. What he whispered was that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers in New York City.

Now this terrible day, and his trip to an out-of-the-way school classroom near Sarasota Florida, would be forever enshrined in the collective history of America, and the rest of the world who watched, glued to their televisions, for weeks to come.

GW Bush’s Reading First initiative did have a lot bi-partisan support when it was introduced. But soon enough, some very bitter divides opened in the country, and it became a defacto “Republican thing.” Phonics was the old way, and Whole Language, or as it also became known, 3-Cueing, was the new way. Why would Democrats want to support, let alone champion, anything the Republicans were doing?

From there, the divisions grew. The War On Terror commenced, protests flared, political divisions widened. And we were left, with a reminder of Bush sitting on a tiny chair, in a classroom, next to a blackboard with a public-school-font sign that read “Reading Makes A Country Great!”

The fact that GW Bush was in a classroom gushing over phonics, and then made his first National Address in a hastily organized press conference from that school’s library as the school kids looked on, is just an odd piece of irony to the whole history of reading. It may or may not be an important footnote in this story.

Let’s dig into the series some more…

The series is spread over 6 episodes, with a total listening time is just over four hours, so more or less an average time span for a series. Emily Hanford narrates with a metered pace that’s appealing, and digestible. It gives you more than it asks of you, and it’s all neatly and coherently wrapped into episode bundles. It’s the kind of series you can multi-task with, and still keep track.

It’s a bit surprising that this narrative, told in the classic public radio longform reportage style, a Who-Dun-It Mystery from the most unlikely of places: the primary education classroom, could hold and secure as much attention that it has. And that’s something I really like about it. I’m always looking for mysteries that don’t turn up dead women killed by an abusive man who she knew. It holds the ultimate unfolding surprise inside as the chapters go on.

But will this topic have a wide-reach? It’s not sexy. No one dies. There are mild tragedies (children not learning to read well) but then they get solved….by the end of the series we learn that there’s a potential billion-dollar industry steering public education, which does feel a little bit dirty to think deeply about. More on that later.

But mass appeal? People who don’t have kids, appeal? People who have other things to worry about, appeal?

Enter the pandemic. The timing of this series is impeccable. Hanford has been reporting on education for a decade, and following the angle of reading since 2017, but this was the right choice, from the publisher's point of view, to push it out as its own series.

The pandemic was bad in almost every way for education, except for one thing: it forced parents to actually see, and hear, what was going on inside their children’s classrooms. Because, if you had kids and weren’t out of the house working on the front line, you couldn’t not see it in those early lock-down months of the pandemic. As you competed for bandwidth and begged family members to wear headphones, shuffled teenagers from bedroom to couch to basement and back, it was unavoidable.

And some of this explains why Sold A Story has been a hit….but I do think there’s more to it.

Maybe like you, my view of teachers has undergone another shift in these last troubled years of education. I have always had great respect for teachers; they get up early every day to do a job that most do not have the patience to do. They teach ADHD kids, wipe noses, zip up snowsuits and inhale glitter on a daily basis.

As kids get older, they do different tasks, all while often being maligned and berated by students, and often parents too. In the US, many teachers also live with a daily threat of violence, that some whacko could open fire on them or their classrooms.

That was all before the pandemic. Now they were fully seen as front-line workers. They went back to work, in some cases before being fully vaccinated, while wearing a mask…and they did this all day, with shrinking resources, big expectations, and sure, summers off, but not with any fluffy kind of cushion to rest on.

So when it comes to where to lay blame here, as to why the reading pedagogy has led public school children astray, the last place I look to is the teachers.

But without the thorough investigation that Hanford and Peak have done in this series, it might be convenient to lay the blame on teachers. That they, the teachers, have let our kids down. It’s the sort of lazy conclusion-drawing that tired, fed-up parents do. And because of this reality, I’m very thankful that the narration and reporting is very accessibly, metered and listen-able.

If you can get through the full series (and do, it’s worth it) it does feel vindication that in fact, the locust of blame is much more decentralized. It takes good journalism to follow the money to figure out how we’ve ended up in this place where our kids don’t know how to read sufficiently.

The educational publishers, and one in particular is named here to take large blame: Heinemann. They are a leading curriculum publisher, and their key authors are also featured in this series: Marie Clay, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, and Lucy Calkins. They have lucrative year-over-year contracts with very large school boards; some wealthy, some not.

If you are a teacher getting ready to teach Grade 1 and your school board offers to buy you a suite of books which come with detailed curriculum materials, including all the books, all the sheets, scorecards, and even the stickers…it’s a no-brainer. The marketing and packaging is flawless.

