10: The Details

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Speaker 7 I just think it's pretty cool to be in a podcast because like everybody hears it and like then I'm just like, oh my god, that's me. I did that.

Speaker 8 That's Zoe Gall.

Speaker 9 We introduced you to her in our first episode.

Speaker 6 Did you listen to the podcast?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I did.

Speaker 13 What was it like to hear about other kids who were struggling to learn how to read?

Speaker 5 It was pretty cool.

Speaker 7 I mean, like, it's not cool that they're struggling how to learn to read, but like,

Speaker 7 you know.

Speaker 12 there are a lot of kids who struggle to learn how to read and i think that hearing you and hearing the other kids who are on the podcast was really um validating for those kids because they realize like they're not alone yeah

Speaker 17 I'm Emily Hanford and this is Soul to Story, a podcast from APM Reports.

Speaker 16 In our previous episode, we heard what's been going on with the people and organizations at the center of our investigation.

Speaker 22 In this episode, we're going to tell you about some of the other people who are in the podcast.

Speaker 14 Kids, parents, teachers, and scientists. What's happened to them since Solda's story came out? What do they think about what's happened in response to the podcast?

Speaker 9 We're going to start with Zoe Gall.

Speaker 9 Zoe was in first grade when I went to New York City in the spring of 2021 to meet with her and and her dad.

Speaker 6 They lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Speaker 25 They still live in the neighborhood in a new apartment.

Speaker 20 And Zoe still goes to the same public school where she's now in fourth grade.

Speaker 13 And how is fourth grade going so far?

Speaker 7 It's going pretty amazing.

Speaker 7 Two of my best friends are in my class this year. And then I have a really cool teacher.

Speaker 31 Cool teacher?

Speaker 32 What makes her cool?

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 6 She's just cool.

Speaker 27 And Zoe says reading is going well.

Speaker 12 Do you feel like you're a good reader?

Speaker 7 Yeah, I do.

Speaker 8 I asked her if she'd be up for reading out loud again.

Speaker 12 You willing to do that?

Speaker 6 Mm-hmm. You have a book?

Speaker 7 Yes, I do.

Speaker 34 She's got a brand new book, one she's never read before.

Speaker 5 Okay,

Speaker 7 so chapter one.

Speaker 4 Is that her?

Speaker 7 Stop pushing, I can't see.

Speaker 5 Ooh!

Speaker 7 Friends, quiet. You're going to ruin everything.
A cab is coming. Quick, hide.
15-year-old Isa and 12-year-old Oliver raced down, raced around to the side of the brownstone. Hurry.

Speaker 7 Hyacinth.

Speaker 28 Hyacinth.

Speaker 10 Pretty impressive.

Speaker 35 She's a really good reader.

Speaker 9 This is Zoe's dad, Lee Gall.

Speaker 35 And I think...

Speaker 35 It speaks to the fact that certain things that we did together when I was teaching her my phonics curriculum that I cobbled together, they really stuck and they really helped her connect the dots on how to read despite the way they taught.

Speaker 36 Zoe's school will have to change the way it teaches reading.

Speaker 6 The school uses the Lucy Cockins reading curriculum.

Speaker 14 And as you heard in the last episode, all New York City public schools will have to stop using that curriculum.

Speaker 20 They're supposed to be using something new by next school year.

Speaker 37 But when I did this interview with Lee last fall, he told me nothing had changed so far.

Speaker 35 It has not changed. The school knows about Solda's story.
The principal there let me know. She's like, I know about the podcast.

Speaker 35 But we didn't talk about it at all. She just said she knew about it.
And

Speaker 35 essentially, they basically were like, we disagree.

Speaker 40 I asked the principal for an interview, but she declined.

Speaker 10 Lee says it feels like the podcast is something no one is supposed to mention at school. He has talked to a few parents about it.

Speaker 35 But these are private moments. This is not somebody going and saying in front of the entire Parents Association and teachers, bringing any of those things up that I know of.

Speaker 35 You know, it's one of those like,

Speaker 42 hey, by the way, that was really great.

Speaker 35 And a shh, like, oh, somebody's coming to bring, you know, it almost feels like that.

Speaker 40 When I first met Lee, he told me there were other parents at the school who were concerned about the reading instruction.

Speaker 6 Now, three years later, he says they've all left.

Speaker 5 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 12 And what are they doing instead?

Speaker 34 Do you know?

