Hard Words: Why Aren't Our Kids Being Taught to Read?

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Speaker 5 Hi, this is Emily Hanford, host of Soul a Story. If you're just finding this podcast, please go back to the first episode and start there, and then come back for this extra episode.

Speaker 5 This is an audio documentary I produced four years ago.

Speaker 2 It's called Hard Words.

Speaker 5 We're putting it on this audio feed because we think that if you liked Soul to Story, you'll be interested in this program too. We will have a bonus episode of Sold a Story coming soon, too.

Speaker 5 This documentary, Hard Words, was originally released on September 10th, 2018.

Speaker 8 From American Public Media, this is an APM Reports documentary.

Speaker 11 I'm Emily Hanford.

Speaker 12 It was 2015, and Jack Silva had a problem.

Speaker 17 He's the chief academic officer for the public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a lot of the kids in his schools were not reading well.

Speaker 20 Only 56% of third graders were scoring proficient on the state reading test.

Speaker 13 He knew nothing about how kids learn to read or how reading should be taught, but he did know that even some older students were struggling with pretty basic stuff when it came to reading.

Speaker 24 I was a middle school and high school teacher for many years, and I could see students who had difficulty with breaking down individual words.

Speaker 13 They'd come across a word they'd never seen before and have no idea how to sound it out.

Speaker 34 Kim Harper noticed the same thing.

Speaker 20 She was a high school English teacher in Bethlehem and she says a disturbing number of her students were were not very good readers, even students in honors classes.

Speaker 40 They didn't like to read. They avoided reading.
They would tell me it was too hard.

Speaker 13 She didn't know what to do about it either, so she kind of shrugged it off.

Speaker 40 I think it became easy to say, well, that's just the way it is, and you're always going to have X percent of kids who it's just going to be a struggle for.

Speaker 43 Less than 60% of kids reading proficiently.

Speaker 4 It wasn't shocking.

Speaker 34 It's just the way things were.

Speaker 45 It was always, well, that's not a reflection of Bethlehem. That's a portion of us.

Speaker 33 Mike Fasanetto is president of the Bethlehem School Board.

Speaker 45 Well, you know, those kids, their parents aren't around, or maybe they don't have two parents or one parent, or maybe they're a grandmother, and that's the best they're going to do.

Speaker 47 It's true that the district's poorest schools had the worst reading scores.

Speaker 34 There are lots of low-income families here, but there are fancy homes here, too.

Speaker 47 And when Chief Academic Officer Jack Silva was examining the reading scores, he saw there were plenty of kids at the wealthier schools not reading very well either.

Speaker 13 This was not just poverty.

Speaker 54 Since he knew nothing about reading, he started searching online.

Speaker 13 There's a whole lot of research about how kids learn to read.

Speaker 58 There are thousands of studies.

Speaker 59 This is Louisa Moates.

Speaker 6 She's been teaching and researching reading since the 1970s.

Speaker 58 This is the most studied aspect of human learning.

Speaker 56 One of the many things researchers have learned over the years is that virtually all kids can learn to read.

Speaker 13 Researchers have done studies in classrooms and in clinics, and they've shown over and over that somewhere between 1 and 6% of kids have such severe learning disabilities that they will probably always struggle with reading.

Speaker 9 But everyone else can learn to read if they are taught.

Speaker 68 The problem is lots of kids aren't being taught, at least not in ways that line up with what science says about how children learn to read.

Speaker 56 The result?

Speaker 13 More than 6 in 10 fourth graders in the United States are not proficient readers.

Speaker 51 30 million adults struggle to read a basic passage of text.

Speaker 4 And this is not just a poverty problem.

Speaker 69 One-third of struggling readers are from college-educated families.

Speaker 34 From APM reports, this is hard words.

Speaker 52 Why aren't our kids being taught to read?

Speaker 7 Kids who struggle to read are more likely to drop out of high school.

Speaker 4 They're more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

Speaker 31 They're more likely to live in poverty when they grow up.

Speaker 13 But we shouldn't have so many struggling readers.

Speaker 34 Over the coming hour, we're going to find out why.

Speaker 59 We're going to learn what typical reading instruction in American schools is like and why it's wrong.

Speaker 48 We're going to hear what scientists have discovered about how the brain learns to read and how kids should be taught based on that science.

Speaker 74 And we're going to investigate why teachers in schools don't know this science and what needs to be done to change that.

Speaker 50 We're going back now to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to find out what the chief academic officer Jack Silva decided to do about all those struggling readers in his schools.

Speaker 43 He knew he had to do something.

Speaker 24 It was really, you know, looking yourself in the mirror and saying, you know, less than 60% of third graders. And me being the chief academic officer was just, okay, let's go.

Speaker 24 Let's do something differently.

Speaker 67 Jack Silva hired some people to help him, and Kim Harper was one of them.

Speaker 36 She's the high school English teacher you heard a moment ago.

Speaker 73 One of her first assignments was to tour Bethlehem's 16 elementary schools and find out what were the teachers doing?

Speaker 79 How were they teaching kids to read?

Speaker 73 She went to a professional development day at one of the district's lowest performing elementary schools.

Speaker 40 And they were talking about how kids attack words in a story.

Speaker 28 When a child came to a word he didn't know, the teacher would tell him to look at the picture and guess.

Speaker 13 The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story. So if the kid came to the word horse and the kid reads reads it as house, it's wrong.

Speaker 40 But if the kid said pony, it'd be right because pony and horse mean the same thing.

Speaker 83 Kim Harper was shocked.

Speaker 78 First of all, pony and horse don't mean the same thing.

Speaker 4 Plus, what do you do when you're reading a book that doesn't have any pictures?

Speaker 47 The teachers described their approach to reading instruction as balanced literacy.

Speaker 83 Kim Harper didn't really know what that meant, but her colleague Jodi Frankelli had heard lots about balanced literacy.

