Sold a Story - 3: The Battle

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

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

Whether you're doing a dance to your favorite artist in the office parking lot, or being guided into Warrior I in the break room before your shift, whether you're running on your Peloton tread at your mom's house while she watches the baby, or counting your breaths on the subway. Peloton is for all of us, wherever we are whenever we need it, download the free Peloton app today. Peloton app available through free tier, or pay subscription starting at 12.99 per month. Previously, on the Soledist story, he doesn't look at all the letters and words, he doesn't look at all the words and sentences, and reading is miserable for him. It was like read the

book to the child first, and then eventually the child will have practiced it enough that they'll read it and it'll be great you know. It didn't seem like they were really teaching them to read it seemed like they were teaching them to sound like they could read. Okay we're gonna go ahead and get started here. In 1996 there was a reckoning going on in California about how children were being taught to read. I'm going to try to hold back my anger towards you because you were at the helm when all this nonsense was going on. I can appreciate the position. The state's former superintendent of public instruction is sitting before a group of lawmakers at the state Capitol.

His name is Bill Honeg. He's on the hot seat because he was in charging California in the 1980s when the state made big changes to reading instruction and reading scores tanked. I agree with the chair's comments. There is no issue facing education that's more crucial right now than how and whether we teach our youngsters to read all of them.

California had gone all in on the whole language approach to teaching reading, and the idea that I told you about in the last episode. The idea that kids don't need to be taught how to sound out written words because they can use other cues to figure out what the words say. Bill Honeig tells the lawmakers, he didn't know there was anything wrong with that queuing idea. But since he left office,

he's been reading a lot of research and talking to cognitive scientists. And he says, now he knows. I had to change my mind, and I think of those of us who are just all good, Edgerton's gonna have to be open enough to look at the facts. There's some very strong research on these issues. You could say 20 years ago, yes,

you could substitute context or meaning to decode a word, and that would work, and they didn't have the details of it. Now they know that it's not a good strategy to teach kids, it's a second-rate strategy that will mean that they're slow readers for the rest of their life. Large numbers of youngsters are being hurt by the failure to adapt to this college. But Bill Honeig was optimistic back in 1996

that things were about to change. I think we can turn this around very, very quickly. The field is ready, the teachers are ready. They know that there's a problem. They know that they want the details of the skills. They want something to lay it out for them. They're willing to play ball. He was confident that if teachers could learn about

the scientific research on reading, they'd be convinced just like he was. He was sure that science would change the way kids are taught to read. But he was wrong. would change the way kids are taught to read. But he was wrong. This is Episode 3 of Soul to Story, a podcast from American Public Media.

I'm Emily Hanford. When Bill Honeig was sitting before those lawmakers in California in 1996, the science of how people learned to read was clear. There were studies, there were books, there was lots of research. But there were powerful people who already believed in that other idea, the queuing idea. They had an approach for teaching children to read that was based on that idea, and they were selling that idea to schools. So when the scientific research on reading came along, it had adversaries, people who believed in something else, people who were going to fight for what they believed in,

and they were going to win. Even though the federal government armed with billions of dollars in taxpayer money tried to stop them. That's the story I'm going to tell you in this episode. The clash between people spearheading a huge government effort to change the way reading was being taught, and people who had a stake in defeating that effort. Back in the 1990s, Susan Newman was a professor of education. We would go to conferences and it was like, it was like bizarre.

There were teams. She was on the team that was losing in the 90s. The team that was saying, you got gotta teach children how to read the words. She remembers going to a conference in Texas. What I did is I gave a talk saying that children needed to be taught early on and they needed explicit instruction in that early childhood methods for failing children

by not providing that kind of explicit instruction. There were a lot of people in the audience who didn't like her talk. And they stormed the podium after and yelled at me and said how wrong and how awful I was, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this awful stuff. But there were at least two people in the audience that day who liked what she had to say. The governor of Texas, George W. Bush, and his wife, Laura. And she asked me to sit next to her at lunch and she wanted to know more of my ideas. They hit it off.

