6: The Reckoning

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Speaker 1 Previously, unsold a story.

Speaker 1 I just assumed that the children I sent to school would come back to me literate because that's what school does, right?

Speaker 5 I recorded exactly what children were saying and doing, and this gave me new insights for building the new series.

Speaker 1 Let's do our triple check and see. Does it make sense? That habit of not looking at the words just continued on.
He didn't know what the words were.

Speaker 6 We cannot count on science and must accept its findings findings tentatively.

Speaker 1 It became a very lucrative business.

Speaker 1 I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Over the past few years, I've been watching a lot of school board meetings online.

Speaker 1 Approval of the minutes, April 8th, 2019. This is a meeting in Medford, Massachusetts.
The school committee approves budget items and attends to some other business.

Speaker 1 And then a mother gets up to speak.

Speaker 7 There is something very

Speaker 7 here.

Speaker 7 No one noticed that my son could not read, write, or spell.

Speaker 1 The mom's name is Maureen Ronaine.

Speaker 7 We are told to wait and see. He'll catch up on his own.
Trust us. And my favorite, have you tried reading to him?

Speaker 1 All over the country.

Speaker 1 Oh, just hit 701. We'll call this meeting to order.
Parents are showing up at school board meetings.

Speaker 6 I'm the parent of a struggling reader. She struggles significantly with reading and writing.

Speaker 1 On Zoom, in person. I have a great-granddaughter who's 12 years old.
They're fed up.

Speaker 3 But she's reading at a second grade level. What happened with that?

Speaker 1 She couldn't read because you're not teaching her.

Speaker 1 Parents and grandparents all over the country are figuring out that their children can't read because they're not being taught how to read.

Speaker 9 We had no idea that the leveled readers he was bringing home promoted guessing based on pictures, context, and sentence patterns, which gave the appearance of reading, but really wasn't reading.

Speaker 1 Parents want change.

Speaker 7 Science has clearly shown us what all kids need to learn to read. Please, stop ignoring the science at the peril of our children.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 This is the sixth episode of Sold a Story, a podcast from APM Reports. I'm Emily Hanford.

Speaker 1 I've been thinking about what I've been seeing at school board meetings, on social media, in my email, as an awakening. People have actually said that, that they're waking up.

Speaker 1 Not to the fact that lots of kids can't read very well. They knew that.
What they didn't know is that many kids aren't being taught how to read.

Speaker 1 They also didn't know that influential people have been selling an idea about reading and how children learn to do it that isn't right.

Speaker 1 And now they want answers from Lucy Cawkins and Irene Fountis and Gay Sue Pinnell and their publisher, Heinemann. In this episode, we're going to try to get some answers.

Speaker 1 Every month, Lucy Caucins holds office hours over Zoom. Welcome, everyone.

Speaker 10 We're joined today with Lucy Cockins, as usual.

Speaker 1 These office hours are for teachers to ask her questions. Hi, Lucy.
Hi. This is Lucy Cockins office hours on November 21st, 2019.
A few months before this, we had released an article I wrote.

Speaker 1 It was about the queuing strategies and how they're part of the Caukins curriculum. This article was getting a lot of attention on social media and blogs and in the news.

Speaker 1 And at the office hours, a teacher asks Lucy Cockins about that.

Speaker 11 My question is around all of these articles I'm reading right now that are claiming research states

Speaker 11 that the units of study and reading are not research-based. I disagree with them, but I need language to support the philosophy we believe in.

Speaker 8 So, a couple different things here. First of all, you're not alone.

Speaker 8 People who are teaching in the primary grades are feeling even more pressured by the science of reading. One of the things I would say is: no one person gets to own the word science.

Speaker 1 No one gets to own the term the science of reading was the title of a statement that Lucy Cawkins had posted on her website earlier in the day.

Speaker 1 The statement begins, I've been asked to write a response to the phonic-centric people who are calling themselves the science of reading.

Speaker 1 In the statement, Lucy Cawkins refers to a new hype about phonics. She says this hype is coming from people who are concerned about children with dyslexia.