Perhaps you’ve already bought these resources; now you buy new stickers and then re-use everything else from a previous year. That means you can free-up your tiny budget to purchase some other classroom component that might be needed. Like paper, textbooks, and chalk. I mean, if a school board is recommending this, hadn’t they done the research? Hadn’t they chosen what is best for the students to learn?

As I said, I don’t blame the teachers. The School Boards, who act as a whole to make curriculum choices and assert buying power and then offer Professional Development Days to teachers certainly have some blame in this story.

The universities, colleges and institutions who teach and certify teachers are also on the hook here; why should it be left to journalism to overcome the problem of academic silos between, say, education and neuroscience? Why hasn’t a spirit of cross-collaboration already been inspired that would share and investigate their findings, to improve upon?

This series carries a strong thesis, and one that carefully pits reading education as more-or-less going one way, or another; Phonics or (sic) Whole Word. It’s still too early in the game to see the benefits and trade-offs where schools and teachers and boards have already switched directions.

As I listened to this it made me wonder: How did my children learn to read? I asked them…they had no memory of this. So I reached out to the Grade 1 teacher who taught two of my three children.

Like many other urban kids from upwardly mobile families in relatively affluent neighbourhoods, my kids all began school with the great Canadian experiment in education called French Immersion. It’s available at many public schools across the country, not just in tony tree-lined urban neighbourhoods. And it’s founded on the principle that Canada is a bilingual country, therefore children should have the opportunity to learn in both official languages.

That’s the idea, anyway. The structure varies somewhat across different school boards, but generally, it means that school children are immersed in French Language language from Senior Kindergarten (public school begins here at age 4 with Junior Kindergarten) and they only receive instruction in French until Grade 4.

Sure, they often had Phys Ed or Library or Music in English, but instruction doesn’t begin officially until Grade 4.

Teachers remain very un-phased about kids learning to read in English. “They naturally pick it up,” is one response I heard often. Or, “the learning translates…most live in an English-speaking household, and they will learn it because it’s around them…” In other words, chill out. Stop worrying so much.

Of course, I did worry, which meant that I spent many hours reading with them myself, and also paid for additional programs to make sure they, actually, did learn to read in their mother tongue. I’m lucky that I had the time and resources to do this. The result: One of my three children actually enjoys reading. One of them struggles, one of them is indifferent to books in general.

When I reached out to the Grade 1 teacher that my good reader, and my struggling reader both had, here’s what she had to say about how she teaches her students:

I taught reading using what I call a balanced approach, ie. both phonics and words in context.  No one told me 'how' to teach French.  No one said 'teach phonics' or 'whole word'.  I used my intuition and instinctively taught a lot with a phonetic approach, French Immersion essentially being a second language acquisition programme. 

Learning to read is an interesting concept, isn't it?  Do you remember when/how you learned how to read?  Personally, no one read books to me at home when I was young.  And at school, we sat quietly in rows and copied a whole bunch from the blackboard into our notebooks. So I have asked myself, how did I learn how to read?

As a teacher, I see children who can read (decode) fluently, even those words that they do not understand the meaning of and children who struggle with the letter (symbol) and its associated sound.  So I naturally approached what I would focus on depending on the needs of the child.

Does French Immersion work? I have mixed feelings about this. There were a few moments, ranging between Grade 2 and Grade 4, when I felt that I had children that were semi-illiterate in both official languages. Neither language had fully taken hold, and I can say for certain none of this happened “naturally,” or without substantial effort.

What does Sold a Story have to offer the cannon of narrative podcasts?

Why have I included it in Bingeworthy?

It’s a fully narrated episodic documentary about an issue, offered in a classic public media format. It’s safe and comfortable. It leans toward controversy but doesn’t get mired in it. It discusses politics but doesn’t take sides. It’s sparse in terms of sound design or artistic use of audio.

The narration style is something that demands more viewing: Hanford very much pulls off a blurred line between being a reporter, and being a narrator. She brings a bit of her own experiences to add colour to the reporting.

To my mind, I think that much of her gravitas in this series is based on her credibility of having followed this beat for a decade. You can hear her deep knowledge of the subject in her tone, rather than jetting in a well-known journalist who has the facts, but lacks the depth. This story could be told by any reporter, but few would be able to pull off the gusto to make it sound authentic.

What it is, in a way, it’s a Glass Onion approach to solve a problem that’s basically universal; not everyone has children, but everyone has gone through Grade 1 at some point. Maybe you are a gifted and prolific reader, and now you know why. Maybe you’ve always struggled, and this is bringing up some questions. Maybe you have watched your children falter, and feel deep concern.