Literacy was a big deal in the Bush family. I can tell you that almost everything I care about would be better if more people could read, write, and comprehend. This is George Bush's mother, Barbara Bush, speaking at a public library when she was the first lady of the United States. So is it possible? I don't know, but I hope it's possible, and I hope everyone will make it their business to see it's possible.

This was personal for Barbara Bush. When her son Neil was in elementary school, she went to his class for reading day. The children were passing a book around, each reading a section, and when the book came to Neil, he couldn't read it. She was stunned. And like so many other mothers I've talked to who have had this experience, it changed her life. First, she went looking for help for her own child. Then the realization, it's not just us. There are a lot of parents and children out here looking

for help. Thank you all very much. When Neil's older brother George ran for president, he made improving reading instruction one of his top priorities. This is George W. Bush at a campaign stop in September of 2000. He tells the crowd that if he's elected president, he'll spend $5 billion on reading programs. But we will only support effective programs, effective reading strategies. Four months later, George W. Bush was president of the United States. In his first week in office in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, President Bush began laying the groundwork for his reading first initiative. It means we're going to have scientific-based knowledge in the cornerstone of our curriculum, and that's what I appreciate, Reed Lion and others' experts.

In the Roosevelt Room that day with the new president, where some of the nation's top reading scientists, one was Reed Lion, you met him in the last episode, and Susan Newman was there, too, the education professor who had hit it off with Laura Bush at that conference in Texas. The whole idea that we would take scientific findings and put them in practice was like, I thought, this is your rana. Susan Newman took a leave from her faculty job to join the Bush administration as an

assistant secretary of education, and Reed Lyon became the president's top advisor on reading. You know, I wasn't a Republican. But he'd voted for Bush because he was so excited about the idea of schools following the science of reading. He didn't think reading should be a partisan issue. It was, though. Conservatives have been pushing for phonics instruction

for a long time, and they were feeling vindicated by the scientific research. In fact, Republicans had endorsed phonics in their party platform in 2000. Pay attention to science, pay attention to research. This is Carl Rove at a Republican leadership conference in the summer of 2001, stumping for the president's reading first proposal.

And what we know from research is, phonics works. Not some fancy program of psychological battle. Applause. Republican politicians focusing on phonics made real-life and nervous. Yes, phonics instruction was missing in many schools. And yes, scientific research had shown that phonics is critical.

But Read Lion didn't want schools to just add phonics instruction. He wanted schools to get rid of programs based on the queuing theory, too. Part of reading forces to make sure that stuff was gone, it was trying to get rid of that stuff. Correct. Yeah, because now you have how many years of contrary evidence for the effectiveness of queuing systems. So why would reading first pay for something that was philosophically or theoretically devoid of any solid evidence. Why would you do that?

Why would you spend money on that? He says the strategy was not to focus on what was wrong with how schools were teaching reading. The strategy was to try to get schools to use reading programs that were based on scientific research. But there were only two programs that fit that bill back in 2001, according to Read Lion were only two programs that fit that bill back in 2001, according to Read Lion, only two. In September of that year, as part of his push to get support for

reading first, President Bush went to a school in Florida that was using one of those programs. The president visited a class of second graders to watch a reading lesson. Open your book up to lesson 60 on page 153. The curriculum the teacher is using is called Direct Instruction. It was originally developed in the 1960s. Direct Instruction is a very structured program. Sound it out. Get ready. What word? Direct instruction is a very structured program, with a big focus on sounding out words and none of the queuing strategies. What is that word?

Sound it out. What word? Start from the beginning of that sentence. Go on. E is too many, thank you. The children are sitting in rows. Their teacher is at the front of the room. They're reading a story called the pet goat. The teacher is tapping on the book as the kids read the words.

