Sold a Story - [BONUS 1] Your Words

Episode Date: May 11, 2023

Messages poured in: voicemails, emails, tweets. We got a lot of messages from people after they heard Sold a Story. In this bonus episode, we bring you some of their voices. A 10-year-old figures out why he has struggled to read. A mom stays up late to binge the podcast. A teacher confirms what he's suspected for years — he's not really teaching kids how to read.  Read: Messages from our listenersMore: soldastory.orgDonate to support Sold a Story and other reporting from APM.

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 the description starting at $12.99 per month. From the first episode I just felt like, oh my goodness, I am not crazy. It's not just me. This is a bonus episode of Soul to Story, a podcast from APM Reports. I'm Emily

Hanford. I got up early this morning to go for a walk to listen to the last episode. We've been hearing from a lot of you. I just finished a podcast. I like literally drove an hour the wrong direction because I was so captivated. We got emails and voice mails. Hi there. Hi. Hello. Good afternoon. Hi, Emily and T. direction because I was so captivated. We got emails and voice emails. Hi there. Hi. Hello. Hi Emily and team. Hi. I was totally one of those people from episode 6, 2, 5. I think it's working. You summarized my whole 29 years in public education. I am that future and I've also that parent of a student who's been not learning this. I was trained as a reading recovery teacher. I trained other people in balanced literacy using that Q and C step.

I'm sad. I'm saddened for the kids that I've taught and believed in this so much that I was led to believe this. You did a wonderful job telling our story. We've heard praise. we've heard criticism, but a lot of what we've been hearing in response to the podcast are personal stories. For the first few years as a teacher, I was a good teacher but I wasn't a good literacy teacher. I got an email from my younger daughter's teacher just a few years ago when my son was in first grade. The school she was in at the time in Virginia.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, she would try to send out a word on the page. She would get the beginning part of the world. And one of my favorite reading specialists in our school district, says to me, the guilt that I feel. Today, in the first of two bonus episodes, we're telling you about some of what we heard from listeners

in response to Soul to Story. I read a lot of the emails we got. I listened to a lot of the messages, but I couldn't keep up with them all, so I got some help. I'm Eliza. Meet Eliza Billingham. I'm a research assistant. Eliza read or listen to every message we received. So who do we hear from? What can you tell us about who called us and emailed us in response to sold a story? Oh, man, who we didn't hear from might be a shorter list.

We've got teachers, obviously, everyone from pre-teachers to retirement. Parents, grandparents, school psychologists, reading specialists, librarians, social workers, professors, lawyers, publishers, and school board members, administrators, and even students. We heard from a bunch of kids. And when I listen to the podcast, I hear a lot of what I've struggled with throughout all the years in school. This is Jack Freeman. He's 13. His mom wrote to us and then I interviewed Jack and his younger brother.

Hi, my name is Cooper and I am 10 and I really love the podcast. The boys listened with their mom in the car. So my mom started putting it on a lot during the car ride back and forth between tutoring. Jack and Cooper are kids who are getting private tutoring because they weren't taught how to read in school. I do remember a little bit of what you talked about

in your podcast about them covering up the word and trying to use tools to guess that word. And I remember the sticky note. I remember this word. There was a couch, there was a carpet, there was all this stuff, and they'd a couch, there was a carpet, there was all this stuff, and they'd be like, go find a spot to read.

But Cooper says he was lost. I couldn't read in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, I was running in darkness. I didn't know what to do. It was during the COVID school shutdown that his parents began to recognize how much he and his brother were struggling. That's when their mom started homeschooling them and taking them to tutoring.

And I think I finally know how to read. I never thought I'd be doing this well. I thought I was just, you know, I thought I took a bad path and I was going to find a path to go to the good path and learn how to read. So you mean as a little kid you actually thought you had the thought maybe you won't ever learn to read? Yes. I was like how am I going to learn how to read? How? I did not learn how to read until I was 11 years old. We heard from adults too. Adults who were once struggling readers.

My name is Brooke Anderson. When I finally did learn how to read, the first sort of reaction as it started to click for me was not one of happiness or pride or relief. It was just extreme anger. I was enraged that no one had thought to teach me how to sound outwards before. I was just in my head thinking, what the f*** like? How did no one think to teach me this way? I've gone through my entire life thinking that I'm an idiot."

She also felt guilty, guilty because she was finally taught how to read. You know, I grew up white in an upper middle class family and in a wealthy New York City suburb and I got the help that I needed and I was very aware that, you know, other kids like me were not going to get that help. Other people talked about feeling the same kind of survivor's guilt.