Speaker 35 They're going to either private or Catholic school.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah.
They're all gone.

Speaker 20 But of course, there's always tutoring for the kids who stay.

Speaker 35 The other day when I was walking Zoe to school, there was a guy in the corner with a banner stand and he was the tutor doctor.

Speaker 35 And like, you know, in our neighborhood, I'm sure he got tons of business because what people do when they think that their child is struggling is they just spend money on a tutor because they have the extra income to be able to do that.

Speaker 6 Lee's glad that balanced literacy is on its way out of New York City public schools and that Lucy Cawkins is out as head of her teacher training institute.

Speaker 14 I asked him what he thought when he first heard that news.

Speaker 35 I have a lot of Schadenfreude, you know,

Speaker 35 this real satisfaction,

Speaker 35 but it's too little, too late. I mean, damage has been done for so long.

Speaker 5 People are going to struggle their whole lives

Speaker 35 with not being able to read very well.

Speaker 14 For parents who believe their children did not get what they needed, watching balanced literacy fall has felt like a victory.

Speaker 19 Missy Purcell remembers when she heard last year that her school district would be dropping the reading recovery program.

Speaker 45 It just felt so.

Speaker 45 I may have gone out to have cocktails, if I'm may realize.

Speaker 47 Missy's son Matthew was in reading recovery.

Speaker 14 You heard about Matthew in episode five.

Speaker 22 He struggled for years and didn't get the instruction he needed in public school.

Speaker 6 So by the end of Seoul's story, he was in sixth grade at a private school that specialized in helping kids with dyslexia.

Speaker 12 And you said that after just one year in that school, he was almost up to grade level in reading and writing.

Speaker 13 So how is Matthew doing now?

Speaker 45 Oh, you just asking that question. I'm like already tearing up.
So here we go.

Speaker 18 He is doing so great.

Speaker 48 First of all, I was told he would never be a fluent reader.

Speaker 2 He's a fluent reader.

Speaker 6 She says he's happy.

Speaker 49 He's got a lot of friends. He's playing baseball.

Speaker 11 And he's a confident student now.

Speaker 45 He has just, he's just blossomed and I could not be more proud.

Speaker 50 And I want that for every kid.

Speaker 45 I don't want my kid to be a unicorn.

Speaker 51 I do believe every kid can read.

Speaker 23 Every kid, it's doable.

Speaker 13 This is Sarah Gannon, another parent from Soul to Story, who ended up moving her child to a private school.

Speaker 51 She said to me the other day, I just feel like people get me.

Speaker 51 And now all of a sudden you can see she doesn't think she's dumb anymore.

Speaker 14 Sarah Gannon was the reading specialist in episode three, who put her faith in Fountess and Pennell.

Speaker 52 I trusted that they're experts.

Speaker 51 I trusted that this is the way you teach reading.

Speaker 14 But when her own daughter couldn't read and Sarah wasn't able to help her, she found the science of reading.

Speaker 9 And eventually she quit her job because her district wasn't willing to change.

Speaker 28 She says some of her former colleagues, people she considered friends, are not interested in changing the way they teach kids to read.

Speaker 27 And they don't want to talk about it with her anymore.

Speaker 51 And at the end of the day,

Speaker 51 you know, we've moved apart and I think that's just unfortunately how it has to be.

Speaker 17 Sarah says Solda's story has been hard for many teachers to hear.

Speaker 51 No one likes to be criticized, especially when it's as personal as teaching. Teaching is a very personal career because it involves children and it involves their lives.

Speaker 51 And if you feel like you're not doing something right and you potentially harm them, I think it's really hard because no one goes into teaching that I know of to harm people.

Speaker 51 It's because you are a helper by nature. And most teachers I work with want to do it right.

Speaker 36 Sarah has a new job now helping school districts that are changing the way they teach reading.

Speaker 25 She wants teachers and district leaders to learn how to be critical consumers of curriculum, to ask what is the research behind this and to be able to evaluate that research.

Speaker 20 She says that's what was missing before.

Speaker 51 I think those of us who came from that movement of balanced literacy where it was almost like blindly accepting what we do, I hope I know for myself have become a little bit more thoughtful and critical and not just taking someone's word for it.

Speaker 11 This is what I was hoping our reporting would do.

Speaker 6 I was hoping it would get more people curious about the scientific research on reading, that people, especially teachers, would listen and want to know more.

Speaker 14 And I wanted people to understand that this is not just about whether schools teach phonics.

