November 10, 2023 • 34 mins
In this episode, Tudor speaks with Emily Hanford, senior education correspondent at American Public Media, about the challenges in teaching children to read. Hanford discusses the ineffective strategies being used in schools, the historical debate over phonics instruction, and the complexity of the English language. She emphasizes the importance of understanding the science of reading and the need for better teacher training. Hanford also touches on the Matthew effect, legislative actions to improve reading instruction, and the role of politics in education. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday, Wednesday, & Friday. For more information visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I am seriously excited about today's podcast because we're talking
about an education solution that everyone wants and no one's
looking for.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
And I'm going to explain.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
What I mean by that a little bit later, but
I really think that today's podcast is going to blow
your mind if you have children or grandchildren in school today.
I'm so glad that Emily Hanford agreed to come on
the program because when I first heard her talking about reading,
it was funny because I'm listening to her talk about
how we're teaching reading in schools and I'm going, yeah,
(00:35):
uh huh, We've done that, Yes, my kids are learning
that way. And then it's this shocking moment where I'm like, yeah,
and we're having all those same struggles. This is really
hard way to learn to read. So I'm so excited
because she's going to talk all about this. Just before
we solve all of the reading problems in the United States,
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code tutor. All right, let's welcome in Emily Hanford to
the podcast. Emily is a senior education correspondent at American
Public Media and host of the six part podcast series
Sold a story how teaching kids to read went so wrong. Emily,
(02:27):
I want to tell you that the way this was
introduced to me is obviously I ran for office and
a big part of our platform was that I felt,
if you can't read, you can't do anything. And I
come from manufacturing, so in my world people, I think
people wrongly assume, Oh, anybody can go into a shop
and work and everything is work constructions.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
You have to be able to read to do anything
in life.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
And after the race, a friend of mine sent me
your podcast series, and I was like, what could this
be about? And I just went from one to the
next to the next, and I couldn't I send it
to my mom. I'm like, oh, my goodness, this is
exactly what we've been dealing with. I have four girls,
one of my youngest, my youngest two are twins. One
(03:11):
of my youngest, the school said to me in first grade,
we don't really know what's wrong. We think she's dyslexic.
She's got a really big problem. Reading. And then it
was like, I mean, I almost feel emotional when I
say this because I listened to your podcast and I
was like, this is why, this is why.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So I'm going to let you talk.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I just I had to tell you that because it's
been so eye opening for me, and I feel like
we're missing the boat when we talk about everything. Even
if we're talking about school choice and everything, No matter what,
there are still schools teaching to read the wrong way. Okay,
so go tell us, tell the people what you know.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Well, thank you for having me. It's good to be here.
You know, the story that you just told is a
story that I've heard from so many parents. So the
way this started for me was about six years ago. Now.
I actually started getting interested in this because I was
interviewing college students who had been put in these so
called remedial reading and writing classes, and they were telling
(04:13):
me their stories about struggling with reading, and here they
were in college, and they were essentially being told, you're
not ready for college because you can't read well enough.
And I was one of those people who learned to
read pretty easily. Some of us do. And it doesn't
have to do with intelligence, by the way, this is
one of the things that I've learned. It's a lot
of people, a lot more than many people probably think,
(04:34):
have a hard time learning how to read. They can
learn how to read, but they really need someone to
teach them how to do it. Some of us, the
minority of us, don't need a lot of instruction. But
what all this scientific research that's been done over the
last fifty years is I'll come back to, has shown us,
is that explicit instruction is really critical for most people
to become good readers. And some kids, and maybe one
(04:55):
of your daughters who were we were just talking about,
may need a lot of instruction and like a lot
of records. But anyway, to go back to my origin
story with this, I was a kid who learned to
read pretty easily. I don't think I needed much instruction.
I have two boys, they're twenty and twenty three. I
don't think they needed a whole lot of instruction either.
They learned to read pretty easily. I think I just
kind of assumed that people learned to read mostly by
(05:17):
being read to a lot. When they're kids, having exposure
to a lot's books, being motivated to read them, they
get a little bit of instruction in school. Of course
I sent my kids off to school. I assume they'd
be taught how to read. They learned how to read,
no problem. And then it was talking to these college
students and actually hearing that word dyslexia, which I didn't
really know very much about. So there was this one
student in particular who told me that she had dyslexia,
(05:39):
which is what she had found out about herself. Well,
what was so amazing to me is that she talked
about how no one had ever really taught her how
to read, just didn't know how to do it. No
one had identified her with dyslexia or given her any help.
So what happened is I sort of wound it back.
I was doing all of this reporting on who gets
access to higher education and different kinds of higher education,
than it came across the big stumbling block that many
(06:01):
people run into, which is sort of getting stuck in
these remediate classes. And I thought, uh, maybe need to
go look at what's happening in the beginning. Maybe we
have all kinds of kids with dyslexia who aren't getting
the help they need. And I think that's true. So
I started looking at dyslexia. But what I learned, like
my eyes just started being opened to the fact that
all of this stuff has been understood about reading and
(06:24):
how it works, why what dyslexia is, and why some
kids have a really, really hard time learning to read,
but also all of this other research that has just
revealed to us how reading works, like how do we
do that, how does that even work, how do we
learn to do it? What do we need to learn?
So really what happened is I was hearing the stories
from parents, moms like you, who had this moment of realizing,
(06:46):
like something, my kid is really struggling, and the school
doesn't seem to know what to do about it, or
sometimes maybe the school even is not even saying it's
a problem. I'm seeing some problem at home, but they're saying,
she's fine, it's fine, We're going to find her the
right book, she's going to get motivated. Anyway, That's where
this journey started for me and I have just been
reporting on this topic for six years, and the Solda
(07:06):
Story podcast, which came out last fall, is six episodes,
but there are actually two more that a lot of
people don't realize that came out in May so go
back and check those out, and we have another one
that's going to be coming out sometime in the new year.
And the bonus episodes are about the response to the podcast.
Who's been hearing it the parents, many teachers, many teachers.
That's who I'm hearing from more than any other category. Kids,
(07:30):
kids are hearing the way that they taught how to
read in zuld a story. And then the other bonus
episode is about the response to it on a policy level.
There's done a lot of legislative change as a result.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Oh interesting, well, I think, what that's something we need
to cover because teachers have had a response. And one
of the things that I think was eye opening to
me as I'm listening, because I'm listening to your podcast
and you're talking about all these strategies that they were
using in our school, which is like, you know, cite
words and language and memorizing words rather than learning to
(08:04):
sound out words and why they sound the way they
do and all of that. And I mean, we've had
this conversation of phonics and whole word language, but it
goes beyond that what I was hearing. But the interesting
part about it is, I think from a political standpoint,
there's always a black and white you know this is
right and this is wrong. But when it was a
(08:24):
non political conversation, it's just a conversation of why do
we have so many kids that are struggling? And then
you start to unpack that these strategies that came out
as a great product that was sold to our public
schools and to all schools, really it turns out that
that may have been the way that kids who were
struggling to read, those strategies they were using. So now
(08:48):
we're taking good readers and we're giving them the strategies
kids that struggle use to actually learn to read. And
teachers were saying, wow, maybe this isn't right. It wasn't
offensive to the teacher, and this isn't on the teachers.