The whole thing has a bit of an old-fashioned schoolmarm vibe to it. Nice and loud, Chris Voices. Let's go. This kind of instruction was not fashionable in the early 2000s, especially in affluent suburbs where the thinking was, kids don't need this kind of direct instruction. But this was not an affluent suburb. This was a poor school, almost all black and Hispanic students. And test scores were going up. This was the kind of reading program

Bush wanted in more schools. Bush is smiling as he chats with the second graders. Bush is smiling as he chats with the second graders. Are we getting more than they were? Oh, yes. But look closely at his face and you can see that something is bothering him. Moments earlier, his chief of staff had walked over and whispered in his ear to tell him that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. When the reading lesson is over, Bush goes to the school library

where he addresses the nation, surrounded by school children. Unfortunately, we'll be going back to Washington after my remarks. Back in Washington, pretty much everything was focused on terrorism. But there was one domestic policy issue that remained a top priority, the president's education plan, which included his reading first proposal. George Bush was not going to give up on that. And there was a huge amount of support on Capitol Hill. Republicans and Democrats were lining up behind it. But there was opposition outside the beltway. And some of that opposition was coming from people who had a stake in the queuing theory,

including the woman from New Zealand who had developed that theory, Marie Clay. She came to the United States a lot to work with people here who were using her Reading Recovery Program. And on one of those trips, she went to DC. To meet with a guy on Capitol Hill, named Bob Sweet. Bob Sweet was the staff member on the Education and Workforce Committee in the US House of Representatives. This is Reed Lion. He remembers getting a phone call from Bob Sweet. He called and said that he had just met with Marie Clay and some of her colleagues. Clay and her colleagues wanted their Reading Recovery program to be eligible for the billions

of dollars in new federal money that was going to be part of the president's Reading First initiative. And Bob Sweet was the congressional staffer in charge of writing the legislation. What I'm gonna tell you about Bob Sweet's meeting with Marie Clay is based on an email he wrote before he died a few years ago and read Lyon's memory of that phone call

he got from Bob Sweet after the meeting. Here's what happened according to those accounts. Marie Clay and her colleagues came to the Rayburn House Office building on Capitol Hill. They met in a small conference room with Bob Sweet. Marie Clay asked him if her program would be eligible for federal funding under reading first. He told her, no.

But he said to her that she had an opportunity to modify her program and to include the proper training for teachers in decoding skills. He wrote in the email, I told her that she could help to turn the tide towards reading science. At that point, he wrote, Dame Clay looked at me with steely eyes

and said, we will not change a thing in our program, but we will modify our description of reading recovery to comply with the law. Marie Clay wasn't the only person with a program to protect. Other people were promoting programs based on the queuing theory, too. And now there was this big piece of federal legislation

with support from Republicans and Democrats. And this legislation was saying the queuing theory was not backed by evidence. It's not science. And that was a threat to people whose beliefs, reputations, and livelihoods rested on that theory. The president's reading first proposal passed in December of 2001 as part of the No Child Left

Behind Act, with huge bipartisan support. The eyes are 87, the nays are 10. There were only 10 votes against it in the Senate, but it wasn't going to be easy to convince schools to adopt programs based on the science of reading, because a lot of them liked what they were already doing. And what a lot of them were already doing was an approach based on Mari Klaes'

Reading Recovery Program, an approach that on Mari Klaes' reading recovery program. An approach that was made popular by the two women, I'm going to introduce you to next after a break. What you watch depends on what kind of major in. Sometimes you're craving comedies like friends or South Park and sometimes you're more into dramas like HBO's Succession and House of the Dragon. There's also cooking shows like Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay and even movies like The Lord of the Rings and Shazam, Theory of the Gods. Well, Max is the streaming destination that has the best of entertainment for whatever mood you're in anytime. And plant start at his little is 999 a month. Max, the one to watch. Subscription required, visit max.com. Sold a story is brought to you by you.

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Go to soldastory.org slash donate or click the link in our show notes. When I started doing all this reporting on how kids learn to read and why there's this wrong idea in trenched in schools, these two names kept coming up. Fountis and Penel. Parents would mention Fountis and Penel. Researchers would mention them. Teachers would too. They were telling me, if you want to understand why queuing is still so big in American schools, you've got to look at two women whose names are Irene Fountis and Gay Sue Penel. I've tried several times over the past few years to get an interview with them,

but they've said no every time. So I've had to learn about them through reading their books, talking to other people, and looking for recordings of them, speeches, interviews, things like that. When the reporter who's working on this story with me was searching through some archives and found a videotape from 2001 with their names on it, we knew we needed to watch it. But who has a VCR these days? I end up finding one on Facebook Marketplace that was at the very far edges of Brooklyn. This is my colleague, Christopher Peek.