Speaker 20 She was working with Harper to figure out what to do about reading.

Speaker 13 She'd previously been a principal at one of Bethlehem's elementary schools.

Speaker 18 Jodi Frankelli says the main idea behind balanced literacy was give kids lots of good books, and with some guidance and enough practice, they become readers.

Speaker 80 We never looked at brain research.

Speaker 57 Never.

Speaker 16 Brain research.

Speaker 85 In the 1990s, scientists began figuring out ways to peer inside our brains, and they learned a lot about how our brains learn to read.

Speaker 13 The scientists were doing their research in labs that were sometimes right across the quad from schools of education.

Speaker 73 But reading researchers and education researchers kind of live in separate universes.

Speaker 87 They go to different conferences, publish in different journals.

Speaker 13 The big takeaway from all the scientific research on reading is that learning to read is not a natural process.

Speaker 61 We are not born wired to read.

Speaker 89 We are born wired to talk.

Speaker 47 This is a toddler.

Speaker 30 He's 20 months old. It's actually my own son, many years ago.

Speaker 49 What's the sound that a train makes?

Speaker 92 Kids learn to talk by being talked to, being surrounded with spoken language.

Speaker 76 That's all it takes.

Speaker 13 No one has to teach them to talk.

Speaker 91 Is Pop by the tub?

Speaker 70 No.

Speaker 91 No,

Speaker 91 just my rubber ducky.

Speaker 33 That's my husband reading our son a story.

Speaker 91 Is pop in the cabinet?

Speaker 57 No.

Speaker 57 No.

Speaker 91 It's just my toothbrush and toothpaste.

Speaker 57 Toothpaste. Yeah.

Speaker 54 Talking comes naturally, reading doesn't.

Speaker 22 Our brains don't know how to do it.

Speaker 93 That's because human beings didn't invent written language until a few thousand years ago.

Speaker 13 And that's like last week in the course of human history. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

Speaker 59 But another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound.

Speaker 53 What a child must do to become a reader is figure out how the words he hears and knows how to say connect to print on the page.

Speaker 38 Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds, and kids have to crack that code to become readers.

Speaker 57 Act, chat,

Speaker 57 chin,

Speaker 13 If you grew up in the 1970s like I did, you might have watched The Electric Company.

Speaker 51 This is the part of the show I remember best.

Speaker 36 Silhouettes on each side of the screen would call out parts of words.

Speaker 4 The letters that represent each part would flow out of the mouths of the silhouettes and blend together to make words.

Speaker 63 For kids to learn how to read, they need to understand that words are made up of different speech sounds.

Speaker 6 That's called phonemic awareness.

Speaker 97 Once children are able to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words, they can begin to understand how different letters and combinations of letters represent those sounds.

Speaker 17 The producers of the electric company planted their flag firmly in the camp that said kids need good phonemic awareness to be able to learn to read.

Speaker 59 I use the word camp because back in the 1970s, there were two distinct factions when it came to beliefs about how kids learn to read.

Speaker 13 They were mostly beliefs at that point because a lot of the science hadn't been done yet. This is Louisa Motz again.

Speaker 58 It was more debates among people who had philosophies.

Speaker 13 Louisa Moetz was in the camp that believed in phonics.

Speaker 74 That means teaching children how letters represent speech sounds.

Speaker 13 The other camp believed in what is known as whole language.

Speaker 9 This is Mark Seidenberg.

Speaker 95 He's a cognitive neuroscientist.

Speaker 32 Whole language essentially said if we create a literacy-rich environment that is highly motivating and provides the right sort of materials that children will figure out how reading works.

Speaker 13 Mark Seidenberg has been studying how children learn to read since the disco era. That's how he puts it in his bio.

Speaker 63 He says the core belief that underlies whole language is that reading comes naturally.

Speaker 32 The essential idea is basically you learn by doing. So children are supposed to learn by doing, not be told what to do.

Speaker 37 So no phonics lessons.

Speaker 75 For the whole language folks, phonics was old-fashioned, kind of conservative.

Speaker 6 In the 1970s and 80s and 90s, the big idea that took over in schools and in colleges of education was that children don't need phonics.

Speaker 13 In fact, the belief was that phonics lessons might be bad for kids, might get in the way of them developing a love of reading by making them focus on all these little tedious skills, like breaking words into parts.

Speaker 32 In whole language, the battle was seen as, are you in favor of literacy or are you in favor of skills?

Speaker 99 And it was a battle.

Speaker 56 People actually called it war, the reading wars.

Speaker 13 It was an intense fight because whole language was more than just a set of beliefs about how kids learned to read.

Speaker 43 It was a movement that said children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of skills-based instruction.

Speaker 68 The battle got so heated that Congress eventually got involved, convening a national reading panel to review all the research on reading.

Speaker 100 In 2000, the panel released its report.

Speaker 52 The sum of the research showed that explicitly and systematically teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improves reading achievement.

Speaker 13 There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

Speaker 61 None.

Speaker 32 Faced with all this evidence contradicting a very deeply held belief, The educational establishment did an amazing thing. They said, balanced literacy.

Speaker 38 Balanced literacy.

Speaker 101 That's the term the schools in Bethlehem were using.

Speaker 85 After the National Reading Panel report in 2000, whole language proponents could no longer deny the importance of phonics.

Speaker 7 But they didn't give up the reading programs they were selling, and they didn't give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs if kids are surrounded by good books.

Speaker 18 Instead, they said, let's do both.

Speaker 38 a balance.

Speaker 15 So whole language didn't disappear.

Speaker 56 It just got repackaged.

Speaker 12 And phonics was treated a bit like salt on a meal.

Speaker 95 A little here and there, but not too much, because it could be bad for you.

Speaker 13 Mark Seidenberg knows of a child who was struggling so much with reading that her mother paid for a private tutor.

Speaker 32 The tutor taught her some of the basic skills that the child wasn't getting in her whole language classroom.