Speaker 34 It's about whether they teach that other idea, the idea that beginning readers don't have to sound out written words because there are other strategies they can use instead.

Speaker 20 I wanted to show people why that idea is a problem and how it became so influential in early reading instruction.

Speaker 48 That was new information for people.

Speaker 36 This is Christine Cronin.

Speaker 29 You met her in episode three.

Speaker 14 She was the teacher in Boston who ultimately resisted that big effort by George W.

Speaker 19 Bush 20 years ago to get the science of reading into schools.

Speaker 6 She resisted because she felt like she was being told what to do and she didn't understand why.

Speaker 6 And she says people need to know why.

Speaker 48 Especially in education where people are often looking for the next shiny object.

Speaker 48 People become initiative weary.

Speaker 50 And when you told the whole story,

Speaker 48 there was a lot of information that people didn't have access to without having heard you report on it that made it beyond just, oh, this is just the next new thing to, wow, this, there was a flaw here all along that we weren't privy to at the time.

Speaker 48 And now we have that information and now we can approach this shift, not just as, oh, gosh, it's a new, new thing, but, oh, I really, I should learn more about this.

Speaker 48 I think that that's the difference that I think that it made.

Speaker 22 She's now in charge of professional development for the Boston Public Schools, where she's working with a team to oversee a big change in reading instruction.

Speaker 36 The school system started doing this before Sold a Story, but she thinks some teachers who were resistant are more interested now because they heard the podcast, or maybe they're just hearing people talking about the science of reading.

Speaker 48 Those conversations are happening through social media. They're happening in sort of all levels of people's experiences as educators.

Speaker 48 And so they definitely are coming into learning experiences curious and open, I think, in a deeper way, if they maybe had not been before.

Speaker 19 And she says, the scientific research is more accessible to teachers than it was 20 years ago during Bush's Reading First program.

Speaker 14 There are now lots of books and articles and videos and podcasts that explain the research.

Speaker 48 And it's not this sort of mysterious thing that I felt like you could only get the knowledge from a few, you know, people who held it.

Speaker 24 And it's not just that the information is more widely available now.

Speaker 9 It's that teachers are sharing this information with each other.

Speaker 48 And it's just, it changes everything as far as how people feel connected to the work. And we didn't feel that way during the Reading First era.

Speaker 48 We felt like something was being done to us as opposed to being collaborators as part of a movement.

Speaker 41 I do think it's different this time.

Speaker 20 This is Reed Lion, the neuroscientist you met in Solda's story who helped develop Reading First.

Speaker 41 What's changed is this tremendous hunger for information.

Speaker 41 It's the first time I've ever experienced people asking me, where can I find more information so I can really do this well?

Speaker 14 It's kind of blowing his mind.

Speaker 41 People who heretofore would have said,

Speaker 41 off, you know, I know what I'm doing, now say, I can't believe that I thought that.

Speaker 16 He's feeling hopeful that things are going to change for the better.

Speaker 14 But he also has concerns because he says the science of reading has become a movement.

Speaker 41 What I'm fearful of, because I've seen it so many times, is

Speaker 41 movements

Speaker 41 sometimes gloss over detail.

Speaker 41 And here's the details are so critical.

Speaker 10 When we come back, we're going to talk about some of the details.

Speaker 57 Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second-grade Challenger School class. They're studying Charlotte's Web.

Speaker 52 How would you describe Charlotte compared to Wilbur?

Speaker 58 I would describe Charlotte as self-reliant.

Speaker 59 I would rather have a self-reliant friend because then they would want to work for things that they get and they would want to earn it instead of just having it given to them.

Speaker 57 Those students are seven.

Speaker 15 Starting early and starting right makes a real difference.

Speaker 57 Learn more at challengerschool.com.

Speaker 56 In episode three of Solda's story, you heard the former superintendent of public instruction in California

Speaker 15 testifying before state lawmakers.

Speaker 42 I agree with the chair's comments. There is no issue facing education that's more crucial right now than how and whether we teach our youngsters to read all of them.

Speaker 38 Bill Hoenig told lawmakers he'd made mistakes when he was superintendent because he didn't know enough about how children learn to read.

Speaker 16 But he said he'd learned from cognitive scientists and he was optimistic that reading instruction would change.

Speaker 42 I think we can turn this around very, very quickly. The field is ready.
The teachers are ready. They know that there's a problem.
They're willing to play ball.