This is the program the teachers have been given. And
even teachers came out and said, yeah, maybe this isn't
the best way to teach them.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
That I thought was fascinating.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yeah, no, I mean so what you just said there,
I think is a point to just reiterate for the audience,
which is this is the big aha moment for me
to realize. Several years ago, back in twenty nineteen, I
did a recording project which was specifically about these strategies
that kids are taught about how to read words. When
they come across words, they don't know what are they
supposed to do, and they do things like they're being
(09:33):
told in classrooms to do things like look at the picture,
think of a word that makes sense, look at the
first letter of the word, look at the last letter
of the word. What's really interesting, monkey.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
There's all these different things that they call it. And
that's how I'm.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Fish chunky monkey, yes, yes.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
And I remember doing this with my kids and I'm like, wait,
we're chunking up this word to see if they can
find a word that they recognize inside of the word
that then they can and maybe figure out what the
rest of the word says, which I thought, I guess
that's how.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
We do it now.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
But then when I listen to what you had to say,
I'm like, well, that makes sense that that's not a
great way to do it. But in that category of
people who's like, Okay, the school knows best, I'm gonna
send my kid there and they're gonna learn to read.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Really absolutely, I think every parent, you know, you basically
go in trusting right, And you know, I think no
small part of this is the role that the pandemic played.
So we can sort of wind back and talk about
some of the historical reasons and how this came to be.
But there's been a lot of parent activism over the
past ten or fifteen years, particularly the parents of kids
(10:37):
with dyslexia, right, So those are the kids who are
really harmed the most when schools are not teaching reading
in ways that line up with what we know about
how people learn to read. And the big aha about
those word reading strategies that you said before is that
when schools teach kids those strategies, it turns out that
they are teaching them the very things that struggling readers
(10:58):
do to get by. Because people are struggling with reading
can have There can be lots of reasons why reading
is hard for you, but a core reason, sort of
the most common and most debilitating source of reading problems
goes back to you just really have trouble with the words.
You don't know very well how to sound them out.
You haven't gotten good practice in that you haven't actually
(11:20):
sort of mapped those words into your memory, so they're
there for instant retrieval because you never really learned how
to sound them out. You don't need to be taught
these strategies. You actually don't need to be told. Look
at the letter, first letter, look at the picture. Think
of a word that makes sense. That's what people do
when they haven't been taught how to sound out the words.
They're thinking, what am I going to do with this word?
(11:41):
That's what they sort of figure out to do. So
that was the huge aha. Without realizing it, these strategies
made their ways into schools and teachers were teaching kids
to read in the ways that struggling readers read. And
I think, yeah, so that was a big aha for me.
And the Oldest Story podcast was really about how did
(12:02):
that happen? How did that happen? Because it doesn't seem
like it could happen. And I think it's important to
recognize that we have actually been arguing about how to
teach reading in this country for a long time. In fact,
you can go back to the founding of public education
in this country and see that there were like crazy
fights in this fabulously like this nineteenth century way where
(12:27):
these people were fighting with each other about how to
teach reading and they were very much fighting about phonics.
So phonics has been at the center of sort of
the wars about reading for a really long time, and
I think in a lot of ways it's been hard
to break through. It's become sort of politicized, and it's
become such a battle for so long that people sort
(12:47):
of assume that this is number one, all about phonics,
which it isn't, which we can come back to. And
number two, there's been sort of an assumption that phonics
is somehow traditional or old fashioned or conservative, and it
has been touted by some sort of conservatives and people
on the right. But I just want to have.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Funny that something that's just a learning process can become
Let's take a quick commercial break.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
We'll continue next on the Tutor Dixon podcast.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That's the thing that really struck me, I think as
I was going through this, because coming out of a
political race, I'm like, oh my gosh, are we just
really making putting these kids in a worse position, Because
it's like when politicians talk about something, it becomes weaponized.
And therefore that's why I said, it's like the solution
no one's actually looking for, because everybody wants to fight
(13:38):
and yet our kids can't read.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I think that's a really good point. And actually I
have to say that I feel kind of helpful, hopeful
on the fact that I think there is starting to
be a lot of bipartis in multipart is an agreement
on all of that. Like, I think a lot of
people come to this and sometimes assume that their old
notions of how this is political and how those politics
(14:02):
play out, and they're surprised. Like education upsets the apple
cart all the time on politics, but this issue in particular.
I mean, I have people following me in social media
on the far right, the far left, and everywhere in between.
And I remember, even when I was starting to talk
to all of these cognitive scientists and others who've been
doing all this really amazing research over the last fifty
(14:25):
years or so that's really revealed all kinds of things
that we didn't know, just about how our brains learned
to read. I remember, you know, getting to that political question,
because inevitably there's so much politics around this. You've been
studying this for so long, Like, what are your politics?
Just tell me a little bit, you know, are you
coming Is there any kind of political game in here
(14:46):
for you. And you know, for the most part, a
lot of these scientists are very left. You know, these
are people in America's universities. Are like, no, I mean,
I don't come to this with any kind of part
as an agenda. I have just been studying how reading
works in the brain and how people learn to do that,
and what do kids need to be taught to become
good readers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
That is beautiful, and honestly, I will tell you that
the person who sent me your podcast is a dear
friend of mine who's very much on the left. And
I got this text and I was like, I mean
full disclosure. I'm like, oh, what's this going to be,
you know, And I'm like, oh, I love this person.
I'm going to listen to this because they send it
(15:27):
to me and they're important to me.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
But I'm not going to agree with it. That's what
I thought.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And so the first I mean the first few minutes,
I was like, oh, my word, this is what we
are living too.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Right now, you know, with my littlest one.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And I sent it to my mom, who was a
reading specialist years and years ago, and she.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Was like, this is what I haven't been able to.
It's like it's hard.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
You do such a great job of explaining it, because
it's hard to put into words why you think that
this isn't working, because it feels like it should work
because so many people, I mean, you say that it's
about sixty seven thousand elementary schools in the US are
using this program, right, It's a lot.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
It's become very widespread, And I think it's also really
important to recognize that sould a story does actually focus
on some particular programs and particular people who have been
kind of the brand name version of these ideas. You know,
they're sort of like the Klinx or the Google or
whatever of these ideas. But as we say in the
very first episode, these ideas are very widespread. They're in
(16:28):
lots of materials, there's lots of publishing companies. They're sort
of baked into ideas that I think a lot of
people in education have in their head about reading and
how it works. So that's sort of how I what
I was trying to figure out years ago is I
was like, I think there's some sort of ideas, there's
like an ocean that everyone's swimming in about reading and
(16:51):
how to teach it, and it does, and you can
buy this curriculum or that curriculum or that curriculum. But
somehow you still get these ideas because there's a little
bit of it in a lot of curriculum, and it's
passed around from teacher to teacher, all those little eagle
eye and chunky monkey. You know. You go on teachers,
pay teacher, you go on to people, you will find
zillions of those. Right. That is not one publisher selling
(17:14):
that to the nation. That's lots of people selling different
versions of that. But it's all because there was a
certain idea about how this all works that got into
people's minds. And I'll tell you that here's one of
the reasons how I think it happened. I think we
fought about phonics for a long time. So that was
kind of like the lighter fluid in the wars about reading,
and so in some ways, in some ways those wars
(17:36):
kind of ostensibly ended, I don't know, ten or fifteen
years ago, when this thing called balance literacy came in,
which was really supposed to be the best of both worlds,
which was we're not the same old sort of whole language.
People who were saying no phonics, no phonics, no phonics.