Speaker 1 She says dyslexia is being used as a Trojan horse to bring back an emphasis on phonics at the expense of everything else. And in her statement, she defends the cueing strategies.

Speaker 1 Cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg wrote a scathing response to Cockin' statement. He said that she had, quote, yet to absorb basic findings that contradict tenets of her approach.

Speaker 1 About a month later, a group of reading researchers released a review of her curriculum. They said that it was unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America's public school children.

Speaker 1 There was other bad news for Cockins.

Speaker 1 The Arkansas Department of Education had recently said that if a program uses the queuing theory, it would be disqualified from the state's list of approved programs.

Speaker 1 And the Colorado Department of Education rejected her reading units of study.

Speaker 1 And then, almost exactly a year after Lucy Cawkins made that first statement about the science of reading, she made another statement. This one was different.

Speaker 1 In the news statement, Lucy Caucins says that she and her colleagues have been poring over the work of reading researchers, that they have challenged themselves to understand more deeply the advances in reading science.

Speaker 1 And they have determined that aspects of their approach need rebalancing.

Speaker 1 In this statement, she recommends that all beginning readers have access to decodable books, books that contain words with spelling patterns they've been taught.

Speaker 1 And she moves away from her support for the queuing strategies.

Speaker 1 She says looking at a picture to figure out a word is inefficient and might not allow written words to get into a child's long-term memory.

Speaker 8 Nothing that we do is ever perfect. You know, it's only the best that we know.

Speaker 1 This is Lucy Cawkins in March of 2021. It's her Zoom office hours.
And in this office hours, she announces that Heinemann will be releasing a new edition of her units of study for teaching reading.

Speaker 1 She says she and her team have been rewriting the curriculum to reflect what they have learned about the science of reading.

Speaker 8 We fixed up a few of the places where the science of reading has been, you know, pointing out we were like messed up.

Speaker 1 She says there are things she regrets, things she should have done differently.

Speaker 1 I wanted to ask her about all this. I had written to her in 2019 to try to get an interview.
She didn't respond. But when I emailed her last year, she got back to me right away.
I'm pressing record.

Speaker 1 We did an interview in May of 2021. Lucy, are you there? I was in my home office.
She was at her house. Can she hear us? Lucy? We had some technical issues at first.

Speaker 12 Can you hear me?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Then we got started.
So we're meeting today because there are some things that you are rethinking about how to teach reading. Can you tell me what led to that?

Speaker 1 Like, was there a particular moment or experience? that you can can you walk me through that

Speaker 12 well i think the important thing to know is that we are always rethinking So

Speaker 12 it's not a new idea that we're rethinking. And the other thing, there's always new research coming, or just research that's new to us.

Speaker 1 She brings up research about how readers map the written form of a word into their memory. There's a technical term for that process that I spared you when I was describing it in episode two.

Speaker 1 It's called orthographic mapping.

Speaker 12 So I think it's really been learning from you and other science of reading researchers the

Speaker 12 importance of orthographic mapping and being convinced as we worked with teachers and in classrooms, you know, being convinced that that was something that we could benefit from changing on that account.

Speaker 1 Is this the idea of orthographic mapping something that is new to you? Like when did you begin to understand that, what that is?

Speaker 12 Well, there's understand and there's understand and there's understand. You know, I find that you learn and you relearn and you relearn and you relearn,

Speaker 12 but

Speaker 12 it's certainly become

Speaker 12 more important in our writing, in our teaching, in our thinking.

Speaker 12 And I am grateful to the science of reading research for making it so prominent because,

Speaker 12 yeah, I think you called attention to it and we think that you were right about that.

Speaker 1 I wanted to understand what she used to believe about how kids learn to read.

Speaker 1 Back in the late 90s, when she was working on her book about how to teach reading, what was your understanding at that point, do you think, of how kids learn to read? Like, how does that happen?

Speaker 12 Yeah, I really can't go back and recall what I, what my, what was, yeah, I mean, I could go back and look at the book again, and maybe I could dig it back, you know, dig up what I was thinking then, but I can't really recall it.