He's talking to me from his apartment in Brooklyn. On a Saturday morning last fall, he set out to go get this VCR. We're getting very close to the edge of the island. Takes a good hour to get there, lots of walking involved. He finally gets to the right address, a guy meets him outside. Christopher pays him $15 in cash,

takes this big old VCR back to his apartment in a duffle bag and fires it up. I put the video in and they're on screen are these two authors who've been looking for found this in Penel. I'm Gaye Supinel and this is my co-author, Irene Candace. Learning to read is a continuous process. And what it showed was that this method we've heard about,

queuing, it was all there on screen. Check the picture. Look at that. That's a lot. They were not teaching kids to use phonics to sound things out. They were teaching them to use all the other sources of information to figure out what words were. You said truck here, does that make sense?

And you see these poor kids struggling over very simple words. And the teachers instead of saying, sounded out, they're telling them to use basically anything else. Wonderful. Let's watch our books for a minute. As I mentioned, this video is from 2001. So the same year, the Bush administration was pushing its reading first proposal. Irene Fountis and Gay Sue Penel were pushing these strategies as part of an approach called guided reading. Guided reading is a version of Mari Clay's Reading Recovery Program, but it's not just for struggling first graders. Guided reading is for all kids at all grade levels. Let's read that together. I like helping. I will help you. In guided reading, kids are given the same kinds of little books I told you about in the last episode.

Books with words the children haven't been taught how to read. But there are pictures to help them guess. And Founta says teachers can do what she calls word work. Use an easel, small chalkboard, white dry erase board, or magnet letters to involve children in working with words and parts of words. But Founta says word work should only last one or two minutes, and she says it's not necessary. Word work is an optional part of the lesson.

It'll be very important for some readers. You will want to include it for children who need to solve words more quickly as they re-text. The idea here is that most kids can learn to read without word work. It's only some kids who need it, and they only need a little bit. Because the theory goes, using the letters is just one way to figure out a word. This comes straight from Marie Clay. Before Founders and Penel started promoting this guided reading approach, they were promoting

Clay's Reading Recovery Program. In fact, Gay Sue Penel was one of the professors at Ohio State who had brought reading recovery to America in 1984. Founders was a professor too at Leslie College in Massachusetts. And by the time George W. Bush signed his reading first initiative into law, these two women were a brand in American education. They had written a book in 1996 about their guided reading approach, and that book became a best seller for their publisher. It was a huge hit, just crazy hit. Lisa Ludicke was one of the editors of the publishing company.

And from that point on, we started publishing a series of books by Fountess and Penel. Some of the books found to some penel wrote were about phonics. They weren't saying no to phonics, but they were saying you can teach a child to read without it. And the fact that they weren't insisting on phonics was part of the appeal of their

guided reading approach for many teachers. I have to say I fell in love with that. Instantly fell in love with it. Marsha Durbano was taught the whole language approach in college. She graduated thinking she wasn't supposed to teach phonics, but she didn't really know what to teach. Until she went to a week-long summer institute where she learned about guided reading from Fountess and Penel. It seemed to fit the philosophy of how I thought kids should learn and the approach was so, it seemed so practical and user-friendly.

learn and the approach was so it seemed so practical and user friendly. And were you learning something new? Was this your understanding? Yes. And what was so new about it? New approach to teaching kids to read that did not involve phonics. Marsha Durbano started teaching guided reading with her first graders in 1998. She says by the early 2000s, guided reading seemed to be everywhere. This was everything. This was how to my knowledge everyone was teaching, teaching reading. I felt like I was part of this exciting movement.