This story does the job of questioning each player as the potential culprit, dropping breadcrumb clues so that the audience can also figure it out as they listen. And then it finally offers a payoff of a clear answer of how we’ve ended up in this place…and some possible suggestions about how to change this going forward.

Picking up from last week’s post, here’s the remainder of the email interview with Emily Hanford.

Samantha Hodder: I wished your series connected one point further, which is about children with dyslexia…how are those kids taught to read, and how does it map on to the techniques mentioned…phonics, decoding, whole word, etc?

Emily Hanford: As I mentioned before, this all started with reporting on kids with dyslexia and why so many are not getting what they need in school. What I discovered is that kids with dyslexia are like canaries in the coal mine – they are suffering the most when kids are not taught HOW to read, but lots of kids are suffering. Sold a Story was an investigation of issues with core instruction (and assessment). 

SH: My kids all went through French Immersion school where I live in Ontario, Canada…this is a public school educational mandate that’s very common in Canada, especially in urban centres. What it means is that all instruction is in French until Grade 4, which was when they began English instruction. The party line from teachers is that reading English “will just happen,” and that “they will naturally pick it up,” and that it’s “easy for them, after French, if they are from an Anglophone family.” I was always nervous about this concept, so I tried early intervention with them with a pre-school English program, and then tried to read as much as possible with them. The tally for good readers in our house? ⅓ kids … what’s your take on reading instruction when a second language is involved?

EH: I haven’t reported specifically on this issue, so I’d rather not comment. But the Simple View of Reading (I talk about it in the talk I linked to above and also here and here) helps to disentangle the role of language comprehension/ oral language and decoding which is really key in understanding differences between learning to speak a language and learning to read it.

SH: Given the silos that academia functions in, I don’t find it that surprising that education departments were not abreast of developments in the field of neuroscience…given what you know about how instruction is handled at “Teacher’s College,” or B-Ed degrees, what natural pathways can you see for these two disciplines to cross paths to share their knowledge of what each discipline knows about reading and reading science? 

EH: I focused a decent amount on the role of teacher prep (and resistance to the scientific research among some faculty at schools of ed) in Hard Words. I think teacher prep is a really important part of the issue here, but Sold a Story focused on this other element that I think needed more attention – the ideas about reading and how it works embedded in curriculum, what teachers are learning from curriculum and in PD about reading and how kids learn to do it.

SH: My mother-in-law can speed read…she can consume an entire novel in under one day. She misses details, but she can polish them with a speed you rarely see. When I raised the topic of this podcast with her, she claims that she learned to speed read by reading words as blocks, as a whole, and not breaking them down into phonics syllables…she claims that’s “a stupid way to read” and that phonics is bogus too. She’s a highly acclaimed (retired) academic. There are so many camps to this topic! What’s your take on this?

EH: I think this is a product of not knowing what has been learned about HOW people learn to read. What it SEEMS like we are doing when we are reading is not what we are actually doing (we are not reading words as wholes). That’s why I spent so much time in Ep 2 explaining some of the basics of the scientific research.

For more on all of this, I highly recommend two books I put on our reading list – Language at the Speed of Sight and Reading in the Brain.

SH: Who are the “good” publishers, in your opinion? Who is filling this void of putting together curriculum resources, paired with books and also study guides? Is making that product widely available the only true cure for this problem?

EH: I don’t think there is or ever will be a perfect curriculum. Teachers teach kids; they use curriculum to do that. One of the things I wanted to help people understand is that curriculum/ materials contain ideas about how kids learn to read and teachers learn ideas about reading (often without realizing) from the materials they use. I think the most important thing is teacher knowledge. 

SH: Do you plan to do a follow-up series with APM Reports? What more is there to cover on this topic that you’re chomping to get back to? Has APM Reports given you any indication of their future interest? 

EH: We really don’t know yet what is next. I think there is a lot more to do on this topic – and interest at APM, and among funders, to do more.

SH: Does APM Reports see this as a hit? What feedback are you getting from them about this series?

EH: I’m getting good feedback from my immediate supervisors. I think the podcast has exceeded expectations in terms of downloads and audience response. We are getting tons of response. More emails and messages on social media than I have yet been able to read. 

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If you haven’t listened to this series, yet, here’s the Apple link to listen to find it:

And then the Spotify link:

Series Details:

Sold a Story
American Public Media
6 Episodes
First published October 20, 2022
Release structure: October 20, 2022: Episodes 1 + 2, and then weekly
Final episode published November 17, 2022

Total Listening time: 4 hours, 8 minutes