Speaker 1 What I'm trying to figure out is, why didn't she know about the research that she now knows about? Why didn't she know about it sooner?

Speaker 1 So much of this research isn't new.

Speaker 1 And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they're reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s as an interesting question.

Speaker 1 Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn't the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?

Speaker 12 Again, you're asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another.

Speaker 12 But I would say that

Speaker 12 you have to remember that that research

Speaker 12 was not,

Speaker 12 I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing

Speaker 12 classroom-based methods. that were exciting and

Speaker 12 poignant and beautiful and

Speaker 12 getting kids on fire readers and writers that were using that chain of thinking.

Speaker 12 It was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.

Speaker 12 So, and I'm not trying to say if I'm right or not, but I think that was my impression.

Speaker 1 I think this impression is one reason that instruction aligned with scientific evidence has had a tough time gaining traction in schools. The impression is that it's boring.

Speaker 1 But learning how to read isn't boring for little kids.

Speaker 1 Remember Kamari?

Speaker 1 Smiley. Smiling.

Speaker 1 And Zoe? It's like the best thing

Speaker 1 ever.

Speaker 1 Good reading instruction isn't boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring.
But this shouldn't be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need.

Speaker 1 And there's no reason that reading reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can't be exciting and beautiful.

Speaker 1 I think Lucy Cockins sees it that way now too, because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she's now selling.

Speaker 1 She's hoping that school districts will stick with her and buy her revised curriculum. Districts that were already using her materials can get it for a discount.
But not everyone's buying.

Speaker 1 For example, Palo Alto, California. The district decided last year to look for a new reading curriculum to replace Caucas.

Speaker 1 I asked Todd Collins, the school board member there, if he'd consider her revised edition.

Speaker 1 He said no.

Speaker 1 There's a trust issue there? You'd have to decide you could trust her again? That's hard.

Speaker 1 Over the past few years, as Lucy Cockins was making statements about the science of reading and rewriting her curriculum, Irene Fountess and Gay Sue Pinnell were keeping pretty quiet until last year, November 2021, when they broke their silence in a series of recorded Q ⁇ As posted to their website.

Speaker 10 Why have you chosen not to participate in the latest debate about how to teach children how to read?

Speaker 14 Gay and I have lived through polarization before, and we simply don't see it as being productive.

Speaker 1 This is Irene Fountas.

Speaker 14 We do feel now it's the right time to clarify some mischaracterizations of our work in support of teachers, some of whom are under attack.

Speaker 1 In this series of Q ⁇ As, Fontis and Pinnell reiterate their commitment to Mari Clay.

Speaker 6 Mari Clay has said, this is Gay Sue Pinnell, if a child has not learned, then we have not yet discovered the way to teach him.

Speaker 1 But they double down on the approach they've been promoting for decades and reiterate their commitment to Clay's cueing theory.

Speaker 14 Multiple sources of information are combined in a complex and orchestrated way.

Speaker 14 If a reader says pony for horse because of information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the pictures.

Speaker 14 His response is partially correct, but the teacher needs to guide him to stop and work for accuracy.

Speaker 1 Fountis says that asking a child to just sound out a word is simplistic and analogous to telling the child not to think.

Speaker 13 What advice do you have for teachers who feel caught in the crossfire while this literacy debate intensifies?

Speaker 6 We would encourage you to remain steadfast to your vision and values.

Speaker 1 This is Penelogon.

Speaker 6 And keep doing what works for your children, the children you teach, and rely on observable reading and writing behaviors to guide your moment-to-moment teaching.

Speaker 1 They really illustrate they still don't get it. This is Mark Seidenberg, the cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin.
I called him to get his reaction to Fountis and Pinnell's series.

Speaker 1 They clarified for me that they just haven't really benefited much from the ongoing discussion about what are the best ways to teach kids to read so that the most kids succeed.

Speaker 1 I think they're just trying to hold the line and, you know, hoping that this stuff will blow over.

Speaker 1 Which brings us to their publisher, Heinemann.