Sarah Ganon taught guided reading too. She first learned about it when she was in college at the University of Michigan. She was assigned, found to some panels guided reading book in a class. She never asked about the research behind guided reading. She never thought to ask because found to some panel were professors. Her professors had assigned their work. Why would she question it? I trusted that they're experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading.

Like, how could they be, how could they be wrong? Foundess in Penel didn't think they were wrong as far as I can tell. Like I said, I haven't been able to talk to them. I don't know what they were thinking back in the early 2000s. They had to have heard about the scientific research on reading. There were big government reports about that research. It was in the news. But I think they just didn't agree with it. Because they had Marie Clay's research, they thought Clay was right,

and reading scientists were wrong. We found a recording where Gay Sue Penel talked about this. So we cannot count on science and must accept its findings tentatively. Let me set the scene here a bit. This is the 2005 conference of the Reading Recovery Council of North America. Gaysu Penel is speaking to a room full of people who support the Reading Recovery Program

and have been trained in Marie Clay's idea about how kids learn to read. But at this point in 2005, a whole bunch of school districts in the United States are getting federal grants to adopt programs based on a different idea. And Penel is telling her audience, don't be so sure about that idea. Don't be so sure about that science. Remember that science can yield some universally accepted findings that looking back a century same actually bizarre. The argument Penel is making in this speech

is that Marie Clay is the person who figured out how children learn to read. And reading scientists haven't caught up with Clay's ideas yet. We should remember that nothing changes instantly. She compares Marie Clay to Isaac Newton. Newton discovered gravity. But there was no great heralding of his new thinking. In fact, the theory was widely disputed. It took 16 years for the

new ideas to enter acceptability in science, and we've only had 40 so far. Penel says she keeps a first edition of one of Clay's books locked in a safe in her house. When I heard this, I remembered a former reading recovery teacher in Texas I interviewed, who told me that some of Marie Clay's original writings were in a university library there, and this teacher was taken to see them, like they were the Holy Grail. Marie Clay was more than a professor who had a theory about reading. She was an icon who inspired a movement, a movement to help children.

Penel tells the audience that when she did her own studies on Clay's Reading Recovery Program in Ohio in the 1980s, and those studies showed that most kids in reading recovery could get up to the average reading level of their class. It was a little bit like Arthur pulling the sword excalibur out of the stone. Now I've got it. What am I going to do with it? She says she had to get Marie Clay's ideas into more schools.

She felt she had no choice. If we know these children have a chance, then the responsibility isn't as capable. We are obligated to do it. Despite of the political wars, we all know we live in a rich country. This country can actually afford, if it chooses, to teach all of its children who possibly can,

to learn to read. At this same reading recovery conference in 2005, there was another session. How many of you have engaged in some direct advocacy activity? You've written a letter, sent an email, visited them in their district office. This was the lobbyist for the Reading Recovery Council of North America. She's telling people how they can get in touch with their elected representatives to make the case

for reading recovery. She says, send your congressman a birthday card, invite them to your school. Ooh, okay. She's giving out prizes to the people who've done the most. Ladies, who wants a calendar, who wants a magnet you get to choose? When the discussion turns to the government's reading first initiative, the mood in the room darkens a bit.

Audience members report that Marie Clay's Reading Recovery Program is being cut in some school districts. Their way of teaching reading is under attack, and they know it. What is happening in reading first schools is permeating Their way of teaching reading is under attack, and they know it. What is happening in reading for schools is permeating. What the states are doing for all for everything. Yes. The people in this room didn't understand why their program was under attack.

The federal government was saying we want schools to use reading programs that are based on scientific research and they thought their program was based on scientific research. A woman in the audience raises her hand. She's from a school district in Colorado. It's hard to hear her, so I'm going to tell you what she says. She says the Colorado Department of Education just sent out an email. The email said programs that used the queuing system were not considered valid and reliable and would not be allowed on the state's list of approved reading programs.