We're going to say, fine to phonics. We're going to
add a little bit of phonics in, but we're going
to stick to all these other things too. Are still
(17:56):
going to teach all those other strategies. And that's the
idea that's a story is trying to sort of reveal
and explain, and it's really subtle. It's this really subtle idea.
Like all of sould A Story, all eight episodes of
sold a Story, are just about one idea. It's like
six hours of listening. And the idea is basically, beginning
readers don't have to sound out the written words as
(18:17):
they're learning how to read. They can, but they don't
have to because we can teach them all these other
strategies to figure out what the words say. That's such
a subtle idea. It doesn't seem like a big deal,
but it's a very, very big deal because it turns
out that if you are not really laboriously sounding out
those words when you're starting to learn to read them,
(18:37):
they have a hard time getting into your brain, into
your memory so that they're there and available for you
in an instant. You and I are both good readers.
We know tens of thousands of words instantly on site.
But it's because at some point, maybe when we were
like six or seven years old, we sounded that word
out very laboriously. We connected the sounds and the word
with the spelling of the word, and the meaning of
(18:59):
the word. Three things, the sound, the spelling, and the meaning.
When those three things get linked in your brain, that
word gets into your brain, and that is what allows
you to be able to comprehend what you read, because
the words themselves aren't requiring a lot of brit of work. Right.
Every once in a while, it'll come across a word
that's you don't see that much or you've never seen before.
You have to stop, pause, think about it, sound it out,
(19:21):
maybe look it up whatever. But most of the words
that we're reading you've just got so you were able
to focus your attention on the meaning of what you're reading.
But for people who struggle with reading, they're focusing a
lot of their attention just on the words themselves. They're struggling,
they're trying to figure them out, they're trying to recall
them from memory, and so it's hard to focus on
the meaning of what you're reading. And reading is really slow.
(19:41):
So anyway, I think one of the reasons why those
ideas took off, which when you kind of start to
point out that they don't make sense, I think the
reason they made sense is because English is actually a
pretty difficult language to learn. How to read English is
probably one of the most difficult alphabetic languages to learn.
So even like a typically developing kid who doesn't have
(20:03):
any kind of reading disability is probably going to take
like two or three years with some instruction. Some kids
need a lot, some kids don't need much, but there's
a few years you're going to need to really master
the basics of how to like decode the English language
because it's complex. We have complex spelling patterns. People say,
like English is a wacky language, but it's actually not.
It's actually this really fascinating kind of melting thought language,
(20:24):
right because English is based on like Greek and Latin
and French and Anglo Saxon, and we borrow words from
other languages all the time. It's actually this really cool
language and you can explain the spelling of virtually every
English word if you sort of look at its history.
Where does it come from? And first of all that
stuff is fascinating. So I think one of the reasons
(20:46):
people didn't like phonics is they thought it would be
boring to kids. But the truth is that words and
how they're spelled it's so interesting. There's all kinds of
opportunities to like really teach kids cool stuff. But I
think because English is difficult to learn, means it's difficult
to teach. And there's a lot that teachers need to
know about how written English works that a lot of
us don't know. You can be a good reader without
(21:08):
being able to explain how English words are spelled. But
if you're teaching first grade and you're teaching kids to
do this, you actually need to know quite a bit
more than you and I do about English and how
it works. I don't know that a lot of first
grade teachers thought they were in for that, and a
lot of them didn't get that kind of training. It's
we don't have very good teacher training just sort of overall.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
And they probably went through a lot of these same
strategies when they learned to read.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Absolutely so there's that like a lot of them learned
it in their teacher preparation programs and learned it themselves,
which means I think we're at a whole other point
with the way that this stuff has infused the culture
because the teachers themselves didn't even learn, many of them
how to sound out words when they were in school.
So I think these things caught on because teachers desperately
want to teach their students how to read. I have
(21:56):
not met a stet teacher who doesn't. No one goes
to school thinking I am going to make sure that
these kids that I teach these kids the habits of
struggling readers. No one is doing that, No, absolutely no one.
So you're getting into school, you don't know what you
need to know about written English and how it works.
You actually don't know as a teacher what you need
to know about just how kids learn to read and
(22:18):
why something like phonics instruction is so important. So you're
kind of like, and what do I do. I have
twenty twenty five thirty kids, and I need to teach
them how to read. Oh, here are these strategies. These
strategies can help kids get into books. It's a way
to get them started. I can teach them. Oh, if
you're reading along, you come to a word, you don't
know what you what can you do. It kind of
(22:40):
gets kids going. And the assumption is that if you
kind of get kids going, they'll turn into readers. And
some of them do, but too many of them don't.
And that's what you're seeing, I think when you see
the dramatically poor reading sports we have in the center.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
And two of my girls, what I noticed with two
of them is that they can read the words, but
they don't retain what they meant. I don't know how
to explain that. It's like they can't the comprehension of reading.
They read it to get through it, but then o't.
Just last night, I was working with my sixth grader
and she has to read this article and then tell
(23:16):
me what she got from the article. And she took
a sentence and she's like, that's what it meant. And
I'm like, you just gave me the exact sentence from
the article. No, I'm like, what did that article.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Mean to you?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And it was a really eye opening moment where I
said to myself, here's my twelve year old and I'm
not fully sure that she can understand what she just read,
that she can grasp the whole concept.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
And she struggles with spelling too. In sixth grade.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I have a sixth grader who struggles with comprehension and spelling,
and I have to say, I feel like it all
ties back to what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
I mean, I can't you know, obviously, I cannot say
for sure. There could be a lot of different things
going on, but I do. I think that's one of
the reasons I've stayed on this for years is because
I've heard from a lot of middle school and high
school teachers who have told me, like who have talked
about how kids really struggle with reading, and they've sort
of vaguely diagnosed it as a comprehension problem, which it is.
(24:15):
But I think one of the things that many of
them are realizing is that it goes back to some
sort of word level reading problems and it can start.
You know, it's not one of the things that I
think is really important to understand. There's this thing called
the Matthew effect, and it comes from the Bible story.
It's like, basically, the rich get richer when it comes
to reading, right, So kids go into school and then
(24:37):
if they got off to a good start in reading,
there's this real reciprocal relationship between learning how to decode
and read the words, and then reading and getting better
at reading and learning more about language and how it works,
and learning new words through reading. Right, So there's this
way that the kids who get off to a good
start just start sort of doing really really well, and
(24:58):
then kids who don't get off to a good start
just sort of It's like it's not like the rich
get richer and the poor get poorer. It's like the
rich get richer and the poor just get a little
bit less poor every year. And that's where these big
gaps come in. So when you have a child in
sixth grade, a lot of things have probably happened, and
she may be able to read the words. I don't
know when you listen to her read out loud, is
(25:19):
she kind of slow? Does she stumble over the words?
Or is she just fluent and she can read them
pretty easily.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
She she's slow. I think she's slower than what I
would imagine my oldest would have been at that age.
It's funny because I have two that are very good
readers that just picked it up, and two that struggle.
And there last night my one of my youngest ones,
one of the twins, the ten year old, we were
both reading through something at the same time, and I
(25:48):
walked away and she said, are you finished reading that already?