Speaker 1 One of their star authors, Lucy Cockins, has moved away from the queuing theory. Their other star authors, Fountis and Pinnell, have not.
Where does Heinemann stand in all this? Hi, Vicki.

Speaker 12 Hi, Emily. Very nice to meet you.

Speaker 1 I talked to Vicki Boyd. She was the executive vice president and general manager of Heineman when we did an interview last April.
She'd been with the company since the early 2000s.

Speaker 1 I pointed out to Vicki that Foundis and Pinnell are sticking with the queuing theory, and Lucy Cawkins is not. Both of those things can't be right.
Where does Heinemann stand on that?

Speaker 12 Yeah, you know, thank you for that question.

Speaker 12 You know,

Speaker 12 our authors disagree.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 we think that's good. We think debate is a good thing.

Speaker 1 But there's lots of evidence against the queuing theory. And there's been lots of evidence since the 90s.

Speaker 1 And now it's 2022. And you just said that there's a difference of opinion among your authors, but I think this is bigger than a difference of opinion.

Speaker 1 Fountis and Pinnell are holding fast to something that has been shown

Speaker 1 decades ago to not be a good idea?

Speaker 12 Yeah, I'm not sure that I agree that they're holding fast to something that has been

Speaker 12 disproven.

Speaker 1 These authors are leaders in the field.

Speaker 12 We rely on their many

Speaker 12 years

Speaker 12 of research and interpretation of that research into real classrooms. Research backs many approaches and teachers need a range of options.

Speaker 1 I tell her that we have interviewed reading scientists and parents and teachers who say that the queuing strategies are actually harming some kids.

Speaker 1 What's your response to people who say that Heinemann products that still have those strategies in them are harming children?

Speaker 12 Yeah, you know, that's that, as you might imagine, is it's disturbing and it gives us pause.

Speaker 12 It

Speaker 12 inspires a lot of reflection. It has us

Speaker 12 interrogating our own ideas and the work that we're doing in the world. We never stop learning.
We never stop listening to the critics.

Speaker 12 And we never stop considering any research that can help teachers, help students move forward.

Speaker 12 You know, you've really helped to elevate conversation around something that's called the science of reading.

Speaker 12 And, you know,

Speaker 12 I'm grateful for that. It's

Speaker 12 put us a bit in a troubling place because some of the talk about what our authors do and about what Heinemann is about

Speaker 12 has not rung true to me and to a lot of the folks who know Heinemann.

Speaker 1 About three months after our interview, Vicki Boyd left Heinemann.

Speaker 1 The company has a new president. I haven't talked to him.

Speaker 1 After I took over this summer, he said in a blog post that the company would be focusing on clarifying and formalizing its curriculum development practices.

Speaker 1 And last month, just before the first episode of this podcast, he said that Heinemann would be working with Fountis and Pinnell to increase the emphasis on foundational skills and decoding in their materials.

Speaker 1 I emailed a spokesperson and asked what would be changing about the curriculum review process at Heinemann. And I asked if Fountis and Pinnell would be dropping the queuing strategies.

Speaker 1 I didn't get a response.

Speaker 1 I've told you before that based on the reporting I've done, I don't think Lucy Cawkins knew there was anything wrong with the queuing theory. I think she made that clear in our interview.

Speaker 1 But I think she should have known. All the evidence was there, and she didn't know.

Speaker 1 And Fountis and Pinnell, I think they still believe in queuing. I think they made that clear in those QAs I played for you.

Speaker 1 And I think they believe in queuing because they have a particular idea about reading and how it works. An idea that I watched in action four years ago at a reading recovery conference.

Speaker 1 It kind of blew my mind.

Speaker 1 And I want to tell you about it. After a break.

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Terms apply. Hi, it's Emily.

Speaker 1 And I'm here to remind you that Soul to Story is a product of independent public media journalism. This kind of rigorous, long-form investigative reporting involves a lot of people and a lot of time.

Speaker 1 It's expensive to produce. But we do it because the work has impact.

Speaker 1 You can support our ongoing reporting right now by making a donation at soldastory.org slash donate or clicking on the link in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Testing one, two, three.