So I have huge concerns. I also have huge concerns. We tried to track down this email and couldn't find it. What's interesting about this exchange is that right now, in 2022, the Colorado Department of Education is trying to get rid of the queuing system in its schools. Something it apparently already tried to do 17 years ago,

and it didn't work. Because something else happened instead, in schools all over the country. Schools added some phonics instruction, but they didn't take away the queuing system. They didn't get rid of programs based on that idea. Exactly what Reed Lion was worried about. And something else happened too. The government's reading first initiative fell apart and people who had a stake in the queuing theory

had something to do with it. Reading recovery wrote us some really nasty notes that we were saying bad things about them. This is Susan Newman again, the education professor who became an assistant secretary of education. She says members of Congress would call her office and say, you should consider reading recovery. Why isn't it being funded? Read Lion remembers reading recovery teachers who would confront him at conferences. I have five teachers, two inches from my face just tearing me up and down.

Usually the arguments where you don't know anything, you have no idea how good this is, just come to my classroom, those kinds of things. In August of 2005, the Reading Recovery Council of North America filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General. The complaint said that the Department of Education was supporting a misinformation campaign against reading recovery. Two other vendors who believed their programs were out of favor under the government's reading first initiative filed similar complaints.

The Inspector General didn't investigation. Tonight a Bush administration audit is finding fault with one of the Bush administration's favorite programs. The Office of Inspector General released its findings in September of 2006. The program known as Reading First is mismanaged, the auditors say, and full of conflicts of interest. The audit found that some consultants who reviewed Reading First grant proposals had professional ties to commercial reading programs. The headline became, Bush's cronies are pushing phonics to make money. The government's reading first initiative could not survive the ensuing controversy.

By the end of 2007, Democrats in Congress had cut the budget for reading first by more than 60 percent. Within a couple of years, the funding had been cut completely. It sort of, I would say, trickled away. This is Christine Cronin. She was a teacher in Boston during the reading first era. She says at the beginning, she was all in. I obviously wanted to be cutting edge.

You know, I wanted to be cutting edge, you know, wanted to be really doing what was research-based and what was right. She remembers going to a week-long training as part of reading first where she learned about the importance of phonics instruction and then she was handed a curriculum and she was told teach this. I wasn't told the why behind any parts of that curriculum. It went to a quick space of just do the thing. She didn't come away with an understanding of how children learned to read.

She didn't really learn about the science of reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the training they got during reading first opened their eyes, changed their lives even. Some of them still used the materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many other teachers, reading first represented a change they didn't like. They were told to follow a curriculum, with structured lessons like the one you heard when

Bush visited the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin, it felt traditional and old-fashioned. It felt like going back to that classroom where everyone is sitting in rows and everyone being in lockstep. And that felt really bad. And Christine Cronin and a lot of other teachers And that felt really bad. And Christine Kronin and a lot of other teachers liked what they'd been doing before reading first. And what a lot of them had been doing before was foundists and panels guided reading, with the queuing strategies. Christine Kronin doesn't remember being told there was anything wrong with those during her reading first training. So she kept doing foundistsism panels guided reading approach.

She thought it was fine, as long as she was doing some phonics too. We thought that this was what the research was telling us was the right thing to do. Christine Cronin thought she was following the scientific research on reading. Other teachers didn't know there was scientific research. That's because reading first was a grant program that focused on low-income

schools. Only about 10% of elementary schools ended up getting funding. Lots of teachers kept on doing what they were doing because no one told them to do anything different. I talked to people who were teaching back then who said they had no idea what reading first was, never even heard of it. Others knew that there was this Bush administration thing called reading first, and they were not interested. This is Carried Shee. Forget it. I wasn't going to do any of that. And you know, I wasn't necessarily rejecting the curriculum as much as I was rejecting Bush. Carried she was a teacher in a school district outside Seattle. She was also a

liberal Democrat. So were a lot of her colleagues. And they weren't going to be for the science of reading. If the science of reading was coming from George W. Bush. You know, the sense of war with reading wars is very true that you just absolutely reject other pieces of evidence coming at you because you can't believe their source. When Bill Honeig was sitting before those angry lawmakers in California in 1996. He was optimistic that science was going to change the way kids were taught to read. Read Lion and Susan Newman were optimistic too.

