A version of this essay originally appeared on “The Next 30 Years” Substack.
By a considerable margin, Emily Hanford is our most consequential education journalist. This is not idle praise. Few reporters covering any field can claim to have changed professional practice and state policy as measurably as Hanford’s work on reading instruction has.
Beginning with her landmark 2018 report “Hard Words” and culminating in the first season of her investigative podcast “Sold a Story” in 2022, Hanford has done more than merely expose the weaknesses of instructional practices like balanced literacy and three-cueing and the people who promoted and profited from them. She’s done as much to make the “science of reading” a national issue as all but a handful of researchers, policymakers, and advocates.
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Recall that for decades, we have sought to improve reading scores with standards, testing, accountability and incentives. All of these policies demanded that schools and teachers produce better results. But for the most part, teachers are not incompetent, indifferent, or negligent. Many have been trained badly, taught the wrong things, or given poor guidance and curriculum materials. Hanford called attention to the ways that teacher preparation went against the grain of what we know, or at least should have known, about teaching reading effectively. Teachers were not sinners, but sinned against—misled, and, well, sold a story. This re-framing has made Hanford something of a hero among teachers.
Season 2 of “Sold a Story,” which debuted Thursday, seems likely to put that hero status to the test. It is no less powerful, meticulously reported or convincing than Season 1. But its central message is challenging and less comforting and it will be hard for teachers to embrace: an entire set of ideas and values many teachers admire and believe makes them good at their jobs might actually make them less effective.
The seven-part series (I’ve previewed the first four episodes) makes an unlikely hero of the late Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann and Direct Instruction (DI), the highly structured approach to teaching that he pioneered. The name is somewhat misleading. It conjures an image of teachers standing in front of the classroom, just telling children what they need to know. Rather, DI consists of carefully sequenced lessons, scripted teacher language, precise explanations and educators who anticipate students’ misunderstanding and how to respond to them. Nor is DI casually constructed. Engelmann and his colleagues wrote, tested, and refined the program in front of children, revising it when faced with evidence of students struggling or misunderstanding concepts or material. Hanford quotes a former Engelmann colleague who described DI’s central premise: “If the kid hasn’t learned it, the teacher hasn’t taught it. That was our basic rule.”
To put it mildly, this is a formidable challenge to deeply held beliefs about what good teaching is and is not. The prevailing view has long been that teachers should create or customize their own lessons, be given broad discretion and autonomy, and adapt instruction according to their professional judgment and the needs and interests of the children in front of them. Season 2 of “Sold a Story” asks educators to reconsider all of those assumptions.
I have long admired Engelmann’s work and I had the privilege of meeting him when I keynoted the National Institute for Direct Instruction conference nearly a decade ago. Elsewhere, I’ve described DI as the Rodney Dangerfield of curriculum: It gets no respect. My rueful conclusion of that piece was that everybody hates Direct Instruction because “all it does is work.” The joke, however, has a darker punch line, which Hanford’s latest work forces us to reckon with uneasily: What if the profession’s longstanding hostility to scripted instruction—the assumption that instruction that’s designed and tested from afar is tantamount to making schools teacher-proof—has come at an enormous cost to children, particularly those who need it the most?
As Hanford tells it, Engelmann and company discovered that teachers have a tendency to overexplain ideas or use examples that confuse children rather than illuminate. “With a script, the teacher isn’t focusing on the design of the lesson,” Hanford puts it. “The teacher can focus on the teaching.” She quotes Doug Carnine, who observes, “The purpose of the scripts and internalizing the scripts is you shift your focus to the kids.”
The experiment education forgot
In episodes that will air later this month, Hanford reports on Project Follow Through, a massive federal research initiative launched in 1968 to evaluate which approaches to teaching could most effectively improve the prospects of disadvantaged children. Researchers compared nearly two dozen programs and approaches encompassing every notion about early childhood education. “Some were highly structured like Direct Instruction, others were a lot looser,” Hanford reports. Many programs evaluated were “based on the popular idea…that kids learn best through experience and discovery,” she explains.
When the results were analyzed, DI emerged as the strongest overall performer, producing superior results not only in basic academic skills, but also in measures of reasoning and students’ self-esteem. This was inconvenient for critics who regarded DI and explicit teaching as stultifying, “totalitarian,” or even psychologically harmful to children. Engelmann himself expressed surprise that his students performed so well on measures of self-esteem. But academically successful children have every reason to feel good and regard themselves as capable.
What happened next is the most troubling part of Hanford’s history lesson. The government backed off recommending Direct Instruction and instead highlighted successful individual schools that practiced nearly every other approach Project Follow Through evaluated. This is enormously consequential. The profession had asked what worked but proved uninterested when the answer challenged its assumptions about good pedagogy. The uncomfortable suggestion is that American education has been reluctant to take seriously evidence that conflicts with its preferred philosophy of learning.
That reluctance is not confined to the 1970s. Hanford opens the new season of “Sold a Story” with teachers describing how they were explicitly discouraged from explicit teaching. “I’ve literally been told by my district that I should not be teaching math. I should be facilitating math,” one teacher tells her in Episode 1. “I was told very clearly that we are just there to present them with materials to explore. They can teach themselves,” another adds. “Everyone is repeating this mantra of inquiry learning is best and the majority of our kids are two to three grade levels behind,” says a third. This will sound familiar to current teachers.