Speaker 1 I think the idea for this podcast started here.

Speaker 15 We are at the National Reading Recovery and Classroom Literacy Conference held in Columbus, Ohio every year.

Speaker 1 This is Patricia Scherer.

Speaker 1 She was a reading recovery teacher and a professor at Ohio State. I met her in 2018 at this Reading Recovery Conference.
I'd recently made an audio documentary about kids with dyslexia.

Speaker 1 And it was parents of kids with dyslexia who told me about Mari Clay's Reading Recovery Program. Many of their kids had been in Reading Recovery.

Speaker 1 And the parents I was talking to didn't think the program worked. In fact, some parents told me they thought Reading Recovery made things worse for their kids.

Speaker 1 So I'm here in Columbus in 2018 to learn more about the Reading Recovery program. I'm in the conference exhibit hall with Patricia Scherer.

Speaker 15 And you see, we want our children to be flooded with text. We send text to them.

Speaker 1 She's showing me the kinds of books that reading recovery teachers use in their lessons.

Speaker 1 This was my first introduction to those little leveled books.

Speaker 15 This insect can jump.

Speaker 15 This insect can climb. Now they can read this because you've introduced the pattern to them and they can use the picture to try and figure it out.

Speaker 1 This was the only thing at the conference I was allowed to record. But I did go to a bunch of the conference sessions and I took notes.

Speaker 1 Most of the sessions I went to focused on trying to figure out what cues kids were neglecting when they were reading. Presenters played videos of children trying to read.

Speaker 1 And I kept waiting for someone to say, they're neglecting the letters. They're not sounding out the words.
But that didn't happen.

Speaker 1 In one of the sessions, a presenter said, research shows young readers do not sound out words letter by letter.

Speaker 1 And I thought that was strange, because I had been reading a lot of research that said the opposite.

Speaker 1 It said that sounding out written words is a critical part of the process of becoming a good reader.

Speaker 1 The strangest part of the conference for me was the Sunday morning keynote. I got a recording of it later.

Speaker 16 So here we are in 2018, and reading recovery has been going strong for 34 years.

Speaker 1 The keynote speaker is Mary Freed. She was a reading recovery teacher trainer who was taught how to do reading recovery by Mari Clay herself in Ohio in the 1980s.

Speaker 1 In the keynote, Mary Freed does a little reading lesson.

Speaker 16 Today you're going to be a beginning reader.

Speaker 1 There's a projector set up so the audience can see the pages of the book they're going to try to read. The book is about a puppy.

Speaker 1 The audience can see his picture, but the words are unfamiliar to them because the book is not written in English.

Speaker 16 This is his name, Plet.

Speaker 1 She points to the puppy's name, Plet.

Speaker 1 She then goes through the entire book, previewing the story, pointing to some of the words, and saying what they mean.

Speaker 1 This is before the audience tries to read the book themselves, just like in a reading recovery lesson.

Speaker 16 So now it's your turn, and you get to read the whole book.

Speaker 1 She turns back to the first page, and the audience starts reading.

Speaker 1 This is where things get weird.

Speaker 1 You can't hear the audience very well, but they're speaking English, even though they're trying to read a book that is written in another language.

Speaker 16 Very good! You almost got it. That word looks like hop.

Speaker 1 Mary Freed stops the audience because she says they made an error. There's a picture of Plett the puppy and one of his friends, an alligator named Tom.

Speaker 1 They're on a trampoline and there's this sentence.

Speaker 1 The audience read that sentence as Tom and Plet hopped on the trampoline. But Mary Fried tells them that wasn't right.

Speaker 16 Let's try that again.

Speaker 16 Tom

Speaker 16 and Plet.

Speaker 1 The audience says, Tom and Plett jumped on the trampoline.

Speaker 16 You did it!

Speaker 1 But actually, they didn't.

Speaker 1 It turns out the book is written in Danish, and the sentence doesn't say Tom and Plett jumped on the trampoline. It says, Tom o plet haba o trampoline.

Speaker 1 Even if you translate the sentence, it doesn't say Tom and Plett jumped on the trampoline.