How did you do that so fast? So they notice
it too. It's not like they're they don't know what's happening.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, it's interesting. I mean, I think,
if you know, often when people are slow at reading,
it is interfering with their ability to comprehend right, because
they are spending a lot of time for working out
the words. But I think one of the other things
that starts to happen is because I think we're I
think a lot of schools are not getting early reading
instruction right. It sort of compromises what teachers can do
(26:18):
all the way up, so they end up having a
lot of kids in their classes in third grade, fourth grade,
fifth grade who are struggling with reading. And I think
that compromises sort of the level at which they can teach.
And so I think even some of the other things
that would be necessary for a child in sixth grade
to really be good at comprehending what they read, some
of the kinds of comprehension strategies that that maybe she
(26:40):
hasn't been taught or learned a lot of that either.
So it's probably not just a word level problem at
this point, but it probably has its roots in a
word level problem. And this stuff gets really complicated and
messy as kids get older. And I will say it
gets complicated and messy in a lot of other ways,
because when kids struggle a lot of times they really
(27:01):
they feel bad about themselves. They feel kind of embarrassed,
they feel insecure. It's like very common for kids, yeah,
as pet yep, and for kids, especially boys, to start
to distract from their reading problems by having behavior problems.
And it's very common for other kids to shut down.
Often girls, you become the quietest one. You don't want
anyone to call on you. You don't want to be
(27:22):
read allowed to in class, and you don't like school.
And it was it was really it was. It was
parents I was talking to who were talking about like
kids would this one moment was talking about how her
dp she had, like her daughter's fingernails had like scraped
the doorframe of the front door because she would like
hold on to the door and not want to be
taken to the school bus. You know, she's just like
(27:44):
that's hard.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
I know, I know it stinks and it's so hard
because we look at this and I think you're right,
everybody wants kids to learn to read. There's nobody that
goes and no parent that says this one that need
to read, and there's no teacher that says this one
will be fine. I mean, how much good is reading
going to do them? That just doesn't happen. And so
(28:08):
when I listened to your podcast, I.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Was like, wow, Wow, this is.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
A whole new world of we could have, I mean,
so much opportunities. So how do you take that and
create something that works for kids?
Speaker 1 (28:20):
How do how do we make these changes?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
You said there's legislation, How do we do this without
people immediately putting up their wall, because I think that
with education, a lot of people put up a wall
right away.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
They do. It's true. I mean, and you know, changing
education is hard. Schools are complex, you know, school systems
are complex. Change doesn't happen quickly. This stuff does get
caught up in politics. So there's been a lot of
legislative action, some of it in response to sold a story,
but really there was a huge wave of legislative action
(28:54):
over the past like fifteen or twenty years with things
like good implementing that schools have to screen kids because
you really want to catch kids early when they're struggling.
You really want to know who's struggling. Are they using
good screeners, good assessments. There's been some not very good
assessments in schools. You know, are they really getting the
kind of help they need? Is a mom who goes
in and says, my kid is struggling. Does the school
(29:15):
have a plan for them? Does the school know what
to do? So a lot of the legislation was focusing
on that. Since sold a story, we've seen a real
uptick in legislation that's focusing on the curriculum. And that's,
I guess not a surprise because we focused a lot
on the curriculum. I think it's important to recognize that
while sort of getting rid of curriculum that has wrong
ideas in it, it may be really important. The solution
(29:38):
isn't necessarily just buy a new curriculum. You go buy
a new curriculum. Is the school board, the superintendent says,
use this three years from now, we should expect, you know,
kids will be reading better. That is not going to happen.
That hasn't happened because this is complicated stuff. It's so
much more of it really has to do with the
teacher knowledge the teacher uptick is their teacher using it.
(29:58):
Has the teacher gotten good training on how to use it.
There's no perfect curriculum out there either. You know, people
are saying, you know, go get a science of reading curriculum,
but there's no such thing. You know, the science of
reading is a body of research. It's not a thing
you do. It's not a program you buy, it's not
a law you pass. You know, it's a body of
research that thousands of cognitive scientists and psychologists and other
(30:20):
researchers all over the world and all kinds of languages
have been studying reading for the past fifty years. And
what my reporting has really focused on is what does
that research say. Why haven't teachers in schools known more
about it? And now the question is what do we do?
So this is where you know, many many teachers are
looking up and saying to the people above them the principles,
(30:40):
the superintendent's, the school boards, their state legislature, help me.
I need help. I need better materials, I need better training.
So a lot of this legislative response is in response
to that people on the bottom saying please help. But
of course every kind of legislative response has unintended consequences, right,
And I think when things get too top down, you
(31:01):
just it's a careful balance between top down and bottom up.
And I think we're just we're really in the midst
of that. There's been a wave of legislation, and I
think that's legislation can get people's attention on a problem. Right,
But just because you pass a law doesn't mean that
the law's going to get implemented well, that it's going
to get followed. So there's a lot to be done
for everyone to do to kind of keep their eyes
(31:21):
on are these laws having their intended effect, are they
being implemented well? Is there the proper support training A
lot of times that needs money to implement this. Well,
there's a lot to keep an eye on.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon podcast. From just this talk today, that
we have teachers listening, that we have school board members listening,
and they just go, wow, this is an opportunity to
bring some some something extra to the school to make
(31:55):
sure that our kids are succeeding. Because we have horrendous
reading proficiency rates across the country and people can say, oh,
it's in certain districts, but we're seeing it no matter what.
It doesn't matter what district you're in, you can still
have a terrible reading proficiency rate. And that is, like
I said, no matter what you want to do in
the future, and no matter what class you are in,
(32:17):
whether it's math or science or history, you have to
be able to read. And so this is just holding
kids behind in every area. So I'm excited that. I mean,
we could talk about this.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I could talk to you about this for hours, but
you did talk about it for about six hours. So
I want people to go listen to that because I really,
I mean, I cannot tell you if you have kids
in school or if you have grandchildren, you will listen
to this podcast and it will be an AHA moment
and it will inspire you to, even if it's not
(32:50):
as your school to at home, take a look at
things differently. Because like I said, I sent it right
to my mom. We were both like, oh, my goodness,
this is wild because now you just see what and
you I mean, I got to tell you. I felt
guilty because I'm like, how did I not see some
of this, but but I don't like the teachers who
even said, well, I just thought this was the best way.
(33:13):
So tell people who are listening where they can go
to get the podcast, listened to the podcast, and follow you.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
It's called sold a Story, So you can just go
to your favorite podcast app if you're a podcast listener
and just put in sold a Story. We have a
website soldastory dot org, so you can listen to it
all there. You can also find links. We have some
articles there. We have a piece. We have an article
which is about some of the legislative action that's taken
place in the wake of Solda story, and you can
(33:42):
follow me. I'm on formerly known as Twitter x at
e hanfouth And yeah, I hope you do listen and
check out the two bonus episodes and stay tuned to
your feet because there's going to be another episode coming
in the new year.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Good. I'm going to check those out, and honestly, I
hope that people here will share. I've shared it on
Twitter formally or ext formally known as Twitter, whatever we
call it now. I've shared it several times, and I
honestly think that it's sort of one of those things
where I am considered a Republican, so people are like, oh,
it's some a crazy thing. So I'm hoping that there
are people who are tuning in. But for all of
(34:17):
the people who are listening to this podcast, you have
the power to share this and it's not it's not political.
This is about getting kids to read, which I love.
I just love it, honestly. So thank you Emily Hanford,
thank you so much for being on.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
With us today, thank you for your interest.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Absolutely, and thank you all for joining us on this
very cool episode of the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this
episode and others, you can check out tutordisonpodcast dot com
subscribe right there, or go to the iHeartRadio app or
wherever you get your podcasts and join us the next
time on the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Have a blessed day.