Similarly, for generations, schools of education and professional-development programs have valorized the ideal teacher as autonomous and creative, designing lessons and adapting curricula according to their professional judgment. Every teacher has heard the advice to be “the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.” It’s code for an unshakable belief that experiential learning and student “inquiry” is superior to explicit instruction. By contrast, scripted instruction—an essential element of Direct Instruction—is derided as surrender, suitable perhaps for novices but beneath the dignity of real teachers.
This dismissal could easily be perceived as insecurity. Surgeons use checklists, pilots follow written procedures, judges abide by the law. Those who do such jobs are not assumed to lack judgment or skill. Carnine compares scripted teaching to a conductor leading an orchestra. “What the conductor has internalized are the exact notes the composer spent weeks, months, maybe years fiddling with and figuring out,” Hanford observes.
Yet education tends to regard anything other than teacher autonomy with suspicion, even contempt. To her credit, Hanford interviews teachers whose views have shifted. “Once I saw what they could do and the level at which they could perform, I changed my mind,” says one.
What was possible at Wesley Elementary
I confess that the fourth episode brought me to tears. Hanford tells the story of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary School in an impoverished Houston, Texas neighborhood, where a remarkable principal named Thaddeus Lott ran one of the highest-performing elementary schools in the state. Lott’s question to prospective teachers was direct and demanding: “What can you do for my Black children?” He was not interested in hearing why poverty made academic achievement difficult; he wanted to know what adults were prepared to do to ensure that children learned. That included Direct Instruction. “The rule at Wesley was the same as the rule at Zig’s Preschool,” Hanford says. “If the kid hasn’t learned it, the teacher hasn’t taught it.”
She interviews former Wesley students who remember reading Shakespeare, studying science, learning music and being regarded as intellectually capable. “I was allowed to be Black and to be smart,” one former student tells her. To be clear, they benefited from more than just DI. Hanford describes Lott’s energetic work monitoring classrooms, demanding instruction with fidelity, and hiring teachers who bought into the approach. In sum, students reaped the benefit of not merely a well-constructed and effective curriculum, delivered well, but an energetic and demanding school culture. “Thaddeus Lott hadn’t changed his students’ homes or their neighborhood, but he had changed the way they were taught,” Hanford explains.
The story ends in heartbreak. When Lott retired, the first few principals who came after him continued to implement Direct Instruction, but eventually, it was cast aside. Hanford tried to contact the principal who replaced the program, but she never got back to her. In 2015, Lott died at the age of 81.
“By that time,” Hanford concludes, “Wesley Elementary was once again one of the lowest performing schools in Houston.”
Can Hanford do it again?
The first season of “Sold a Story” helped persuade teachers that they had been misled about reading instruction. It also helped accelerate a wave of legislation in nearly every U.S. state that intended to bring reading instruction into alignment with scientific evidence. To be clear, Hanford did not create the science of reading movement; researchers and advocates had been building its intellectual and political foundations for decades. But, without question, she gave it momentum and a compelling narrative that brought it to an audience far beyond the education world. Can Season 2 of “Sold a Story” do something comparable for direct and explicit instruction?
It’s relatively straightforward for states to require evidence-based foundational reading instruction. It’s much more complicated to legislate how teachers should teach. The more consequential outcome would be a shift, across the field, in what educators regard as proof of performance. Can “Sold a Story” make scripted curricula respectable—even desirable—among teachers, school leaders, and teacher educators? Can Hanford persuade the profession to distinguish between the freedom to design one’s own lessons and the ability to deliver instruction that reliably produces learning?
Frankly, it’s a much heavier lift than exposing the failures of balanced literacy. The first season of “Sold a Story” gave teachers permission to believe that the people and institutions they trusted had misled them. The second requires them to reconsider convictions they have embraced as central to their professional identities. Engelmann devoted his life to the proposition that effective instruction could be designed rather than left to chance. Hanford is giving his work an audience it has never enjoyed, and perhaps a second chance to influence American education.
I’ve told countless times the story about how, when I became a second-career teacher in a low-performing South Bronx public school, I didn’t recognize the ways I was instructed and expected to teach. None of it matched my recollection of my childhood days in school 30 years earlier. A district staffer insisted that “making kids memorize times tables is child abuse.” A literacy coach derided my instructional approach, saying, “You’re not teaching, you’re giving directions.” When I asked her what curriculum I should use to teach reading, she scoffed. “Mr. Pondiscio, you’re the best person to know what your students need,” she replied. This seemed not just unhelpful advice, but unlikely to succeed. It still does.
Fast forward 15 years later, when Emily Hanford began exposing the problems with balanced literacy. I got an email from a former grad student of mine who remembered my criticism of “reading workshop,” the approach we were expected to master and use in New York City’s schools. She wanted to know if I’d heard “Sold a Story” and what I thought about Hanford’s reporting. “It’s exactly what you talked about in class!” she wrote.
It’s my earnest hope and prayer that researchers, advocates, school administrators, and frustrated teachers who have long championed direct and explicit instruction and Engelmann’s work receive similar messages in the months ahead.