The disturbing truth about a huge educational error

The most terrifying podcast I listened to so far this year was not about the death of American democracy or even Jordan Peele’s new horror offering (though more of that at a later date). Rather, it was a podcast about reading.

Sold a Story, Emily Hanford’s new six-parter highlighting how American kids have been learning – or more accurately, not learning – to read for decades, is an investigation into why teachers, parents, and governments came to believe in a methodology that she says caused harm to a generation of children.

Maybe the reading wars in the US are not new to you, but just in case, a recap: two different pedagogical approaches to teaching kids to read have long been battling it out in the US and in other countries too, and this podcast makes a compelling case that only one of them works.

The Whole Language approach, which emphasises exposure to and immersion in books, making meaning from stories instead of individual words, and employing a three-cueing method that encourages students to look for context, syntactical, and visual cues to make sense of the reading material was ascendant for decades. This fuzzy, reading-by-osmosis vibe caught on with progressive educators who were told it would create lifelong readers. The other one? That’s phonics, the one most common in Irish primary schools, centred on laboriously sounding out the letters and syllables to make words.

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The result? According to a test run by the US department of education, some 65 per cent of fourth graders – that’s 9-10-year-olds – are unable to read proficiently.

Hanford, a senior correspondent with radio giant American Public Media, has done serious, dogged digging on this subject for years, and she knows it well. But she brings fresh reporting and lively storytelling skills to the unsexy subject of school curriculums, leveraging her journalistic chops while making clear the gobsmacking importance of the stakes.

For Sold a Story, Hanford requested records from close to 200 school districts, mined archives and libraries, watched VHS video, and reached out to educators and parents across the United States. She includes a range of voices in this expertly scripted podcast: parents of kids who can’t read, parents who taught their kids to read, adults who grew up unable to read – a Vietnam vet’s story of being unable to write down his dying comrade’s last words is particularly affecting – teachers, cognitive scientists, and even one of the most influential architects of the three-cueing approach, Lucy Calkins, whose semi-apostasy resulted in a revised curriculum.

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Calkins has worked for years with Heinemann, an educational publishing powerhouse, and that’s where the buck stops for Hanford. Megabucks stop there, in fact, given that by her calculations Heinemann earned $1.6 billion (€1.5 billion) from book sales over the decade before the pandemic. Two other authors from Heinemann – Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, who also became big names for their work rooted in the Whole Language or balanced literary approach – declined to be interviewed for this podcast, and it’s a shame. Though Hanford finds a way to include their voices, their case is never fully made, nor is anybody on the podcast robustly defending the controversial three-cueing method. You might wonder how an approach without scientific support ever had so many devotees in the first place, but Hanford also shows us how seductive these approaches can be, and how convinced so many were that what they were doing would help kids fall in love with reading.

Ultimately, Sold a Story represents some kind of Battle of Hastings in the reading wars – it seems clear we’re not going back from here – and serves as a warning to educators everywhere. Over six episodes, Hanford shows that as the grown-ups duked it out, a generation of children were harmed. In a glorious piece of craft, she closes the series by having young children reading the credits. It reminds the listener what a vital exercise it is to learn to read, and that it should never be sacrificed to politics or business. That’s a story worth selling.