Speaker 32 And at the end of the school year, the teacher was proud that the child had made so much progress and the parent said, well,

Speaker 32 why didn't you teach this phonics and these other basic skills related to print in class?

Speaker 32 And the teacher said, oh, I did. Your child was absent that day.

Speaker 13 The problem with teaching just a little bit of phonics is that according to all the research, phonics is crucial when it comes to learning how to read.

Speaker 35 Surrounding kids with good books is a great idea, but it's not the same as teaching children to read.

Speaker 33 According to Mark Seidenberg, the reading wars of the 80s and 90s are over, and science lost.

Speaker 65 The ideas that underlie whole language are still, right now, everywhere in American classrooms.

Speaker 13 Like that idea you heard earlier, that if a kid comes to the word horse and says pony, it's fine.

Speaker 18 That comes from this whole language theory that reading doesn't involve exact, detailed identification of letters and words.

Speaker 65 Instead, the theory goes, when readers come to a word they don't know, they use context to figure out what the word is.

Speaker 13 So if a child gets stuck on a word, she's told, reread the sentence, think about a word that would make sense in the sentence, look at the pictures.

Speaker 51 She's told, that's what good readers do.

Speaker 4 But in fact, that's not what good readers do.

Speaker 56 Studies that compare skilled readers to poor readers show that poor readers guess when they come to a word they don't know because they have difficulty decoding.

Speaker 65 When skilled readers come to a word they don't know, they rapidly identify the sounds and letters in the word.

Speaker 69 Good readers may guess at the meaning of the word, but they don't guess at the print on the page.

Speaker 51 We're going back to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania now, where balanced literacy was the prevailing approach to reading instruction until the district got serious about trying to do something about all those kids who were struggling with reading.

Speaker 67 This is Kathy Bast.

Speaker 13 She's walking the halls of Calypso Elementary, where she's the principal.

Speaker 13 Back in 2015, when Bethlehem realized it needed to change the way it taught reading, district leaders decided the first step would be a series of trainings for all the principals at the district's 16 elementary schools.

Speaker 13 Over the course of an entire school year, the principals were going to be taught the reading science.

Speaker 49 As it happened, Kathy Bast was out on medical leave when the trainings began, but her colleagues warned her.

Speaker 103 They said to me, Kathy, we know you. You're not going to take well to this training.

Speaker 52 The principals were learning about the importance of explicitly teaching children how to decode words, and everyone was sure Kathy Bast was going to resist.

Speaker 103 They knew who I was and how reading was a passion, and that decoding was never part of anything I ever did.

Speaker 67 But Kathy Bast had a secret.

Speaker 19 Even though she was known as the district's number one balanced literacy champion, she had doubts.

Speaker 13 Before becoming a principal, Kathy Bast had been a reading specialist.

Speaker 51 It was her job to help struggling readers.

Speaker 13 In her training to become a reading specialist, she says she learned a lot about how to identify a child with a reading problem, but she learned nothing about how to help a child actually learn to read.

Speaker 103 I didn't know what to do, except just give them more books, and it wasn't working.

Speaker 17 With time on her hands while she was on medical leave, Kathy Bast began reading about reading, and she discovered the vast scientific literature.

Speaker 86 When she returned to work from medical leave and joined her fellow principals in the trainings on the reading science, she was ready to hear what the trainer had to say, and it kind of blew her mind.

Speaker 103 Wow, we okay, let's go get at this.

Speaker 79 The training the principals were doing used a curriculum written by Louisa Moats.

Speaker 8 You heard her earlier.

Speaker 56 The curriculum is called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or letters for short.

Speaker 63 The principals went through the training in 2015.

Speaker 22 The kindergarten teachers went through it the next year.

Speaker 73 Then the district's first and second grade teachers did the training.

Speaker 14 I got to sit in on it for part of a day.

Speaker 104 Good morning, everyone.

Speaker 13 The training was led by Mary Doe Doniker.

Speaker 68 She's an educational consultant.

Speaker 42 Which word doesn't begin with the same sound?

Speaker 53 Theory,

Speaker 104 therefore,

Speaker 42 thistle, thinker.

Speaker 57 Therefore, therefore, therefore.

Speaker 79 For children to clearly understand how letters represent speech sounds, they need to be able to hear the speech sounds.

Speaker 43 And teachers do too.

Speaker 15 It's not always easy.

Speaker 104 Tell me the first sound you hear in Eunice.

Speaker 106 Before you get to the ooh.

Speaker 104 How about Charlotte?

Speaker 64 Once kids can isolate the sounds in a word, their next task is to understand how letters represent those sounds.

Speaker 38 In English, we have 44 different speech sounds or phonemes.

Speaker 31 Each phoneme is represented by a letter or combinations of letters.

Speaker 26 Research shows when kids are explicitly taught how letters represent phonemes, they become better readers.

Speaker 68 But phonics isn't enough.

Speaker 71 Kids can learn to decode words without knowing what the words mean.

Speaker 53 To comprehend what they're reading, kids need a good vocabulary too.

Speaker 93 Scientists came up with a model to explain the relationship between a person's ability to decode text and their ability to comprehend what they're reading.

Speaker 27 Scientists called it the simple view of reading and it's basically a math formula.

Speaker 31 It says this, reading comprehension equals decoding skills times language comprehension.

Speaker 30 Language comprehension is what develops naturally in children when people talk to them.

Speaker 91 It's just my toothbrush and toothpaste.

Speaker 18 Decoding is what kids have to be taught.

Speaker 33 Some kids learn decoding quickly and easily.

Speaker 52 Others need much more instruction.

Speaker 83 But a child who can't decode will never be a good reader because of that math formula.

Speaker 63 Zero times anything is zero.

Speaker 57 Yeah!

Speaker 17 In their training on the science of reading, the teachers and principals in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania learned about the simple view of reading and a lot more.

Speaker 25 There's quite a bit to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach it to little kids.