Speaker 1 I asked my brother-in-law, who speaks Danish, he's the guy you heard reading the sentence, and he told me it says, Tom and Plett are jumping on the trampoline. It's a small difference.

Speaker 1 The audience still got the meaning of the story, but they were not reading.

Speaker 16 Was it fun to read?

Speaker 1 Mary Fried tells them they were reading.

Speaker 16 And your very first lesson in reading

Speaker 16 in Danish, you made accelerated progress. So that's very good.

Speaker 1 At this moment, I realize something.

Speaker 1 I realize that the people in this room have bought into a definition of reading that isn't really reading.

Speaker 1 They've bought the idea that reading is making meaning from a story using whatever strategies you can think of.

Speaker 1 You can look at the pictures, you can look at parts of the words, you can think about what would make sense.

Speaker 1 They've bought into the cueing idea, the idea that a child can read a book without being able to read the words.

Speaker 1 And here's why I think they bought that idea.

Speaker 1 They want kids to be able to make meaning from a story. Everybody wants that.
That's the goal, to understand what you read.

Speaker 1 The question is, how does a little kid get there?

Speaker 1 And the answer is, they have to learn how to read the words. They have to get good at that.

Speaker 1 But learning how to read words is hard for a lot of kids. They need explicit instruction, repetition, and practice before they can curl up in a cozy nook and read a book on their own.

Speaker 1 And I think people with good intentions wanted to get kids curled up with books in cozy nooks as fast as they could. They wanted to get kids to the good part.

Speaker 1 And they ended up teaching them shortcuts that don't get a lot of kids to where they need to go.

Speaker 1 And now, even in many schools where kids are getting symphonics instruction, they are also being taught the cueing system.

Speaker 1 Kids are being taught two different ways to read.

Speaker 1 And one of those ways isn't really reading.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry. This is Christine Cronin.

Speaker 4 It is very painful.

Speaker 4 It is embarrassing.

Speaker 1 Christine Cronin was the teacher in Boston who wanted her classroom to look like what what she saw in books by Fountess and Pinnell and Lucy Cockins.

Speaker 1 And what she just said about being sorry and embarrassed and all of this being really painful, it's what I've been hearing from a lot of teachers.

Speaker 4 It's hard to recognize that you believed in something so much that now the research is like blowing out of the water. It makes you feel gullible.
It makes you feel sort of played in a way.

Speaker 12 No one wants to be told that what they're doing is wrong or that you've harmed kids.

Speaker 1 Like that's a really,

Speaker 1 it's terrible to feel. This is Sarah Gannon.
She's a teacher you met in episode three. She trusted Fountess and Pinnell and Lucy Cockins.

Speaker 12 I trusted that they're experts. I trusted that this is the way you teach reading.

Speaker 1 She believed in the queuing and the leveled books. The first time she encountered criticism of that approach was in 2019, after one of my articles came out.

Speaker 12 Teacher friends were like, did you read this, Emily Hanford? And I was like, I read it.

Speaker 1 And we were like, what is she talking about?

Speaker 1 She was outraged because a journalist was questioning the way she taught reading.

Speaker 1 And then her daughter, Maeve.

Speaker 1 Maeve wasn't learning how to read. Sarah tried to teach her, but it wasn't working.
So Sarah went looking for answers and discovered the research.

Speaker 12 I changed because I had to. There was no choice.
I couldn't ignore it. I couldn't keep doing what I was doing with Maeve.

Speaker 1 The same thing happened to Carrie Chi.

Speaker 1 She was one of the Lucy Cawkins fans you met in an earlier episode, the one who didn't like George Bush.

Speaker 1 One day, when Carrie's daughter was in elementary school, she came to her mother and she said, I have something to tell you. My child looked at me and she was

Speaker 1 really nervous and anxious and she just says, I can't read.

Speaker 1 The school hadn't said there was a problem. Carrie hadn't noticed a problem either, but her daughter knew.
She knew, they know.

Speaker 1 You know, the kids know first, the parents know second, the teacher chimes in third, and then, you know, the hunt is on for help.

