I think that Emily Hanford and I first connected about a decade ago — probably on Twitter. In the ensuing years, we eventually met for coffee a few times to talk about early literacy and multilingual kids and various other stuff where our professional interests intersect. It’s a little fuzzy in the blur of years when I was juggling work, life, parenting and teaching my own young kids to read.
But I’ll never forget meeting up with Emily at the Education Writers Association conference a bit later, after she’d published “Hard Words,” an award-winning piece indicting American schools for using terrible, disproven strategies to teach reading. When her panel ended, at least half of the room moved directly from their chairs to form a line that soon stretched fully out to the hallway — everyone there wanted to talk to her. The only time I’d seen anything like this at the conference was when Star Wars’ Mark Hamill showed up the year before. One young journalist emotionally thanked Hanford for pursuing journalism that matters.
A few years later, Hanford put out “Sold a Story,” a podcast (again award-winning) that explored why thousands of U.S. teachers don’t know how to teach children to read. It unfolded a confounding story: researchers figured out what worked in early literacy, but teacher training programs, influential curriculum authors like Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins and thousands of teachers were still clinging to “whole language” instructional methods that had been debunked decades before. How? Why?
The first two episodes of Sold a Story’s second season are out today. They follow a similar route, but ask an even bigger question: “What happened to teaching?” In other words, what if researchers identified general instructional practices that worked best for kids … but those practices were abandoned by many schools and teachers anyway?
This may be the first you’re hearing of a second “Sold a Story” season, but if past is prologue, it won’t be the last. Podcasts are not part of my media diet — I rarely know about, let alone listen to them. But “Sold a Story’s” first season was ubiquitous. Families at our elementary school organized to pressure the leadership to drop Calkins’ whole language curriculum and adopt a phonics-rich literacy approach.
Dozens of states changed laws to require schools to ground literacy instruction in the science of reading instruction. The House of Representatives just sent the Senate a bill to align federal literacy funding with the science of reading. Conference rooms filled to the brim to hear Hanford talk through her reporting.
The new “Sold a Story” season explores whether we know more about effective teaching than our schools generally show. To make her case, Hanford marshals evidence from high-quality, high-poverty schools in Houston; quirky pedagogical experiments in Illinois; and major, if largely forgotten, federal research projects. She talks to mid-20th century education advocates like Gene Glass and Doug Carnine — and replays recordings of some who have passed — who are convinced that there is a “solution to every learning problem, and the solution was better teaching.”
Zig Engelmann’s development of “direct instruction” shows up, as does the HighScope early education program, famous for the longitudinal study of its Perry Preschool Project that found children gained wide-ranging, lifelong benefits from attending early childhood education programs.
Speaking of that major, forgotten federal research effort: Have you heard of Project Follow Through, launched by the federal government in 1968, which Hanford dubs “one of the largest educational experiments in the history of the world?” “Sold a Story” is about to make it front-page education news. As Hanford puts it, Follow Through asked, “What actually works in education? How could school become a more powerful tool for helping kids get out of poverty?”
As with season one, part of the problem is getting researchers’ answers out through the bureaucracy and experts’ jockeying so that they ultimately reach the public education system. “Project Follow Through ended up providing some answers, some information that could have influenced the direction of American education,” Hanford says. “But it didn’t.”
“Sold a Story’s” second season will surely launch 1,000 takes. Nikole Hannah-Jones recently wrote a contemplative article about her family’s experience navigating the pressures of New York City’s public schools — and their own deeply held convictions about racial justice and social progress. The piece was raw, vulnerable … and instantly appropriated for other pundits’ own uses. Just so, many people will seize on “Sold a Story” to reignite pet proxy battles about no-excuses charter schools or No Child Left Behind or some other such argument.
And yet, the season’s real, insistent lesson is this: schools matter, and students do better when educators teach more effectively. Yes, poverty and health and nutrition and other structural forces also affect children’s development. Yes, a just modern society should refuse to allow children to grow up with their needs and dignity neglected.
But also: Yes, school effectiveness also matters.
As Hannah-Jones discovered, kids do worse when schools don’t meaningfully evaluate student work — or fail to assign it at all. Same thing happens when schools don’t honestly update families on students’ academic progress. “Sold a Story” pushes further: it matters if schools use instructional methods without a track record of success.
Education journalism of consequences focuses on these questions. For the better part of a decade, American political leaders at the federal and state levels have largely avoided any structured efforts to reform our K–12 public schools. The only exception was the push to enact research-backed literacy reforms aligned with the science of reading — and that stemmed from “Sold a Story’s” first season.
Perhaps it’s too much to hope that Hanford’s latest work will singlehandedly reignite public interest in making our schools better and fairer. But I sure hope it does.
The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’ alone, and do not represent the views of his employer or any other affiliated organization.