One parent wrote on Twitter, I cried when I realized how fortunate my son was that we could afford tutoring and how tragic it was for all the children who would never have access to the same help. We heard from a lot of parents. They stayed up late last night to listen to your entire six episode podcast and man, I really struck a chord. The stories are hard to listen to because they hit so close to home. So much of your podcast resonated with me and what I've experienced with my third grader. I kept being told that everything would be fixed, but third grade, everything would be

fine. Parents knew there was a problem, but many of them couldn't figure out what the problem was until they heard sold a story. Hi, I just had to tell you that I think your podcast has changed my life. This is Jen, a mom in New Jersey. I was working late one night a few weeks ago, and your podcast came on, and I started screaming. Hi, you have to watch the video! My husband worked downstairs, great papers, he's a teacher, and he teaches high school in our son at eight years old, and we have struggled so hard with our son.

He's a delightful and very smart boy, but my husband and I are both voracious readers. We could not understand what we were doing wrong and why our son was having such a hard time greeting and hating to read. She says they blamed themselves, they blamed their kid, but they never thought much about how he was being taught in school until she heard the podcast. And I pulled out all of his schoolwork from kindergarten and first grade, and sure enough,

there were the books, there were the letters, so I called the principal. And the principal said to her, yes, we teach those strategies and those programs. She sent him the podcast every episode every week. She doesn't know if he listened, but she sent the podcast to teachers at her son's school too. And she says some of them wrote back and said, we listened, and we're talking about this now. So my hope is that they're slowly moving away from it. And I'm so thankful for this podcast.

Another mom told us that it was a teacher at her son's school who told her to listen to the podcast. Last week, my school's parent teacher conferences were happening. And I scheduled a parent teacher conference with his fourth three teacher like I always do every year with his regular teacher but this year I also scheduled a conference with his reading specialist. This is Liz. She says her son has been working with the same reading specialist since kindergarten so she'd met with her before. But this time it was a really weird and strange and different

vibe. It's you the conference with reading specialists. She was almost getting emotional. She started out the 15 minute conference, teleconference over zoom, apologizing and saying that she hasn't helped call it all. She was talking really fast. It seemed really emotional. But seemed really emotional, but she said, folder story, please you've got to listen to folder story. So she listened. I'm so sorry. This is my son. Look at how this is my child. So what's sad? And but mostly I just want to change it right away. And so does his reading specialist. You know, I'm so grateful to her and I'm so

grateful to this podcast because I think you just changed my phone boy and I'm going to fear this podcast with everyone I need. Sorry, gosh, I had no idea I was going to get emotional, but yeah, wow, this is a big deal. We also heard from a lot of teachers. Hi, Emily. My name's Alex. Alex was a reading recovery teacher. Reading recovery is the program that was started by Marie Clay, the woman from New Zealand you heard about in the podcast.

As difficult as it is to hear that a belief system that I'd heard too was erroneous, it made me think a lot about the frustrations I experienced as a reading recovery teacher and also as a reading specialist using reading recovery and then a thantis and penel with the students I taught to read or believes that I taught to read. Alex wanted us to know why reading recovery was so appealing to him. I knew nothing about teaching reading, which is why I got my master's degree in literacy and then would just jump to the chance to be trained as a reading recovery teacher.

And it certainly did change the way I taught in the classroom in terms of my attention and my ability to do something to help kids read, which mostly involved putting a book that they could read in front of them. Teaching is a lonely profession in many respects and the intensity of the reading recovery training in particular where you're being observed by your colleagues and observing your colleagues with regularity throughout the time that you're a reading recovery teacher. It involves a lot of risk, a lot of intimacy, and you build tremendous trust in your colleagues, and you're guided by a teacher leader. And it's a wonderfully constructed model for professional education,

professional development, but it's also worked very well to create an insulated community. That kind of community is not going to be open to changes in perception unless they come from on high. And in that case, it was Marie Clay, who we all worshiped. He says he did have some nagging questions, though, some doubts. But I started to see, but I couldn't really acknowledge it.

I really appreciate your reporting, because it, in a very gentle way, in a very kind way, you've let me accept what I suspected. And I think back about the children I taught to read, and many of it was just, they taught themselves and I got to watch it. Of course, there are current and former teachers who did not feel the way Alex did about the podcast. A group of 58 educators wrote a letter criticizing Solta's story.