Speaker 20 This was in 1996.

Speaker 28 And as you know, things didn't turn out the way Bill Hoenig hoped.

Speaker 16 That's why we made this podcast. We wanted to know why scientific research from decades ago still wasn't making its way into many schools.

Speaker 11 What we discovered is that there was an idea that was in the way.

Speaker 6 An idea about how kids learn to read that was in conflict conflict with what the research said. This idea was everywhere.

Speaker 16 It was embedded in books and curriculum materials and assessment systems and intervention programs that were being sold by many people and many publishing companies and most successfully by the people and the company we've been focusing on in this podcast.

Speaker 8 The idea is that kids don't need to be taught how to sound out written words because they can use other strategies to figure out what the words say.

Speaker 23 This entire podcast has been about that one idea and how that idea justified an approach to teaching reading that didn't include much phonics.

Speaker 44 That approach, often referred to as balanced literacy, is now being scrutinized by a lot of people.

Speaker 50 The science of reading movement and the laws in particular have had the effect of dislodging, not completely, but certainly pushing that approach off the pedestal and opening the door to doing different things.

Speaker 20 This is Mark Seidenberg, one of the cognitive scientists you heard in Sold's story.

Speaker 8 And like Reed Lyon, who you heard before the break, Mark is thrilled and kind of amazed that there's such an interest right now in the science of reading.

Speaker 50 So we have all this antipathy to science in so many parts of the country and with regard to many issues.

Speaker 50 And in reading, you have all these people who who are saying, we want to know more, we want to know more. And that's great.

Speaker 31 But like Reed, Mark is worried about the details.

Speaker 6 The details of how schools are translating the science of reading into practice.

Speaker 31 So we're going to talk about some of the details because the details matter here.

Speaker 39 I'm going to start with Mark and then bring in Reed.

Speaker 27 And I'm going to offer some of my own thoughts too.

Speaker 15 Mark Seidenberg's concerns are mostly about how the science itself is being understood or misunderstood by teachers and curriculum developers.

Speaker 44 As you heard in episode 8, the science of reading isn't a program you buy or a thing you do.

Speaker 17 It's a body of research.

Speaker 49 And this research has important implications for how schools teach reading.

Speaker 15 But Mark says only a few big ideas from the research literature seem to be getting through, and he thinks that's a problem.

Speaker 50 There are big parts of the literature people haven't gotten to for various reasons. And I would say the main one is the stuff we know about learning.

Speaker 29 The stuff we know about learning.

Speaker 14 Let me back up a bit to explain what he's talking about.

Speaker 20 First of all, he sees many successes when it comes to how the science of reading is changing instruction in many schools.

Speaker 11 There's a lot of good news here.

Speaker 50 It has definitely focused attention on the need to teach kids basic reading skills like about print and about how print relates to language and how language relates to the world.

Speaker 50 And it did definitely increase awareness of a true fact, which is that kids need instruction in these areas and that that's an important thing to do.

Speaker 31 This is a big deal.

Speaker 14 Lots of kids were struggling because they were being left to figure out too many things on their own.

Speaker 60 I'm going to read a little bit of this story to you and if I get stuck on a word, I want you to try to help me figure out what that word could be.

Speaker 19 This is that lesson you heard in episode one where children were being taught to use the meaning of the story to guess a written word.

Speaker 60 Do you think that covered word could be the word miss?

Speaker 60 Because now that they're gone, maybe their parents will miss them?

Speaker 11 One of the big lessons from the scientific research is that schools need to explicitly teach beginning readers how to sound out written words.

Speaker 5 Because kids who don't get off to a good start with decoding often end up with reading problems they may never get over.

Speaker 14 Remember this fourth grader trying to read in episode one?

Speaker 46 About

Speaker 46 10%

Speaker 21 to the balanced literacy approach, with its emphasis on teaching kids other strategies for identifying words, failed to provide many kids with the decoding instruction they needed.

Speaker 28 But Mark is concerned that in their enthusiasm to teach things they weren't before, some schools may be going overboard.

Speaker 50 I think people had the idea that, look, we've been leaving too many kids behind. We've been doing a poor job.
We know what the parts of reading are, and we will teach them. God damn it.

Speaker 14 And what he's seeing now, when he visits schools, when he talks to teachers, when he reads what they're saying online, is that some schools may be teaching kids more than they need to know.