They all imagined a future where teachers knew and understood the scientific research on reading, and the queuing system and those word reading strategies were gone. That was their utopia. But that vision of the future was a dystopia to other people, including Marie Clay and her supporters. In the 2005 speech that Gaisu Penel made at the Reading Recovery Conference, she asked her audience to imagine that dystopian future. I'm going to pretend I'm an educational researcher, invited by the president, she called me and asked.

In the scenario that Panela's laying out, it's the year 2024. The Bush administration education reforms have prevailed. Teachers are being handed textbooks that tell them exactly how to teach reading, and publishers are making hundreds of millions of dollars. And what about reading recovery in this grim scenario? A few teachers nearing retirement will occasionally mention their early training and reading recovery, saying that's where they learn so much. But they don't get to use their knowledge and accept it in visible ways.

And those folks are few because programs like reading recovery didn't fit into the general competitive design, and they didn't make money. Occasionally, someone riding a scholarly treatise will mention reading recovery in the historical perspective section. Clay is certainly remembered as a researcher and pioneer, but mostly by researchers. A few islands of light incorporate her principles, but reading recovery has largely disappeared. There's a special guest sitting on the stage

as Gaysu Penel makes this speech. She's wearing big glasses and a green jacket. She's a small woman with gray hair who celebrated her 79th birthday weeks earlier. Gaysu Penel surprises her with a plaque. I'm so taken by surprise, I am at a loss for words if you can believe it. It's Marie Clay.

The plaque she's holding is from the Ohio State University College of Education. The college has just established the Marie Clay Endowed Chair in Reading Recovery and Early Literacy. I'm not terribly fond of putting a plaques around my office, but this is one I will definitely be showing everyone. Thank you. I never met Marie Clay, but I've read lots about her and talked to people who knew her. By all accounts, she was a humble woman, steely and dedicated to her cause, but not that interested in accolades and not that interested in money. She set things up in association with universities and as nonprofits. According to people we talked to, Mari Clay did not want her reading

recovery program aligned with commercial interests and she was not a fan of big publishing companies or traditional curriculum. Marie Clay died just a little over two years after she accepted the plaque at that conference. And the future didn't turn out the way Gaysu Penel had feared. Marie Clay has not been forgotten. She hasn't been pushed aside by publishers trying to make money. In fact, the opposite is happened.

Marie Clay's ideas are everywhere, and it's Penel and her co-author Irene Fountis, who are now publishing those ideas and making a lot of money. Along with another woman, I'm going to tell you about in the next episode. A woman who is so well known among teachers that you don't even have to say her last name. She was like a rock star walking into that building and it was like theater. If Beyonce came and gave a private concert in my district, it would not have been a bigger deal for many of my teachers. It felt like you were watching something magical. That's next time on Soul to Story.

Soul to Story is a podcast from American Public Media. It's reported and produced by me, Emily Hanford, and Christopher Peek. Catherine Winter is our editor. Andy Cruz and Dave Mann are the digital editors. Mixing and sound design are by Chris Jullin and Emily Havik with original music by Chris Jullin. Our reporting and production team included Angela Caputo, Colmary Rivera, and Will Callin.

Our fact checker is Betsy Towner Levine. Special thanks to Chris Worlington, Lauren Humbert, Christine Hutchins, and Lynn Stone. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. The mastering of this episode was by Derrick Ramirez. We have three more episodes coming in this podcast. Find them all on our website, soldastory.org. You can also find links to our previous articles and documentaries about reading at that website.

It's soldastory.org. Support for this podcast comes from the Hollyhawk Foundation, the Oak Foundation, and Wendy and Stephen Gaul. In 2012, a new charity bursts onto the scene. It's called Believe in Magic and it grants wishes to seriously ill children. It has the support of the biggest boy band in the world, One Direction. It's run by an inspirational 16-year-old girl called Megan Barry, who herself is battling a brain tumour. I've been in and out of hospital and seen so many other very poor children. But when questions arise about her story, they reveal she could be facing another very different danger.

What is this girl going through? It wasn't supposed to have like this. Listen to Believe in Magic, with me, Jamie Bartlett. you