The group included Lucy Cawkins and other people who have published with Hynamen. The letter condemned the podcast for, quote, attacking the integrity of a group of educators who have led pioneering research and helped advance our field. Another woman wrote, please stop blaming teachers. Teachers are employees who must do as they are told. But many teachers wrote to say they believed what they were told.

I've learned a lot about the science of reading since you started writing about the topic. Michelle Schard has been a teacher for 29 years. I have some ideas about why we fought the way we did and want to share them. I didn't focus on decodings very my early years as the classroom teacher because I wanted to teach kids to read deeply to make connections and synthesize information using deep critical thinking. And we as a group wrote off on it is a superficial skill that didn't need much attention. Most of the teachers I knew came to reading easily, seemingly automatically, so it made sense to us that our students would as well.

She says teaching kids how to read the words felt kind of like not believing in them, not believing in their ability to learn on their own. And that felt inequitable. We believed the Marie Clay studies and the fontos and panel methods and especially loosely caucons structures around readers and writers' workshops because it went with how we were all thinking. Also, we didn't know how to teach phonics. So there you have it, we were full of the story. Other teachers called to say they never believed in clay and found a sympanel and caucons or

the ideas they were promoting. Your podcast, Sign the Light on Something I've been trying to tell people for the last 11 years of my teaching career. This is Laquisha Underwood. I was a striving reader as a child. I am now a reading teacher because I did not want what happened to me to happen to millions of other children. I was afraid to turn over my own children's ability to learn,

leading to schools because I know what they've been told and I know that it doesn't work. She says she's had to make hard decisions because she had doubts about programs she was expected to teach. As early as last year, I saw a school purchase, the LLI leveled reader program and I cringed so much so that I actually took a leave after trying to be forced to use the program that I know doesn't work. Anyhow, thank you so much for the work you put into this and I'm going to keep doing what I can to help people learn to read. Hi, I'm a first-year kindergarten teacher. We heard from new teachers trying to buck the system too.

I just finished listening to the podcast. This teacher didn't say her name. I teach in a district that uses Lucy across the board and does not support very much monarchs instruction. And so I try to do things myself to fill in the gaps and I don't teach the queuing system, but I have to keep it secret. And after listening to the podcast, I just feel stuck. Like, I like my district. I like it for quite a few different reasons. And I just don't even know if I'd be able to find a district that did teach, reading that was aligned with science. The other option I have in the district has made this quite clear is to keep your mouth shut,

keep your head down, because if you say something, or if you try to take a stand, there will be trouble. And I don't know where to go from here. So I wonder if you have any other teachers who are in a similar position or teachers who have been in that position and figured out what happens next. Do you stay and try to fight or do you leave to a district

that's more aligned with what you know to be true? We'll be back 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 is story comes from a non-profit investigative journalism team. We take on stories that we think can prompt meaningful change. And as you're hearing on this bonus episode, sold to story has made a difference in the lives of parents, teachers, and students all over the country.

There are very few news organizations putting resources into investigative journalism like this. Donations from you are a vital part of our budget and our ability to continue this work. If you can, please consider making a donation at soldastory.org slash donate or follow the link in our show notes. Thank you.

Hi everybody. After people heard Soul to Story, they wanted to talk about it. Thank you so much for coming. This is a Zoom happy hour to talk about Soul to Story. If you would not mind just putting your name maybe where you're from, always feel free to tell us where you're drinking. We heard about a bunch of Soul-to-story discussion groups like this one. This series of Friday Night Happy Hours was started by a teacher in Connecticut.

My name is Virginia Quinmooney. I've been teaching first grade for a little over a minute. She's been teaching first grade for 19 years. She says she knew something wasn't right with reading instruction. Like I did teach phonics, and I've always known that, you know, post-it notes over letters is really not effective. But she doubted herself.

Because everyone around her seemed to be all in on balance literacy and Lucy Cawkins and Founta Sennpanel. All of education was embracing this. All of the people that were my literacy leaders were sitting me down and telling me this is the way. She says after she heard Soul to Story, she couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep because I was like, what can I do? So she started the happy hours. Thank you everybody. Thank you so much for being here and moving the conversation forward. being here and moving the conversation forward. She says nearly 400 people signed up for the first happy hour. People from all over the world. We had

South Wales, we had Ghana. There were some great accents. Lots of teachers came. So did principals, superintendents, school board members, college students, parents. So much of this for me is it's incumbent on me to pay back those families that I needed to have done better for. This is Virginia at one of the happy hours. We have to just be done with balance literacy like it just has to go away and we have to just start directly teaching our kids, pet or read. Virginia, I feel the same way. This is one of the other teachers who came to the happy hour. I feel like I have to give back to the community because I was so

ingrained and I was about a literacy teacher and supportive. It's so much. And I've been on that same journey for about probably four years now. And I am so passionate about it. And I spend more time now and I am so passionate about it and I spend more time reading and taking classes and it's just I dig about all my free time to this. This is what I think I was hoping for when I started reporting on this topic more than six years ago. I was hoping that the reporting would get people interested in the scientific research on reading, that it would be an invitation to learn more. And it has been. I think a lot of people know a lot more about how kids learn to read because of this reporting.