Speaker 50 I've seen first grade classrooms where phonological awareness is the big term that's on the wall, or teaching kids what diphthongs are.

Speaker 31 The point is, children need to be taught how to read.

Speaker 27 They need to know how to identify the sounds in words, but they don't need to know that's phonological awareness.

Speaker 27 And they need to know that the letters OI make the sound OI in coin, but they don't need to know that's a diphthong.

Speaker 50 I think there's a failure to distinguish what a teacher might need to know about how language works and how reading works and what the kid needs to learn.

Speaker 19 He's concerned that teachers now think they have to teach kids everything there is to know about how English spelling works, every spelling pattern, every exception, every rule.

Speaker 50 And so you have the emergence of a view that really emphasizes explicitly teaching everything that goes into becoming a reader.

Speaker 38 There's not enough time in the school day to teach kids everything they need to know about how written language works.

Speaker 25 And more importantly, it's not necessary.

Speaker 50 There's another kind of learning.

Speaker 44 This other kind of learning has a name.

Speaker 50 Implicit learning or statistical learning.

Speaker 14 This kind of learning occurs without explicit instruction.

Speaker 6 Mark Seidenberg's research has shown that the brain has a remarkable ability to learn from the statistical regularities in language, such as the frequency of certain spelling patterns in words.

Speaker 36 Explicit instruction is critical at first.

Speaker 14 Most kids don't just start picking this up.

Speaker 18 But research shows that a lot of what a good reader eventually knows about words and how they're spelled and what they mean is stuff they learned implicitly through reading.

Speaker 16 Mark says the goal of reading instruction should not be to teach kids everything they need to know.

Speaker 43 It should be to teach them enough so that this implicit or statistical learning can kick in.

Speaker 50 You know, there's this idea of cracking the code where the light bulb goes on and the kid kind of goes, oh, that's how it works.

Speaker 40 Remember Kamari?

Speaker 44 You heard Kamari having a light bulb moment in episode two.

Speaker 13 Kamari got a lot of phonics instruction, not on things like what a diphthong is, but on how to sound out written words.

Speaker 38 He needed extra help.

Speaker 6 But eventually, he was able to decode words with spelling patterns he hadn't been taught.

Speaker 37 That's implicit learning. That kind of learning depends on lots and lots of practice.

Speaker 61 And Mark Seidenberg is worried that schools may now be spending too much time on instruction and not giving kids enough time to read.

Speaker 38 Remember the cozy nooks?

Speaker 14 I mentioned them in episode 6.

Speaker 16 I said that people with good intentions wanted to get kids curled up with books as fast as they could.

Speaker 6 They wanted to get kids to the good part, which is reading.

Speaker 28 So they taught beginning readers shortcuts, like look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense, in the hopes that eventually kids would figure out how to read.

Speaker 23 That approach failed to recognize how difficult it is for many children to learn how to decode words.

Speaker 44 But Mark Seidenberg wants everyone to be cognizant of the fact that time in a cozy nook curled up with a book is essential.

Speaker 40 You become a good reader by spending a lot of time reading.

Speaker 23 But there's that critical first step, learning how to decode, that can't be skipped or given short shrift.

Speaker 40 And here's the thing, figuring out the amount of instruction that each child needs and making sure each child gets that instruction, that's a complex task.

Speaker 19 And Read Lion is concerned that with all the new laws and policies and public awareness about the science of reading, schools and teachers are under pressure to do things quickly and they might not have what they need to do things well.

Speaker 41 Whenever you're trying to

Speaker 41 put anything in place, you got to have time to do it. You got to have teachers who feel like they're being taken care of.

Speaker 41 You know, the nuts and bolts of helping people work together and feel supportive, as hokey as that sounds, is so critical.

Speaker 14 He learned this the hard way through his experience 20 years ago with Reading First.

Speaker 17 He thought if educators learned about the research, instruction would change.

Speaker 41 I thought just saying the words would get it done.

Speaker 38 What he learned is that information is not enough.

Speaker 20 He says the key thing to think about is how do complex systems change?

Speaker 31 What's the best way to do that?

Speaker 20 And one of the lessons from Reading First is that top-down policies are not necessarily effective when the goal is complex systems change.

Speaker 19 That's why Reed has concerns about laws that are telling schools they have to do things and they have to do them fast.

Speaker 41 Where my fear is, is it takes us away from the details I'm talking about and the love for learning the details back to a combative

Speaker 41 stance where you're blowing out a lot of epinephrine and orepinephrine and cortisol.

