17 episodes
Sold a Story APM Reports
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- Society & Culture
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4.9 • 196 Ratings
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Millions of kids can't read well. Scientists have known for decades how children learn to read but many schools are ignoring the research. They buy teacher training and books that are rooted in a disproven idea. Emily Hanford investigates four authors and a publishing company that have made millions selling this idea.
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1: The Problem
Corinne Adams watches her son's lessons during Zoom school and discovers a dismaying truth: He can't read. Little Charlie isn't the only one. Sixty-five percent of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient readers. Kids need to learn specific skills to become good readers, and in many schools, those skills are not being taught.
Read: Emily Hanford’s reading listRead: Transcript of this episodeSupport: Donate to APMMore: soldastory.org
Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit. -
2: The Idea
Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They’d catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Read: Emily Hanford’s reading listRead: Transcript of this episodeSupport: Donate to APMMore: soldastory.org
Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit. -
3: The Battle
President George W. Bush made improving reading instruction a priority. He got Congress to provide money to schools that used reading programs supported by scientific research. But backers of Marie Clay’s cueing idea saw Bush’s Reading First initiative as a threat.
Read: Transcript of this episodeSupport: Donate to APMMore: soldastory.org
Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit. -
4: The Superstar
Teachers sing songs about Teachers College Columbia professor Lucy Calkins. She’s one of the most influential people in American elementary education today. Her admirers call her books bibles. Why didn't she know that scientific research contradicted reading strategies she promoted?
Read: Transcript of this episodeSupport: Donate to APMMore: soldastory.org
Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit. -
5: The Company
Teachers call books published by Heinemann their "bibles." The company's products are in schools all over the country. Some of the products used to teach reading are rooted in a debunked idea about how children learn to read. But they've made the company and some of its authors millions.
Map: Heinemann’s national reachRead: Transcript of this episodeSupport: Donate to APMMore: soldastory.org
Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit. -
6: The Reckoning
Lucy Calkins says she has learned from the science of reading. She's revised her materials. Fountas and Pinnell have not revised theirs. Their publisher, Heinemann, is still selling some products to teach reading that contain debunked practices. Parents, teachers and lawmakers want answers.
Map: How states approach reading instructionOrganize: Sold a Story discussion guide Read: Transcript of this episodeSupport: Donate to APMMore: soldastory.org
Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit.
Customer Reviews
Australia is failing too
I’ve worked with school age kids for 20 years in Sydney Australia. This podcast is true for Australian reading instruction 20yrs ago and still today. It’s a mess. The same misunderstandings about reading are prevalent throughout all 3 school systems here. When schools choose a “program” for reading instruction, they’re prey to whatever marketing is the latest fad. Literacy standards in Australia have been falling for decades, it’s unforgivable.
Heartbroken Australian Teacher
Unfortunately the same thing is happening in Australia. I am a junior school teacher and in an affluent school. I’ve been trying to convince my Principal that we need to get rid of these horrible programs. Sadly she told me I do not understand curriculum. I will be strongly suggesting to her to listen to this podcast.
Explains so much of my childhood.
I am a student listening to this. Once I was an autistic first-generation immigrant and I entered school fully literate, already reading Roald Dahl and Oscar Wilde’s childrens story by myself, because I was taught phonemes by my father from age two.
In school I was endlessly frustrated to be told that my reading skills were mediocre, and being assigned and made to read books that were well below my capacity and which I found dull and unchallenging. Even at age ten, although I was reading 1984, Greek myths, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Wilde’s adult stories by myself, I was still being asked to read books far below this level. In fact I later tested in the 99.99th percentile for reading comprehension and verbal IQ.
So why was I being unchallenged in school? I was autistic and an immigrant, and we were being taught with the whole word method, which require a knowledge of social and cultural cues that I did not possess. Although I was completely literate, I was deemed unsatisfactory. It was so unfair.
I am so grateful for having learned phonemes, which has also allowed me to easily learn and teach myself other languages and scripts and create my own, explore IPA, and relearn my native tongue which is in danger of extinction. Phonetics sparked a lifelong amateur interest in linguistics, because I noticed that the way I sounded out words differed from others (due to my accent and dialect). I always found phonetics fascinating, and I did not ever feel this way for the whole word/language approach, which robbed me of the excitement I got from deconstructing lexemes, learning their etymology, and the like, to obtain deeper meaning from the text.