But I have focused mostly on one aspect of what it takes to be a good reader. I have focused on what it takes to be able to read words quickly and accurately. Because that's critical. You can't be a good reader without being good at reading the words. But that's not enough. There is a lot more to reading. And this has been one of the criticisms of my reporting, that it's focused too much on word reading, and not enough on comprehension, on what it takes to understand what you read. And I heard from people who expressed that criticism in response to Solda's story. I'm Claude Goldenberg.

Claude Goldenberg was a professor of education at Stanford. He retired a few years ago. But I'm still involved in working through reading issues, reading policy, reading problems, reading research. He wrote me an email after hearing the first two episodes of the podcast. One of the things that you said in that email to me in October is there's a huge danger we're digging

another hole for ourselves by appearing, maybe unintentionally, to extol foundational skills as silver bullets. So can you say more about that? Like what's the danger? What are you actually noticing out there? Well, I get the impression and sometimes more than just an impression, there's like this, this sort of dismissing like, yeah, okay, right. We know there's more, but you gotta get those foundational skills down. He's concerned that schools aren't paying enough attention to the vocabulary development and knowledge building that's necessary for kids to become good readers. I think one of the things I said in my email was even if you were to in each episode, just

make a brief aside, you know, 30 seconds. Look, ladies and gentlemen, we know there's more to reading than foundational skills. We also know that that's been a glaring gap in reading education, but no one should walk away from this podcast thinking that if if he just got foundational skills right, everything would be okay. He's right. Things will not be okay if all schools get better at is teaching kids how to decode words. And here's the thing. Making sure that kids get the knowledge and vocabulary they need to comprehend what they

read may actually be the bigger challenge. It takes years and years of schooling, and it's where family income and educational background tend to make a big difference. Because kids don't just learn vocabulary and knowledge at school. They learn a lot at home, and through the experiences they have every day, the people they meet, the places they go, the information they're exposed to. The challenge of bringing literacy on a massive scale

to an entire population is a tall order. Claude Goldenberg doesn't want anyone to be under the impression that just teaching kids how to decode words will lead to better reading comprehension. We need to have a teaching force that understands these things with as much kind of nuance and complexity as possible. He's concerned that people are rushing to adopt simple solutions to a complex problem. And changes are coming fast. State legislators across the country are passing laws.

We need to improve reading in Wisconsin. We are all in agreement on that. Exhibit one is the result of a five-year investigation by an education reporter into reading instruction. I'm calling for a renewed focus on literacy and on the way we teach reading in the state of Ohio. I'm going to tell you about some of the laws that are being passed in response to the podcast, and why I'm kind of worried about some of those laws. In a second bonus episode of Soul to Story coming next week. This episode was produced by me with Eliza Billingham and Christopher Peake.

Our editor was Chris Jullin. He also did mixing sound design and made some of the music. Final mastering of this episode was by Alex Simpson. The Soul to Story theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Our digital editor is Andy Cruz. The acting deputy managing editor of APM Reports is Tom Schack. And our executive editor is Jane Helmke. You can still write to us if you want to respond to the podcast, where especially interested in your tips and story ideas. What questions do you have?

What else do you want us to report on? Our email address is soldistoryatamericanpublicmedia.org. That's soldistoryatamericanpublicmedia.org. That's soldistory at americanpublicmedia.org. You can also find us, along with transcripts, additional articles, and a podcast discussion guide at our website, soldistory.org. If you want other people to hear this podcast, one of the best things you can do is leave a review

on the podcast app where you are listening now and share it on social media. Support for this podcast comes from the Hollyhawk Foundation, the Oak Foundation, and Wendy and Stephen Gull. Thank you for listening to this bonus episode. What you just heard is the impact of rigorous long-form journalism. Here's one more reminder that SOLD A Story and other investigations

from American public media rely on support from you in the form of donations. Every gift makes a difference. Please go to soldastory.org slash donate or follow the link in our show notes to give today. Thank you.