Speaker 14 That's the neuroscientist talking.

Speaker 56 He's referring to chemicals in our brain that get released when we're stressed.

Speaker 36 He wants to avoid this, to avoid the kind of fight that eventually took down reading first.

Speaker 6 And he is optimistic because, as he said earlier, he does think something is different this time.

Speaker 41 There's a thoughtfulness about reading in the country today. There is an actual mature conversation.

Speaker 19 But there are intense debates going on right now on social media and among teachers and researchers about the details of how to teach kids to read and how to do it at scale.

Speaker 3 Because that's the task here.

Speaker 43 Getting thousands of school districts to make the right kinds of changes so that millions of kids can become better readers.

Speaker 23 It's a tall order.

Speaker 38 I'm worried that things will fall apart under pressure.

Speaker 14 The pressure of new laws and policies in particular.

Speaker 9 It's tricky.

Speaker 23 Policy has an important role to play here.

Speaker 29 Schools and teachers often need the resources that can come with policy, things like money for new training and materials.

Speaker 14 And policy has a key role to play when it comes to accountability.

Speaker 21 Sometimes pressure is necessary to change the status quo.

Speaker 44 But what's happening now is that schools and districts are buying new curriculum and materials, sometimes because they have to.

Speaker 54 They're spending a lot of money committing to new products.

Speaker 18 And there are a lot of questions to ask about these new products.

Speaker 6 What's the evidence they will lead to better results?

Speaker 3 This is one of the things Mark Zeidenberg is really worried about.

Speaker 14 He's worried that schools will commit to doing things in a certain way because they have bought a particular product that tells them to do it that way.

Speaker 50 If people decide that all we need to do is stick to the program here and everyone will read, I think that would be a really big mistake.

Speaker 20 And something that's troubling him is a kind of dogmatism that he's noticing in conversations these days around the science of reading.

Speaker 30 People expressing strong beliefs, joining teams, and becoming committed to new programs and new authorities.

Speaker 50 One thing I see is there is this sort of authoritarian strain where people want to have someone they can rely on for guidance.

Speaker 50 It's like we need to have an authority who we can rely on to tell us what to do. And one of the problems with people like Lucy Cawkins were, well, she took on that role and she was a flawed resource.

Speaker 14 Here's what I think.

Speaker 14 I think as a nation, we need to approach what's happening now as a work in progress.

Speaker 33 Keep learning new things and be prepared to course correct if necessary.

Speaker 55 But this is hard to do in education because it's such a big system with so many parts and so many people and so much money involved and so much at stake.

Speaker 55 What I can see is that the Soul to Story podcast and our earlier reporting has helped to raise awareness about the body of research known as the science of reading.

Speaker 54 It spurred a lot of action and reaction, and now it's kind of messy out there.

Speaker 28 And that means we're not done with this story.

Speaker 23 There's a lot more to report on, and we're going to do that.

Speaker 22 We want to know what's working in schools as they are changing how they teach reading, and what's not working, and why.

Speaker 14 There's more coming in this podcast.

Speaker 29 If you want to be sure to get new episodes, follow the show in your podcast app.

Speaker 15 You can also sign up for our email list.

Speaker 16 If you have a story you want to share, please email us.

Speaker 14 You can find our address, sign up for the email list, and get a link to our website in the show notes.

Speaker 16 You can also find links there to an article and a talk by Mark Seidenberg about his concerns with translating the science of reading into practice, and a piece by Reed Lyon on what he believes are the most important findings from the reading research, with tons of citations if you want to read more.

Speaker 11 This episode was produced by me with Christopher Peake.

Speaker 54 Our editors are Chris Julin and Curtis Gilbert. Mixing and sound design by Chris Julin and Emily Hoffick.
Our theme music is by Wonderly.

Speaker 11 Final mastering of this episode was by Derek Ramirez.

Speaker 14 We had reporting help from Annika Best and fact-checking by Betsy Towner-Levine.

Speaker 3 Special thanks to Emily Corwin, Chris Haxel, and Margaret Goldberg for listening to early versions of this episode and providing feedback.

Speaker 54 Andy Cruz is our digital editor, Tom Scheck is our deputy managing editor, and our executive editor is Jane Helmke.

Speaker 54 Support for Solda's Story comes from the Oak Foundation, IBIS Group, and the Hollyhawk Foundation.