Speaker 63 I sat down with three teachers who were in the first group group to go through the training in Bethlehem.

Speaker 51 I asked them what it was like at first.

Speaker 110 I remember sitting there and like my head was throbbing because it was like, how can I take all of this in?

Speaker 111 Oh my God, I'm never gonna be able to use this or I don't know how to use this. And then them constantly saying, you're gonna get there, you're gonna get there, you're gonna get there.

Speaker 15 That was Adrienne Ibera and Candy Maldonado.

Speaker 13 They hadn't learned any of this in their teacher preparation programs.

Speaker 69 Neither had teacher Michelle Bozak.

Speaker 80 It was very broad classes, vague classes, and like a children's literature class, but not actually teaching phonics and things like that.

Speaker 75 When they became teachers, they did a little of what they thought was phonics.

Speaker 13 Candy Maldonado says it pretty much went like this.

Speaker 112 So like we did like a letter a week.

Speaker 111 So if the letter was A, we read books about A, we ate things with A, we found things with A, and then, but we never did anything else with it.

Speaker 111 Like we, all we did was learn like A said ah, and then there's apples and we tasted apples.

Speaker 19 When you were all being being taught to teach that way and teaching that way, what was the idea about how children learn to read?

Speaker 43 Did you have a sense of that? No.

Speaker 113 No.

Speaker 110 Now that I think about it, no, not really.

Speaker 15 It was just that they do.

Speaker 42 Almost like it's automatic.

Speaker 57 Yeah.

Speaker 34 When these teachers started the training on the science of reading, they felt overwhelmed.

Speaker 22 By the time they were done, they felt guilty.

Speaker 80 I thought, all these years, all these students, I feel horrible guilt.

Speaker 18 The Bethlehem School District has adopted a motto to help ease the guilt.

Speaker 8 When we know better, we do better.

Speaker 106 Pass it back in.

Speaker 13 We're now in a kindergarten class at Bethlehem's Calypso Elementary School.

Speaker 42 This is Kathy Bass School.

Speaker 31 The principal everyone thought was going to resist the reading science, but didn't.

Speaker 34 Her kindergarten teachers got the science of reading training last year.

Speaker 87 Now they're putting it into practice.

Speaker 57 Globe. Globe.

Speaker 106 Globe. Good job cutting that sound off, guys.

Speaker 51 The entire class is seated on a carpet while a student teacher holds up flashcards with pictures on them.

Speaker 30 No letters.

Speaker 8 The kids are just practicing the first sounds in words that begin with g and w.

Speaker 57 Water, water, water.

Speaker 65 Teachers in Bethlehem use a curriculum that mixes whole class lessons like this one with group work that's tailored to the needs of kids at different points in the process of learning to read.

Speaker 13 After the class lesson, teacher Lynn Venable meets with a group group of six students at a small U-shaped table.

Speaker 106 So we're going to start doing something today that we have not done before. This is brand spanking new.

Speaker 57 All right.

Speaker 26 This group of kindergartners is ready for something more challenging than words that begin with w and g.

Speaker 106 So let's read it together. What's it say?

Speaker 57 My pet report.

Speaker 106 Wonderful.

Speaker 38 These kids are writing a report about a pet they want.

Speaker 95 They have to write down three things their pet can do.

Speaker 12 But spelling is hard.

Speaker 58 I need a pencil information.

Speaker 13 I need a pencil with an eraser, says Roman.

Speaker 4 The kids make lots of mistakes.

Speaker 101 Quinn spells bark, B-O-C, balk.

Speaker 43 He needs some help discerning the speech sounds in the word.

Speaker 106 What is your dog doing? A dog can.

Speaker 106 Now, I want you to make all the sounds and bark, because you can do this. Ready?

Speaker 30 Spelling errors are like a window into what's going on in a child's brain when they're learning how to read.

Speaker 106 What's the first sound?

Speaker 106 We got that one, that's B.

Speaker 106 Now what's the next sound?

Speaker 13 Quinn struggles for a moment but gets some help from Mrs.

Speaker 4 Venable.

Speaker 106 How do you make the sound R? Where's your pirate patch?

Speaker 57 R.

Speaker 57 R.

Speaker 57 How do you write R?

Speaker 106 Do you remember? Tell me.

Speaker 25 With a little more prompting, Quinn eventually gets it.

Speaker 76 A-R, absolutely.

Speaker 13 Lynn Venable has been teaching elementary school for 21 years.

Speaker 30 She says she used to think reading would just kind of fall together for kids if they were exposed to enough print.

Speaker 34 Now, because of the science of reading training, she knows better.

Speaker 16 She says this year's class of kindergartners has progressed more quickly in reading than any class she's ever had.

Speaker 106 My kids are successful and happy and believe in themselves. I don't have a single child in my room that has that look on their face like, I can't do this.

Speaker 106 Carolyn, can you tell me what your cat's going to do?

Speaker 57 A cat can scratch, claw, and perk.

Speaker 57 You're absolutely right. That is a wonderful list of things that your cat can do.

Speaker 106 Give me some.

Speaker 51 At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem School District gives kindergartners a test to see where they are with early reading skills.

Speaker 6 The year before the science of reading training began, 65% of kindergartners at this school tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure.

Speaker 79 After the kindergarten teachers were trained, zero kindergartners at Calypso finished the year at risk of reading failure.

Speaker 13 And at the end of this year, same thing.

Speaker 21 Two years in a row, every single kindergartner at Calypso was at or above the benchmark score on the reading test.

Speaker 13 Across the entire Bethlehem School District, more than eight in ten kindergartners met or exceeded the benchmark score, up from fewer than half before the science of reading training started.

Speaker 51 Chief Academic Officer Jack Silva is thrilled with the results, but cautious.

Speaker 8 He's eager to see how the kindergartners do when they get to that big state reading test in third grade.