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I am seriously excited about today's podcast because we're talking
about an education solution that everyone wants and no one's
looking for.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
And I'm going to explain.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
What I mean by that a little bit later, but
I really think that today's podcast is going to blow
your mind if you have children or grandchildren in school today.
I'm so glad that Emily Hanford agreed to come on
the program because when I first heard her talking about reading,
it was funny because I'm listening to her talk about
how we're teaching reading in schools and I'm going, yeah,
(00:35):
uh huh, We've done that, Yes, my kids are learning
that way. And then it's this shocking moment where I'm like, yeah,
and we're having all those same struggles. This is really
hard way to learn to read. So I'm so excited
because she's going to talk all about this. Just before
we solve all of the reading problems in the United States,
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Go now to balanceifnature dot com and get thirty five
percent off your first preferred order shipped free with promo
code tutor. All right, let's welcome in Emily Hanford to
the podcast. Emily is a senior education correspondent at American
Public Media and host of the six part podcast series
Sold a story how teaching kids to read went so wrong. Emily,
(02:27):
I want to tell you that the way this was
introduced to me is obviously I ran for office and
a big part of our platform was that I felt,
if you can't read, you can't do anything. And I
come from manufacturing, so in my world people, I think
people wrongly assume, Oh, anybody can go into a shop
and work and everything is work constructions.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
You have to be able to read to do anything
in life.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
And after the race, a friend of mine sent me
your podcast series, and I was like, what could this
be about? And I just went from one to the
next to the next, and I couldn't I send it
to my mom. I'm like, oh, my goodness, this is
exactly what we've been dealing with. I have four girls,
one of my youngest, my youngest two are twins. One
(03:11):
of my youngest, the school said to me in first grade,
we don't really know what's wrong. We think she's dyslexic.
She's got a really big problem. Reading. And then it
was like, I mean, I almost feel emotional when I
say this because I listened to your podcast and I
was like, this is why, this is why.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So I'm going to let you talk.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I just I had to tell you that because it's
been so eye opening for me, and I feel like
we're missing the boat when we talk about everything. Even
if we're talking about school choice and everything, No matter what,
there are still schools teaching to read the wrong way. Okay,
so go tell us, tell the people what you know.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Well, thank you for having me. It's good to be here.
You know, the story that you just told is a
story that I've heard from so many parents. So the
way this started for me was about six years ago. Now.
I actually started getting interested in this because I was
interviewing college students who had been put in these so
called remedial reading and writing classes, and they were telling
(04:13):
me their stories about struggling with reading, and here they
were in college, and they were essentially being told, you're
not ready for college because you can't read well enough.
And I was one of those people who learned to
read pretty easily. Some of us do. And it doesn't
have to do with intelligence, by the way, this is
one of the things that I've learned. It's a lot
of people, a lot more than many people probably think,
(04:34):
have a hard time learning how to read. They can
learn how to read, but they really need someone to
teach them how to do it. Some of us, the
minority of us, don't need a lot of instruction. But
what all this scientific research that's been done over the
last fifty years is I'll come back to, has shown us,
is that explicit instruction is really critical for most people
to become good readers. And some kids, and maybe one
(04:55):
of your daughters who were we were just talking about,
may need a lot of instruction and like a lot
of records. But anyway, to go back to my origin
story with this, I was a kid who learned to
read pretty easily. I don't think I needed much instruction.
I have two boys, they're twenty and twenty three. I
don't think they needed a whole lot of instruction either.
They learned to read pretty easily. I think I just
kind of assumed that people learned to read mostly by
(05:17):
being read to a lot. When they're kids, having exposure
to a lot's books, being motivated to read them, they
get a little bit of instruction in school. Of course
I sent my kids off to school. I assume they'd
be taught how to read. They learned how to read,
no problem. And then it was talking to these college
students and actually hearing that word dyslexia, which I didn't
really know very much about. So there was this one
student in particular who told me that she had dyslexia,
(05:39):
which is what she had found out about herself. Well,
what was so amazing to me is that she talked
about how no one had ever really taught her how
to read, just didn't know how to do it. No
one had identified her with dyslexia or given her any help.
So what happened is I sort of wound it back.
I was doing all of this reporting on who gets
access to higher education and different kinds of higher education,
than it came across the big stumbling block that many
(06:01):
people run into, which is sort of getting stuck in
these remediate classes. And I thought, uh, maybe need to
go look at what's happening in the beginning. Maybe we
have all kinds of kids with dyslexia who aren't getting
the help they need. And I think that's true. So
I started looking at dyslexia. But what I learned, like
my eyes just started being opened to the fact that
all of this stuff has been understood about reading and
(06:24):
how it works, why what dyslexia is, and why some
kids have a really, really hard time learning to read,
but also all of this other research that has just
revealed to us how reading works, like how do we
do that, how does that even work, how do we
learn to do it? What do we need to learn?
So really what happened is I was hearing the stories
from parents, moms like you, who had this moment of realizing,
(06:46):
like something, my kid is really struggling, and the school
doesn't seem to know what to do about it, or
sometimes maybe the school even is not even saying it's
a problem. I'm seeing some problem at home, but they're saying,
she's fine, it's fine, We're going to find her the
right book, she's going to get motivated. Anyway, That's where
this journey started for me and I have just been
reporting on this topic for six years, and the Solda
(07:06):
Story podcast, which came out last fall, is six episodes,
but there are actually two more that a lot of
people don't realize that came out in May so go
back and check those out, and we have another one
that's going to be coming out sometime in the new year.
And the bonus episodes are about the response to the podcast.
Who's been hearing it the parents, many teachers, many teachers.
That's who I'm hearing from more than any other category. Kids,
(07:30):
kids are hearing the way that they taught how to
read in zuld a story. And then the other bonus
episode is about the response to it on a policy level.
There's done a lot of legislative change as a result.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Oh interesting, well, I think, what that's something we need
to cover because teachers have had a response. And one
of the things that I think was eye opening to
me as I'm listening, because I'm listening to your podcast
and you're talking about all these strategies that they were
using in our school, which is like, you know, cite
words and language and memorizing words rather than learning to
(08:04):
sound out words and why they sound the way they
do and all of that. And I mean, we've had
this conversation of phonics and whole word language, but it
goes beyond that what I was hearing. But the interesting
part about it is, I think from a political standpoint,
there's always a black and white you know this is
right and this is wrong. But when it was a
(08:24):
non political conversation, it's just a conversation of why do
we have so many kids that are struggling? And then
you start to unpack that these strategies that came out
as a great product that was sold to our public
schools and to all schools, really it turns out that
that may have been the way that kids who were
struggling to read, those strategies they were using. So now
(08:48):
we're taking good readers and we're giving them the strategies
kids that struggle use to actually learn to read. And
teachers were saying, wow, maybe this isn't right. It wasn't
offensive to the teacher, and this isn't on the teachers.
