Sold a Story, Part 1
Why you should listen to APM's hit podcast on how early reading instruction in the US went so wrong
Despite being passionate about education, I rarely listen to education podcasts. But I knew this one was making waves, and when an old friend of mine with young children said he’d binged it, I knew I had to get on to it.
If you don’t know what this podcast is, you can find it here. But the short version is this: journalist Emily Hanford, who has spent some years of her professional life researching and writing about the state of early reading instruction, turned her work into a six episode podcast series with American Public Media.
This is the summary of the podcast from APM:
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.
To use the technical term, it’s gone off like a frog in a sock.
There are good reasons for this. The series is well-produced and engages the audience with its focus on individual stories, particularly of struggling readers, their parents and teachers as they grappled with what has been termed (by others; Hanford herself does not use the term) the ‘reading wars’. Research has been painstaking, with the academics, curriculum writers and publishers that go under the microscope speaking for themselves through not only interviews but audio from old videos and interviews, some dating back over 20 years. Technical information is well-presented for a lay audience, in which I include myself because I am sure no reading scientist.
I don’t want to review the story Hanford and her team tell in the podcast in any detail; other writers with much more skin in the early reading instruction game have no doubt done this. I will instead briefly relay why this resonated with me.
My first exposure to the depths of reading failure and the nature of what caused it was through the work of Dr Jennifer Buckingham, my then-colleague and still-friend, best summarised in this short collection of speeches from 2013 (pdf warning). “Why Jayden Can’t Read” is similar in many respects to the story of Sold A Story: the proliferation of reading instruction practices has left too many students behind, and policy-makers have struggled to connect research to teacher practice. I caught glimpses of this first-hand early in my teaching career.
In 2017, I started working in a regional Victorian high school as a Spanish and Humanities teacher through the Teach for Australia program, and it’s there that I met a few of the casualties of failed instructional methods. They would act out during any independent reading time, refuse to read aloud even one on one and would profess to hating school. When asked their favourite subject, PE was the most common response. There’s not too much reading in PE. Exasperated and resigned teachers and parents would say, “well, s/he is just the hands-on learning/outdoorsy/non-academic type”. As upsetting as it is, and as angry as it made me at the time to hear that said, I can understand the approach. If a kid gets to high school struggling with reading, there can be a sense of indifference about the problem because it’s so unclear what can really be done to fix it.
Firstly, parents don’t always understand that there is anything wrong. This is at least partly because the child has probably gone through primary school, successfully in their eyes given they are now in high school. If there were no red flags raised, it’s perfectly rational for a parent to trust that their child’s school and teachers have taught them to read. If the parents don’t know there is a problem - and this can be more likely if they themselves have lower literacy - then they can’t advocate for their children. It’s not an accident that the parents we meet in Episode 1, who watch their kids during Zoom school and do reading activities with them are the ones to ask questions and purchase the resources required to teach them effectively at home.
Secondly, teachers in secondary are too often ill-equipped and under-resourced. If initial teacher training for primary school teachers is woefully inadequate when it comes to training teachers to teach kids to read effectively, then secondary school is an order of magnitude worse. Looking at writing samples can give an indication that something’s not quite right, but trying to diagnose the exact nature of the difficulty/ies requires training, diagnostic tools, and - that scarcest of resources in education - time. Even if the exact nature of the problems can be identified, there are further problems of lacking training in evidence-based methods, time (again) and curricular resources that are needed to intervene effectively. The subject of secondary literacy interventions is probably one for a future blog post.
Beyond bad behaviour and school disengagement, Pamela Snow - a LaTrobe University academic - has written about language disorders and the school-to-prison pipeline, a summary of which you can read here. So there’s no denying that the stakes here are both real and high.
On that basis, I would recommend this podcast to any teacher and primary school leader, but also to any parent of young children as a warning to be vigilant about the reading instruction on offer at their child’s school or prospective school. While I of course recommend this to anyone who works in education policy, I would go further and say that anyone who works in a space of trying to translate research and evidence into public policy and into in-field practice needs to listen to this podcast, particularly Episodes 3 and 6.
My main takeaway from the series is this: underlying the human stories is a clear sense that it did not have to be this way. It is a story of policy failures at many levels. The implications for policy will be the subject of at least one, possibly two more posts.