Speaker 24 We may have hit a home run in the first inning, but there's a lot of game left here.

Speaker 52 It's impossible to know if the science of reading training is what led to the test score gains.

Speaker 13 Some of the schools in the district, including Calypso, moved from half-day to full-day kindergarten the same year the training started, so that could have been a factor.

Speaker 13 But Kathy Bast, the Calypso principal, thinks that if her teachers had just been doing more of the same when it came to reading instruction, she'd still have a lot of struggling readers at her school.

Speaker 56 She says other school districts are taking note of Bethlehem's progress.

Speaker 103 I've gotten calls from other administrators in other districts. What are you doing differently in Bethlehem?

Speaker 22 She remembers one call in particular.

Speaker 103 Tell me what you're doing, my superintendent. Saw your scores in the paper.
He asked me to call you. I spent over an hour on the phone just detailing what I've talked to you about.

Speaker 103 And after all of it was said and done, oh,

Speaker 103 I don't think that'll work here. There'll be too much pushback.

Speaker 92 Too much pushback.

Speaker 43 Beliefs about how kids learn to read and how they should be taught run deep in American education.

Speaker 13 You can find schools and school districts across the country that are trying to change things the way Bethlehem is.

Speaker 79 But typical reading instruction in American schools is some version of a balanced literacy approach, backed up by the core belief that learning to read is a natural process.

Speaker 64 Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases, they actively resist it.

Speaker 23 Why is that?

Speaker 41 That's what we're going to hear about after the break.

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Speaker 26 We're now in Jackson, Mississippi, where something unusual is happening.

Speaker 115 All right, colleagues, let's go ahead and get started.

Speaker 37 A group of teachers is gathered in a conference center for letters training.

Speaker 52 It's what you heard the teachers doing in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 9 But these teachers are college faculty from schools of education across Mississippi.

Speaker 115 So I'm going to go ahead and distribute some anticipation guides, so to speak.

Speaker 99 That's a euphemism for quiz.

Speaker 47 The first question is: true or false?

Speaker 61 Speaking is natural, reading and writing are not.

Speaker 56 These are the faculty who teach people who want to be teachers how to teach reading.

Speaker 17 And they are being asked this question because they might not know the answer.

Speaker 115 So, do I have everyone's?

Speaker 82 The trainer, Antonio Fierro, collects the quizzes.

Speaker 69 I don't know how many of the professors got the question right.

Speaker 63 The answer, of course, is true.

Speaker 71 Speaking is natural, reading and writing are not.

Speaker 46 Most people in this class should know that by now because this is the third day of this series of letters trainings.

Speaker 73 Here they are reviewing the speech sounds or phonemes in simple words.

Speaker 115 The next word is cloud. What's the word? Cloud.
Tap it.

Speaker 115 Hold on, hold on.

Speaker 115 That first sound is right up there, all right?

Speaker 73 The trainer points to a sound wall posted to his right.

Speaker 56 According to research, this is what you want to see in classrooms.

Speaker 47 Not an alphabet wall that says, for example, O is for octopus, but a sound wall that has all 44 speech sounds in the English language with the letters and combinations of letters that represent those sounds.

Speaker 56 Octopus is a great example of the short O sound, but then there's owl, which starts with the letter O, but begins with the sound owl, represented by the letters OW.

Speaker 46 The college faculty in this room, a lot of them didn't know this.

Speaker 42 It's a lot to take in.

Speaker 102 This is Roshanda Harris Allen.

Speaker 43 She's a professor in the teacher preparation program at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi.

Speaker 93 She says she was never taught this stuff about language, not as part of her college education or her doctorate, and not when she was a kid.

Speaker 116 We weren't taught phonemes, we weren't taught sound recognition, we were just taught, here are your sight words, you need to memorize them.

Speaker 79 She struggled with reading when she was little.

Speaker 22 Her colleague at Tougaloo, Trishonda Dixon, says she did get phonics instruction when she was young, but she never learned how to to teach phonics.

Speaker 118 I think we did have issues with a lack of knowledge initially, but I think we're making great strides here to correct that.

Speaker 115 With your partner, please discuss the simple view of reading.

Speaker 108 The reason I started off by saying something unusual is going on here in Mississippi is that college faculty almost never come together like this for training.

Speaker 13 And college professors getting training originally designed for elementary school teachers in the science of reading?

Speaker 46 Pretty much unheard of.

Speaker 59 Louisa Moats, who developed the letters training, told me Mississippi is the only place she knows of where college faculty are doing this.

Speaker 93 And college faculty across the country need it.

Speaker 13 A number of reports and studies show that many faculty members in teacher preparation programs don't know the reading science, don't teach it, and in some cases actively resist it.

Speaker 59 We'll get to the resistance in a bit.

Speaker 34 but first the story of how this training came to be in Mississippi.

Speaker 18 It was the early 2000s.

Speaker 99 Mississippi was and always has been at the bottom of the list when it comes to how well kids read.

Speaker 86 That big National Reading Panel report had just come out and a wealthy Mississippi couple who had started an institute to improve reading in the state wanted to know, were teacher preparation programs in Mississippi teaching what was in the National Reading Panel report?

Speaker 52 So their their organization, the Barksdale Reading Institute, did a study.

Speaker 15 The study focused on the teacher preparation programs at the state's eight publicly funded universities.

Speaker 93 The institute reviewed syllabi and textbooks, surveyed the students in the classes, observed some of the classes, and interviewed the deans and faculty.

Speaker 18 Kelly Butler led the study.

Speaker 117 Generally, I found that among the eight publics, you could go to any one of them and not necessarily be exposed to all five components of reading.

Speaker 52 The National Reading Panel had identified five components of reading.

Speaker 46 They are phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

Speaker 117 So you could go to an undergraduate program with the expectation you would graduate to be able to teach elementary education, but not even know what the five components of reading were, much less how to teach them.

Speaker 11 The two components most essential for learning to read, phonemic awareness and phonics, were basically absent.