This is the program the teachers have been given. And
even teachers came out and said, yeah, maybe this isn't
the best way to teach them.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
That I thought was fascinating.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
Yeah, no, I mean so what you just said there,
I think is a point to just reiterate for the audience,
which is this is the big aha moment for me
to realize. Several years ago, back in twenty nineteen, I
did a recording project which was specifically about these strategies
that kids are taught about how to read words. When
they come across words, they don't know what are they
supposed to do, and they do things like they're being
(09:33):
told in classrooms to do things like look at the picture,
think of a word that makes sense, look at the
first letter of the word, look at the last letter
of the word. What's really interesting, monkey.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
There's all these different things that they call it. And
that's how I'm.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Fish chunky monkey, yes, yes.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
And I remember doing this with my kids and I'm like, wait,
we're chunking up this word to see if they can
find a word that they recognize inside of the word
that then they can and maybe figure out what the
rest of the word says, which I thought, I guess
that's how.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
We do it now.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
But then when I listen to what you had to say,
I'm like, well, that makes sense that that's not a
great way to do it. But in that category of
people who's like, Okay, the school knows best, I'm gonna
send my kid there and they're gonna learn to read.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Really absolutely, I think every parent, you know, you basically
go in trusting right, And you know, I think no
small part of this is the role that the pandemic played.
So we can sort of wind back and talk about
some of the historical reasons and how this came to be.
But there's been a lot of parent activism over the
past ten or fifteen years, particularly the parents of kids
(10:37):
with dyslexia, right, So those are the kids who are
really harmed the most when schools are not teaching reading
in ways that line up with what we know about
how people learn to read. And the big aha about
those word reading strategies that you said before is that
when schools teach kids those strategies, it turns out that
they are teaching them the very things that struggling readers
(10:58):
do to get by. Because people are struggling with reading
can have There can be lots of reasons why reading
is hard for you, but a core reason, sort of
the most common and most debilitating source of reading problems
goes back to you just really have trouble with the words.
You don't know very well how to sound them out.
You haven't gotten good practice in that you haven't actually
(11:20):
sort of mapped those words into your memory, so they're
there for instant retrieval because you never really learned how
to sound them out. You don't need to be taught
these strategies. You actually don't need to be told. Look
at the letter, first letter, look at the picture. Think
of a word that makes sense. That's what people do
when they haven't been taught how to sound out the words.
They're thinking, what am I going to do with this word?
(11:41):
That's what they sort of figure out to do. So
that was the huge aha. Without realizing it, these strategies
made their ways into schools and teachers were teaching kids
to read in the ways that struggling readers read. And
I think, yeah, so that was a big aha for me.
And the Oldest Story podcast was really about how did
(12:02):
that happen? How did that happen? Because it doesn't seem
like it could happen. And I think it's important to
recognize that we have actually been arguing about how to
teach reading in this country for a long time. In fact,
you can go back to the founding of public education
in this country and see that there were like crazy
fights in this fabulously like this nineteenth century way where
(12:27):
these people were fighting with each other about how to
teach reading and they were very much fighting about phonics.
So phonics has been at the center of sort of
the wars about reading for a really long time, and
I think in a lot of ways it's been hard
to break through. It's become sort of politicized, and it's
become such a battle for so long that people sort
(12:47):
of assume that this is number one, all about phonics,
which it isn't, which we can come back to. And
number two, there's been sort of an assumption that phonics
is somehow traditional or old fashioned or conservative, and it
has been touted by some sort of conservatives and people
on the right. But I just want to have.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Funny that something that's just a learning process can become
Let's take a quick commercial break.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
We'll continue next on the Tutor Dixon podcast.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That's the thing that really struck me, I think as
I was going through this, because coming out of a
political race, I'm like, oh my gosh, are we just
really making putting these kids in a worse position, Because
it's like when politicians talk about something, it becomes weaponized.
And therefore that's why I said, it's like the solution
no one's actually looking for, because everybody wants to fight
(13:38):
and yet our kids can't read.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I think that's a really good point. And actually I
have to say that I feel kind of helpful, hopeful
on the fact that I think there is starting to
be a lot of bipartis in multipart is an agreement
on all of that. Like, I think a lot of
people come to this and sometimes assume that their old
notions of how this is political and how those politics
(14:02):
play out, and they're surprised. Like education upsets the apple
cart all the time on politics, but this issue in particular.
I mean, I have people following me in social media
on the far right, the far left, and everywhere in between.
And I remember, even when I was starting to talk
to all of these cognitive scientists and others who've been
doing all this really amazing research over the last fifty
(14:25):
years or so that's really revealed all kinds of things
that we didn't know, just about how our brains learned
to read. I remember, you know, getting to that political question,
because inevitably there's so much politics around this. You've been
studying this for so long, Like, what are your politics?
Just tell me a little bit, you know, are you
coming Is there any kind of political game in here
(14:46):
for you. And you know, for the most part, a
lot of these scientists are very left. You know, these
are people in America's universities. Are like, no, I mean,
I don't come to this with any kind of part
as an agenda. I have just been studying how reading
works in the brain and how people learn to do that,
and what do kids need to be taught to become
good readers.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
That is beautiful, and honestly, I will tell you that
the person who sent me your podcast is a dear
friend of mine who's very much on the left. And
I got this text and I was like, I mean
full disclosure. I'm like, oh, what's this going to be,
you know, And I'm like, oh, I love this person.
I'm going to listen to this because they send it
(15:27):
to me and they're important to me.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
But I'm not going to agree with it. That's what
I thought.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And so the first I mean the first few minutes,
I was like, oh, my word, this is what we
are living too.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Right now, you know, with my littlest one.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And I sent it to my mom, who was a
reading specialist years and years ago, and she.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Was like, this is what I haven't been able to.
It's like it's hard.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
You do such a great job of explaining it, because
it's hard to put into words why you think that
this isn't working, because it feels like it should work
because so many people, I mean, you say that it's
about sixty seven thousand elementary schools in the US are
using this program, right, It's a lot.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
It's become very widespread, And I think it's also really
important to recognize that sould a story does actually focus
on some particular programs and particular people who have been
kind of the brand name version of these ideas. You know,
they're sort of like the Klinx or the Google or
whatever of these ideas. But as we say in the
very first episode, these ideas are very widespread. They're in
(16:28):
lots of materials, there's lots of publishing companies. They're sort
of baked into ideas that I think a lot of
people in education have in their head about reading and
how it works. So that's sort of how I what
I was trying to figure out years ago is I
was like, I think there's some sort of ideas, there's
like an ocean that everyone's swimming in about reading and
(16:51):
how to teach it, and it does, and you can
buy this curriculum or that curriculum or that curriculum. But
somehow you still get these ideas because there's a little
bit of it in a lot of curriculum, and it's
passed around from teacher to teacher, all those little eagle
eye and chunky monkey. You know. You go on teachers,
pay teacher, you go on to people, you will find
zillions of those. Right. That is not one publisher selling
(17:14):
that to the nation. That's lots of people selling different
versions of that. But it's all because there was a
certain idea about how this all works that got into
people's minds. And I'll tell you that here's one of
the reasons how I think it happened. I think we
fought about phonics for a long time. So that was
kind of like the lighter fluid in the wars about reading,
and so in some ways, in some ways those wars
(17:36):
kind of ostensibly ended, I don't know, ten or fifteen
years ago, when this thing called balance literacy came in,
which was really supposed to be the best of both worlds,
which was we're not the same old sort of whole language.
People who were saying no phonics, no phonics, no phonics.
We're going to say, fine to phonics. We're going to
add a little bit of phonics in, but we're going
to stick to all these other things too. Are still
(17:56):
going to teach all those other strategies. And that's the
idea that's a story is trying to sort of reveal
and explain, and it's really subtle. It's this really subtle idea.