Speaker 22 The study found that teacher candidates in Mississippi were getting an average of 20 minutes of instruction in phonics, 20 minutes, over their entire two-year teacher preparation program.

Speaker 25 Kelly Butler was alarmed.

Speaker 13 How were kids in Mississippi going to learn to read if their teachers were not learning the basics of the reading science in their teacher preparation programs?

Speaker 13 Kelly Butler and her colleagues at the Barksdale Reading Institute went to state education officials and said, you have to do something about this.

Speaker 53 And in 2003, in a rather extraordinary move, the State Department of Education mandated that every teacher preparation program in Mississippi require two courses on early literacy to cover what was in the National Reading Panel report.

Speaker 83 It was extraordinary because even though states have the authority to regulate teacher preparation programs, they rarely tell them what to teach in their classes.

Speaker 13 Higher education does not like to be told what to do.

Speaker 51 This is Kelly Butler again.

Speaker 117 Professors pretty much have academic freedom to construct learning in the way they think best.

Speaker 113 Faculty members close the door and do whatever the heck they want to.

Speaker 33 That's Angela Rutherford.

Speaker 26 She is a faculty member at the University of Mississippi.

Speaker 52 She works with the Barksdale Reading Institute.

Speaker 59 She knows the reading science and she says a lot of her colleagues in teacher preparation programs don't.

Speaker 27 They believe in whole language.

Speaker 113 That's what they believe. I had a colleague challenge me and her question was, well, you know, what do you believe? I said, I believe what I see in research.

Speaker 64 Once, when Kelly Butler was talking to a dean about the reading science, the dean said to her, is this your science or my science?

Speaker 4 Is this your science or my science?

Speaker 93 That's what Kelly Butler and her colleagues were up against.

Speaker 19 They wanted to change what prospective teachers in Mississippi were learning about reading.

Speaker 51 State officials did too, but Kelly Butler says many deans and faculty still believed in whole language.

Speaker 117 We'll fast forward to 2015 and we now have a literacy-based promotion act.

Speaker 41 The state legislature had passed a law called the Literacy-Based Promotion Act.

Speaker 37 The law says that kids who are not reading on grade level by the end of third grade cannot move on to fourth grade.

Speaker 117 What that precipitated was a retraining of teachers because we knew that teachers really didn't know enough about what to do.

Speaker 86 The teachers already working in Mississippi schools started learning the reading science.

Speaker 79 But what about the new teachers just graduating from teacher prep programs?

Speaker 35 If they weren't learning the science, the state would be spending money forever training teachers.

Speaker 22 At this point, no one really knew what aspiring teachers were actually learning in those required early literacy classes.

Speaker 56 So in 2015, the Barksdale Reading Institute decided to repeat the study it had done back in 2003.

Speaker 79 This time, private colleges were included.

Speaker 56 15 teacher prep programs overall.

Speaker 117 The needle had moved some.

Speaker 19 Kelly Butler says with one exception all the state's teacher prep programs were now teaching the five components of reading.

Speaker 93 The deans and faculty all said they'd heard of the National Reading Panel report.

Speaker 117 But most of them had not read it.

Speaker 33 She learned other things that shocked her.

Speaker 117 When I interviewed both faculty and students and asked them particular questions about the science of reading. For example, were they familiar with something called the simple view of reading?

Speaker 15 That's that formula scientists came up with to explain that reading comprehension is the product of your ability to decode text times all the words you know the meaning of.

Speaker 117 Not a single one that I talked to had ever heard of the simple view of reading, which has been around since 1986.

Speaker 61 The science had been around for a long time.

Speaker 43 The state had been requiring colleges to teach the science for more than a decade.

Speaker 51 And still, prospective teachers weren't learning it.

Speaker 13 So the state legislature decided to do something else.

Speaker 75 It started requiring teacher candidates to pass a test on the reading science.

Speaker 13 If you don't pass the foundations of reading test, you don't get licensed to teach elementary school in Mississippi.

Speaker 57 I'd be the student. You'll be the student, okay?

Speaker 57 And we're going to start with phoneme. Exclusion allowed.

Speaker 13 We're back in letters training with the college faculty in Mississippi.

Speaker 11 They're in pairs now working on phonemic awareness skills.

Speaker 102 This is Roshanda Harris-Allen and Trashonda Dixon.

Speaker 8 You heard them earlier.

Speaker 57 What is the first speech sound in the following words?

Speaker 57 Quiet.

Speaker 57 There it is.

Speaker 57 I said it.

Speaker 56 College faculty in Mississippi are not required to do letters training, but it's in the best interest of those who teach the early literacy classes since their students will not become licensed teachers unless they pass the Foundations of Reading test.

Speaker 93 I interviewed several of the women in this training.

Speaker 98 They were all women.

Speaker 59 I was expecting to hear resistance and resignation about being here, but I didn't.

Speaker 18 As I'm sitting in there, I'm thinking, I'm gonna do this in class next week, or oh man, I wish I had done that.

Speaker 111 I'm gonna have to make a note, you know, to do this next semester.

Speaker 6 That was Kim Smith of Mississippi State, and this is Barbara Bowen of the University of Southern Mississippi.

Speaker 109 I feel blessed to be part of this change.

Speaker 69 They were elementary school teachers before they became college instructors.

Speaker 79 They didn't know the reading science when they were teachers, and they're grateful to be learning it now.

Speaker 42 I think that we all agree that this is

Speaker 57 right

Speaker 75 or best practices.

Speaker 56 And maybe we're here because of that.

Speaker 63 And the whole language ones are not here because maybe

Speaker 15 I think they would really resist

Speaker 57 a lot.

Speaker 93 The faculty who believe in whole language didn't seem to be here.

Speaker 50 I had to look for them.

Speaker 20 I found two professors at the University of Southern Mississippi willing to talk to me.

Speaker 80 My name is Stacey Reeves.