Like all of sould A Story, all eight episodes of
sold a Story, are just about one idea. It's like
six hours of listening. And the idea is basically, beginning
readers don't have to sound out the written words as
(18:17):
they're learning how to read. They can, but they don't
have to because we can teach them all these other
strategies to figure out what the words say. That's such
a subtle idea. It doesn't seem like a big deal,
but it's a very, very big deal because it turns
out that if you are not really laboriously sounding out
those words when you're starting to learn to read them,
(18:37):
they have a hard time getting into your brain, into
your memory so that they're there and available for you
in an instant. You and I are both good readers.
We know tens of thousands of words instantly on site.
But it's because at some point, maybe when we were
like six or seven years old, we sounded that word
out very laboriously. We connected the sounds and the word
with the spelling of the word, and the meaning of
(18:59):
the word. Three things, the sound, the spelling, and the meaning.
When those three things get linked in your brain, that
word gets into your brain, and that is what allows
you to be able to comprehend what you read, because
the words themselves aren't requiring a lot of brit of work. Right.
Every once in a while, it'll come across a word
that's you don't see that much or you've never seen before.
You have to stop, pause, think about it, sound it out,
(19:21):
maybe look it up whatever. But most of the words
that we're reading you've just got so you were able
to focus your attention on the meaning of what you're reading.
But for people who struggle with reading, they're focusing a
lot of their attention just on the words themselves. They're struggling,
they're trying to figure them out, they're trying to recall
them from memory, and so it's hard to focus on
the meaning of what you're reading. And reading is really slow.
(19:41):
So anyway, I think one of the reasons why those
ideas took off, which when you kind of start to
point out that they don't make sense, I think the
reason they made sense is because English is actually a
pretty difficult language to learn. How to read English is
probably one of the most difficult alphabetic languages to learn.
So even like a typically developing kid who doesn't have
(20:03):
any kind of reading disability is probably going to take
like two or three years with some instruction. Some kids
need a lot, some kids don't need much, but there's
a few years you're going to need to really master
the basics of how to like decode the English language
because it's complex. We have complex spelling patterns. People say,
like English is a wacky language, but it's actually not.
It's actually this really fascinating kind of melting thought language,
(20:24):
right because English is based on like Greek and Latin
and French and Anglo Saxon, and we borrow words from
other languages all the time. It's actually this really cool
language and you can explain the spelling of virtually every
English word if you sort of look at its history.
Where does it come from? And first of all that
stuff is fascinating. So I think one of the reasons
(20:46):
people didn't like phonics is they thought it would be
boring to kids. But the truth is that words and
how they're spelled it's so interesting. There's all kinds of
opportunities to like really teach kids cool stuff. But I
think because English is difficult to learn, means it's difficult
to teach. And there's a lot that teachers need to
know about how written English works that a lot of
us don't know. You can be a good reader without
(21:08):
being able to explain how English words are spelled. But
if you're teaching first grade and you're teaching kids to
do this, you actually need to know quite a bit
more than you and I do about English and how
it works. I don't know that a lot of first
grade teachers thought they were in for that, and a
lot of them didn't get that kind of training. It's
we don't have very good teacher training just sort of overall.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
And they probably went through a lot of these same
strategies when they learned to read.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Absolutely so there's that like a lot of them learned
it in their teacher preparation programs and learned it themselves,
which means I think we're at a whole other point
with the way that this stuff has infused the culture
because the teachers themselves didn't even learn, many of them
how to sound out words when they were in school.
So I think these things caught on because teachers desperately
want to teach their students how to read. I have
(21:56):
not met a stet teacher who doesn't. No one goes
to school thinking I am going to make sure that
these kids that I teach these kids the habits of
struggling readers. No one is doing that, No, absolutely no one.
So you're getting into school, you don't know what you
need to know about written English and how it works.
You actually don't know as a teacher what you need
to know about just how kids learn to read and
(22:18):
why something like phonics instruction is so important. So you're
kind of like, and what do I do. I have
twenty twenty five thirty kids, and I need to teach
them how to read. Oh, here are these strategies. These
strategies can help kids get into books. It's a way
to get them started. I can teach them. Oh, if
you're reading along, you come to a word, you don't
know what you what can you do. It kind of
(22:40):
gets kids going. And the assumption is that if you
kind of get kids going, they'll turn into readers. And
some of them do, but too many of them don't.
And that's what you're seeing, I think when you see
the dramatically poor reading sports we have in the center.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
And two of my girls, what I noticed with two
of them is that they can read the words, but
they don't retain what they meant. I don't know how
to explain that. It's like they can't the comprehension of reading.
They read it to get through it, but then o't.
Just last night, I was working with my sixth grader
and she has to read this article and then tell
(23:16):
me what she got from the article. And she took
a sentence and she's like, that's what it meant. And
I'm like, you just gave me the exact sentence from
the article. No, I'm like, what did that article.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Mean to you?
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And it was a really eye opening moment where I
said to myself, here's my twelve year old and I'm
not fully sure that she can understand what she just read,
that she can grasp the whole concept.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
And she struggles with spelling too. In sixth grade.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I have a sixth grader who struggles with comprehension and spelling,
and I have to say, I feel like it all
ties back to what you're talking about.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
I mean, I can't you know, obviously, I cannot say
for sure. There could be a lot of different things
going on, but I do. I think that's one of
the reasons I've stayed on this for years is because
I've heard from a lot of middle school and high
school teachers who have told me, like who have talked
about how kids really struggle with reading, and they've sort
of vaguely diagnosed it as a comprehension problem, which it is.
(24:15):
But I think one of the things that many of
them are realizing is that it goes back to some
sort of word level reading problems and it can start.
You know, it's not one of the things that I
think is really important to understand. There's this thing called
the Matthew effect, and it comes from the Bible story.
It's like, basically, the rich get richer when it comes
to reading, right, So kids go into school and then
(24:37):
if they got off to a good start in reading,
there's this real reciprocal relationship between learning how to decode
and read the words, and then reading and getting better
at reading and learning more about language and how it works,
and learning new words through reading. Right, So there's this
way that the kids who get off to a good
start just start sort of doing really really well, and
(24:58):
then kids who don't get off to a good start
just sort of It's like it's not like the rich
get richer and the poor get poorer. It's like the
rich get richer and the poor just get a little
bit less poor every year. And that's where these big
gaps come in. So when you have a child in
sixth grade, a lot of things have probably happened, and
she may be able to read the words. I don't
know when you listen to her read out loud, is
(25:19):
she kind of slow? Does she stumble over the words?
Or is she just fluent and she can read them
pretty easily.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
She she's slow. I think she's slower than what I
would imagine my oldest would have been at that age.
It's funny because I have two that are very good
readers that just picked it up, and two that struggle.
And there last night my one of my youngest ones,
one of the twins, the ten year old, we were
both reading through something at the same time, and I
(25:48):
walked away and she said, are you finished reading that already?
How did you do that so fast? So they notice
it too. It's not like they're they don't know what's happening.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, it's interesting. I mean, I think,
if you know, often when people are slow at reading,
it is interfering with their ability to comprehend right, because
they are spending a lot of time for working out
the words. But I think one of the other things
that starts to happen is because I think we're I
think a lot of schools are not getting early reading
instruction right. It sort of compromises what teachers can do
(26:18):
all the way up, so they end up having a
lot of kids in their classes in third grade, fourth grade,
fifth grade who are struggling with reading. And I think
that compromises sort of the level at which they can teach.
And so I think even some of the other things
that would be necessary for a child in sixth grade
to really be good at comprehending what they read, some
of the kinds of comprehension strategies that that maybe she
(26:40):
hasn't been taught or learned a lot of that either.
So it's probably not just a word level problem at
this point, but it probably has its roots in a
word level problem. And this stuff gets really complicated and
messy as kids get older. And I will say it
gets complicated and messy in a lot of other ways,
because when kids struggle a lot of times they really
(27:01):
they feel bad about themselves. They feel kind of embarrassed,
they feel insecure. It's like very common for kids, yeah,
as pet yep, and for kids, especially boys, to start
to distract from their reading problems by having behavior problems.
And it's very common for other kids to shut down.
Often girls, you become the quietest one. You don't want
anyone to call on you. You don't want to be
(27:22):
read allowed to in class, and you don't like school.
And it was it was really it was. It was
parents I was talking to who were talking about like
kids would this one moment was talking about how her
dp she had, like her daughter's fingernails had like scraped
the doorframe of the front door because she would like
hold on to the door and not want to be
taken to the school bus. You know, she's just like
(27:44):
that's hard.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
I know, I know it stinks and it's so hard
because we look at this and I think you're right,
everybody wants kids to learn to read. There's nobody that
goes and no parent that says this one that need
to read, and there's no teacher that says this one
will be fine. I mean, how much good is reading
going to do them? That just doesn't happen. And so
(28:08):
when I listened to your podcast, I.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Was like, wow, Wow, this is.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
A whole new world of we could have, I mean,
so much opportunities. So how do you take that and
create something that works for kids?
Speaker 1 (28:20):
How do how do we make these changes?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
You said there's legislation, How do we do this without
people immediately putting up their wall, because I think that
with education, a lot of people put up a wall
right away.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
They do. It's true. I mean, and you know, changing
education is hard. Schools are complex, you know, school systems
are complex. Change doesn't happen quickly. This stuff does get
caught up in politics. So there's been a lot of
legislative action, some of it in response to sold a story,
but really there was a huge wave of legislative action
(28:54):
over the past like fifteen or twenty years with things
like good implementing that schools have to screen kids because
you really want to catch kids early when they're struggling.
You really want to know who's struggling. Are they using
good screeners, good assessments. There's been some not very good
assessments in schools. You know, are they really getting the
kind of help they need? Is a mom who goes
in and says, my kid is struggling. Does the school
(29:15):
have a plan for them? Does the school know what
to do? So a lot of the legislation was focusing
on that. Since sold a story, we've seen a real
uptick in legislation that's focusing on the curriculum. And that's,
I guess not a surprise because we focused a lot
on the curriculum. I think it's important to recognize that
while sort of getting rid of curriculum that has wrong
ideas in it, it may be really important. The solution
(29:38):
isn't necessarily just buy a new curriculum. You go buy
a new curriculum. Is the school board, the superintendent says,
use this three years from now, we should expect, you know,
kids will be reading better. That is not going to happen.
That hasn't happened because this is complicated stuff. It's so
much more of it really has to do with the
teacher knowledge the teacher uptick is their teacher using it.
(29:58):
Has the teacher gotten good training on how to use it.
There's no perfect curriculum out there either. You know, people
are saying, you know, go get a science of reading curriculum,
but there's no such thing. You know, the science of
reading is a body of research. It's not a thing
you do. It's not a program you buy, it's not
a law you pass. You know, it's a body of
research that thousands of cognitive scientists and psychologists and other
(30:20):
researchers all over the world and all kinds of languages
have been studying reading for the past fifty years. And
what my reporting has really focused on is what does
that research say. Why haven't teachers in schools known more
about it? And now the question is what do we do?
So this is where you know, many many teachers are
looking up and saying to the people above them the principles,
(30:40):
the superintendent's, the school boards, their state legislature, help me.
I need help. I need better materials, I need better training.
So a lot of this legislative response is in response
to that people on the bottom saying please help. But
of course every kind of legislative response has unintended consequences, right,
And I think when things get too top down, you
(31:01):
just it's a careful balance between top down and bottom up.
And I think we're just we're really in the midst
of that. There's been a wave of legislation, and I
think that's legislation can get people's attention on a problem. Right,
But just because you pass a law doesn't mean that
the law's going to get implemented well, that it's going
to get followed. So there's a lot to be done
for everyone to do to kind of keep their eyes
(31:21):
on are these laws having their intended effect, are they
being implemented well? Is there the proper support training A
lot of times that needs money to implement this. Well,
there's a lot to keep an eye on.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon podcast. From just this talk today, that
we have teachers listening, that we have school board members listening,
and they just go, wow, this is an opportunity to
bring some some something extra to the school to make
(31:55):
sure that our kids are succeeding. Because we have horrendous
reading proficiency rates across the country and people can say, oh,
it's in certain districts, but we're seeing it no matter what.
It doesn't matter what district you're in, you can still
have a terrible reading proficiency rate. And that is, like
I said, no matter what you want to do in
the future, and no matter what class you are in,
(32:17):
whether it's math or science or history, you have to
be able to read. And so this is just holding
kids behind in every area. So I'm excited that. I mean,
we could talk about this.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I could talk to you about this for hours, but
you did talk about it for about six hours. So
I want people to go listen to that because I really,
I mean, I cannot tell you if you have kids
in school or if you have grandchildren, you will listen
to this podcast and it will be an AHA moment
and it will inspire you to, even if it's not
(32:50):
as your school to at home, take a look at
things differently. Because like I said, I sent it right
to my mom. We were both like, oh, my goodness,
this is wild because now you just see what and
you I mean, I got to tell you. I felt
guilty because I'm like, how did I not see some
of this, but but I don't like the teachers who
even said, well, I just thought this was the best way.
(33:13):
So tell people who are listening where they can go
to get the podcast, listened to the podcast, and follow you.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
It's called sold a Story, So you can just go
to your favorite podcast app if you're a podcast listener
and just put in sold a Story. We have a
website soldastory dot org, so you can listen to it
all there. You can also find links. We have some
articles there. We have a piece. We have an article
which is about some of the legislative action that's taken
place in the wake of Solda story, and you can
(33:42):
follow me. I'm on formerly known as Twitter x at
e hanfouth And yeah, I hope you do listen and
check out the two bonus episodes and stay tuned to
your feet because there's going to be another episode coming
in the new year.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Good. I'm going to check those out, and honestly, I
hope that people here will share. I've shared it on
Twitter formally or ext formally known as Twitter, whatever we
call it now. I've shared it several times, and I
honestly think that it's sort of one of those things
where I am considered a Republican, so people are like, oh,
it's some a crazy thing. So I'm hoping that there
are people who are tuning in. But for all of
(34:17):
the people who are listening to this podcast, you have
the power to share this and it's not it's not political.
This is about getting kids to read, which I love.
I just love it, honestly. So thank you Emily Hanford,
thank you so much for being on.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
With us today, thank you for your interest.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Absolutely, and thank you all for joining us on this
very cool episode of the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this
episode and others, you can check out tutordisonpodcast dot com
subscribe right there, or go to the iHeartRadio app or
wherever you get your podcasts and join us the next
time on the Tutor Dixon Podcast.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Have a blessed day.
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