Speaker 80 I am an associate professor of literacy and other areas of elementary ed.

Speaker 105 I'm Mary Ariel. I'm a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, Special Education.

Speaker 26 Mary Ariel had actually been the chair of the department until a few months before our interview.

Speaker 8 She and Stacey Reeves both told me they had no interest in going to the letters training.

Speaker 15 This is Stacey Reeves.

Speaker 80 I am philosophically opposed to jumping on the bandwagon of the next great thing that's going to teach every child how to learn to read. Phonics for me is not that answer.

Speaker 100 She says she knows this from her own experience.

Speaker 56 She was an elementary school teacher before she got her PhD.

Speaker 59 It was the early 1990s.

Speaker 39 Her students did phonics worksheets and then got these little books called decodable readers that contained words with the letter patterns they'd been practicing.

Speaker 67 Sentences like, the bad rat hid in the tin can.

Speaker 80 They were boring, they were repetitive, but as soon as I sat down with my first graders and read a book like Frog and Toad Are Friends, they were instantly engaged in the story.

Speaker 30 She says she ditched the phonics workbooks and the decodable readers.

Speaker 80 And once I started teaching in a more whole way, a more encompassing way of the whole child, What does this child need? What does that child need? Let's read more real books.

Speaker 80 Let's write more real language about your life. Once I did that, my teaching improved.
The students learn more, I feel. I feel they came out the other side much better.

Speaker 61 Stacey Reeves says her students seemed more engaged, but she admits she had no evidence they were learning better.

Speaker 51 One of the central tenets of the whole language movement is that teachers are best able to judge whether their students are learning, not standardized tests.

Speaker 31 Another key idea is that all children learn differently and need to be taught in different ways.

Speaker 73 But that's not true with reading.

Speaker 68 Our brains are much more similar than they are different, and we all need to learn the same things to change our non-reading brains into reading brains.

Speaker 98 Some of us learn to read more quickly and easily than others, but everyone reads in basically the same way.

Speaker 46 One of the most consistent findings in all of education research is that children become better readers when they get explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

Speaker 52 Decodable readers with letter patterns may be boring and repetitive for adults, but they help children learn to read.

Speaker 13 Mary Ariel, the former chair of the curriculum and special ed department at the University of Southern Mississippi, remains unconvinced.

Speaker 43 She's against explicit phonics instruction.

Speaker 97 She thinks it can be helpful to do some phonics phonics with kids as they're reading books, maybe prompt them to sound something out, to notice a letter pattern in a word.

Speaker 56 But she thinks kids will be distracted from understanding the meaning of what they're reading if teachers focus too much on how words are made up of letters.

Speaker 105 What it really does, it makes it harder because we're trying to make meaning of it, and when you're teaching these meaningless symbols, that it's actually making it harder.

Speaker 63 So breaking it down into pieces

Speaker 34 makes it harder to learn to read?

Speaker 105 That's the idea. That's one of the ideas, the concepts behind whole language is that

Speaker 105 when it's meaningful, it's easy. And when it's broken down into little parts, it makes it harder.

Speaker 47 So, okay, so

Speaker 97 from your perspective, how do kids learn to read?

Speaker 105 Well, I think kids learn to read in different ways.

Speaker 105 A lot of children come to school already reading because they have been immersed in print-rich environments from the time they were born.

Speaker 55 The underlying belief here is that reading comes naturally when children are read to and surrounded by books.

Speaker 59 Mary Ariel sees the effort to change reading instruction in Mississippi as an example of lawmakers telling educators what to do, and she doesn't like it.

Speaker 56 She actually left her job shortly after our interview in part because of her frustration over what's happening with reading in Mississippi.

Speaker 97 She told me she does not like the term science of reading.

Speaker 105 That's one of the bones of contention that the phonics-based approach is the scientific approach.

Speaker 40 It's their science.

Speaker 6 The belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by books is a problem not just because there's no science to back it up.

Speaker 56 It's a problem because it assumes the primary responsibility for teaching children to read lies with families, not schools.

Speaker 51 If you are not fortunate enough to grow up in a household where where there are lots of books and adults who read to you, you're kind of out of luck.

Speaker 18 There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond.

Speaker 52 Here's Louisa Moats again.

Speaker 58 It's so accepted in the scientific world that

Speaker 58 If you just write another paper, another study about these fundamental facts and submit it to a journal, they won't accept it because it's considered settled science.

Speaker 58 I think often of scientists in the area of climate change research.

Speaker 58 All of this information about climate change was readily available decades ago and

Speaker 58 we still have

Speaker 58 prominent people in our government who are climate change deniers.

Speaker 57 It's appalling.

Speaker 36 Louisa Mote says it's not just faculty and deans at colleges of education who resist the science.

Speaker 13 It's also the publishing industry that continues to sell stuff that does not line up with what the science says.

Speaker 13 The American education system has bought into whole language, literally, and it's hard to get rid of it.

Speaker 58 Districts have spent so much money on this stuff that they may feel that their resources

Speaker 58 have been used up and also of course the administrators who are responsible for making the decisions and spending the money want to defend their decisions.

Speaker 79 She says educators convince themselves that what they're doing is best practice.

Speaker 96 But if you believe that what you've invested in is the best there is when it comes to teaching kids to read and still more than 40% of the students in your school district are struggling, what do you do?

Speaker 30 You blame the kids.

Speaker 9 You blame their families for not reading to them enough.

Speaker 13 You blame poverty.

Speaker 55 And then it's no longer shocking that four in 10 kids can't read very well.

Speaker 13 It's just the way things are.

Speaker 73 You might be thinking, if phonics and phonemic awareness are so important, and lots of schools are doing such a poor job teaching those things, how does anyone learn to read?

Speaker 36 It's a good question.

Speaker 51 I asked lots of experts.

Speaker 4 Basically, it comes down to this.

Speaker 109 Some kids crack the code quickly and easily. Experts told me probably a third of children, maybe a bit more, don't need much instruction.

Speaker 13 A parent points out some things about how words work, a teacher does a bit of phonics, the kid grows up watching Electric Company, like I did, and she's off and reading.

Speaker 24 It's not as if some students, many students, can't learn in ways that we taught reading before.

Speaker 67 This is Jack Silva again, the chief academic officer in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 24 The question is: do you want all of them to be able to read?

Speaker 51 There is no evidence that phonics instruction is bad for kids, not even kids who crack the code easily.

Speaker 87 In fact, research shows good phonics instruction helps them become better spellers.

Speaker 30 This doesn't mean that phonics is all kids need.

Speaker 31 Remember, according to that math formula, kids also need to know a lot of words and what they mean.

Speaker 6 And that's why reading to children and surrounding them with good books is really important.

Speaker 22 The whole language proponents are absolutely right about that.

Speaker 31 But as I said before, reading to kids and surrounding them with books is not the same as teaching them to read.

Speaker 84 According to the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on phonics instruction in the early grades.

Speaker 89 Louisa Mote says the idea that this will make reading harder or somehow turn kids off to reading makes no sense.

Speaker 12 It's the opposite.

Speaker 30 She says if schools do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, the kids read better,

Speaker 58 get off to a better start earlier, and they accelerate their progress faster and read more and like it better, and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

Speaker 58 I can read, therefore I like to read, therefore I will read.

Speaker 58 Whereas the converse is true when you don't give kids insight into the code and don't arm them with insight into language, both spoken and written. What happens is this is a mystery.

Speaker 58 I'm not sure I'm getting what these words really say. Therefore, I'm uncomfortable and therefore I don't really like it.

Speaker 30 The kids who suffer most when schools don't give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia.

Speaker 22 They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters.

Speaker 22 If you're a kid with dyslexia from an upper-income family, someone is probably going to notice that you're struggling and pay for you to get the help you need.

Speaker 38 But what happens to kids from poor families?

Speaker 33 All you need to do is look at our nation's prison population for an answer.

Speaker 22 Our prisons are full of people who grew up in poor families.

Speaker 25 And according to a study of the Texas prison population, nearly half of all inmates have dyslexia.

Speaker 41 Half.

Speaker 9 They struggled to read as kids and probably never got the help they needed.

Speaker 15 If you were a kid who was able to crack the code with minimal instruction, you should count your lucky stars.

Speaker 89 But a question we should all be asking is, why aren't we helping all kids learn to read?

Speaker 6 For Kelly Butler of the Barksdale Reading Institute in Mississippi, the main problem at this point is ignorance.

Speaker 16 Too many teachers, school administrators, and college professors don't know the science.

Speaker 72 She's betting that teaching them the science is the answer.

Speaker 117 Part of my optimism about this is it's not like we're setting out to try to figure out how to teach reading and so we can then teach everybody how to do it.

Speaker 117 We know how to do it, so we need to get her done.

Speaker 33 Mark Seidenberg is not as optimistic.

Speaker 16 He's the cognitive scientist we heard from in the first part of the program.

Speaker 63 He'd like to believe that teaching the science would be enough to change minds, but he's not so sure.

Speaker 87 He makes a comparison to climate change too.

Speaker 32 And one thing that we've learned from climate change and the other issues over which we have polarization in this country is that facts aren't the thing that change people's beliefs.

Speaker 32 In fact, confronted with data that contradict deeply held beliefs,

Speaker 32 Instead of bringing people closer together, it can have the paradoxical effects of entrenching them further.

Speaker 62 If there is one fact that everyone can surely agree on, it's that kids need to know how to read.

Speaker 15 The stakes are really high here.

Speaker 25 The research shows children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 6 And they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas too.

Speaker 13 Right now, in this country, millions of kids are struggling.

Speaker 16 And so are teachers.

Speaker 83 Dozens of teachers I've talked to have told me they knew in their gut that the way they were teaching reading wasn't working for a lot of kids.

Speaker 13 But they didn't know what else to do.

Speaker 12 They felt helpless and guilty.

Speaker 82 They shouldn't have to feel that way.

Speaker 56 Teachers need to be taught how to teach kids to read.

Speaker 47 The research is clear about how to do it.

Speaker 108 You've been listening to an APM Reports documentary, Hard Words, Why Aren't Our Kids Being Taught to Read?

Speaker 15 It was produced by me, Emily Hanford.

Speaker 48 The editor was Chris Julin with help from Catherine Winter.

Speaker 63 Special thanks to Emerald O'Brien, Tom Scheck, Liz Lyon, and Tim Shanahan.

Speaker 56 Our associate producer is Alex Baumhart.

Speaker 108 Our web editors are Andy Cruz and Dave Mann.

Speaker 79 The mix was by Chris Julin and Craig Thorson.

Speaker 69 Fact-checking by Betsy Towner-Levine.

Speaker 6 Theme music by Gary Meister.

Speaker 15 The APM Reports team includes Sasha Eslanian, Executive Editor Stephen Smith, and Editor-in-Chief Chris Worthington.

Speaker 30 We have more about this story at our website, including a documentary about how schools are failing kids with dyslexia.

Speaker 4 You can find it at apmreports.org and on our podcast, Educate.

Speaker 22 If you want more people to hear this program, please share it on social media and review it on your favorite podcast app.

Speaker 26 And if you have a story to share about reading, please write to us.

Speaker 54 The address is contact at apmreports.org.

Speaker 19 Support for APM Reports comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

Speaker 31 This is APM American Public Media.

Speaker 68 This is Emily again.

Speaker 5 You've been listening to Hard Words from 2018. We'll have a bonus episode of Sold a Story coming soon, so keep this podcast in your feeds.

Speaker 5 If you want to find out more about the Sold a Story podcast and all of our reporting on reading, you can go to our website, soldastory.org.

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