Speaker 1 Some kids try to keep it a secret when they're struggling. They can look like they're reading for a while.
But as the words get longer and the pictures go away, it all kind of falls apart.

Speaker 1 Carrie Chi was a seventh grade English teacher before she had her daughter. She says she always had struggling readers in her class, a lot of them.

Speaker 1 And the only thing she knew to do was to try to find them books about things they were interested in. And I just kept saying, well, keep trying.

Speaker 1 And then when they couldn't, I just thought they didn't want to try.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what I'm haunted by is when it wasn't working, I blamed it on children.

Speaker 1 Carrie Chi isn't sure she would have learned anything about the science of reading if it weren't for her experience with her own child. Sarah Gannon, too.

Speaker 1 If everything had been fine with her daughter, she thinks she might still be dismissing all of this science of reading stuff.

Speaker 12 I don't know if I could be convinced, and that's what worries me. You know, I have good friends who are very smart, incredibly talented educators who it's just like hold fast to old beliefs.

Speaker 12 And I think, I honestly, I think I would be one of them, you know?

Speaker 12 But I guess you have to say, like, it's okay to be wrong. Like, I was wrong.

Speaker 1 Sarah quit her job. She was a reading specialist in Winchester, Massachusetts, a wealthy suburb outside Boston.
She quit because her district is still using Lucy Cawkins and Fountess and Pinnell.

Speaker 1 And she says she can't teach that way anymore.

Speaker 1 But there are school districts making changes. For example, Fort Worth, Texas is getting rid of the Fountess and Pinnell benchmark assessment system.

Speaker 1 The chief academic officer told us, we got our fleet of trucks and picked up the materials and took them out of there.

Speaker 1 In New York City, a Lucy Cawkins stronghold, the new schools chancellor said last year that he wants to change how children are taught to read. He says the current approach is fundamentally wrong.

Speaker 1 And remember Charlie and his mom Corinne in Rhode Island?

Speaker 1 The school Charlie went to was using the Lucy Cockins curriculum, but the school district recently decided to adopt a different reading program.

Speaker 1 There's a new law in Rhode Island that requires most districts to choose a program from a state-approved list. The Cockins reading curriculum is not on that list.

Speaker 1 We found that since 2019, at least 26 states have passed laws that are intended to get schools to follow the research or help teachers learn about the science of reading.

Speaker 1 And the very first school district in the United States to use Mari Clay's Reading Recovery Program has gotten rid of it.

Speaker 1 The Executive Director of Teaching and Learning for the Columbus, Ohio Public Schools told me last spring that the district's decision to drop reading recovery is part of a larger effort to bring the science of reading to the city's schools.

Speaker 1 I wanted to talk about this with someone from the organization that advocates for reading recovery in the United States.

Speaker 1 And I wanted to know whether they'd changed anything about how they teach kids to read since I was at their conference in 2018. They wouldn't give me an interview.

Speaker 1 Since we began releasing this podcast last month, my inbox and social media feeds have been flooded. I'm hearing from people who are saying, I know, I know, this queuing stuff.

Speaker 1 I've been trying to tell people about it for years.

Speaker 1 And I'm hearing from teachers who are saying, I didn't know. I feel terrible.
I'm going to do better.

Speaker 1 And I'm hearing from a lot of parents. They're saying, wow, this is me.
This is my kid. This is our story.

Speaker 1 I'm hearing from critics too. People who are saying I've gotten it wrong.
I've misunderstood Mari Clay. I'm attacking teachers.
I'm creating controversy.

Speaker 1 And I'm hearing from another group of people, children. Kids are listening to this podcast.
I'm not sure I was really expecting that.

Speaker 1 Last week, I got this from the mother of a boy who's in fourth grade.

Speaker 1 She wrote, today when I dropped him off for basketball and we were mid-episode one, he said, turn it off and don't listen again until I get back in the car.

Speaker 1 I love that kids are listening to this. This is about kids.
It's about doing what's right for them. This has been too long.

Speaker 1 It's not working. You know, don't dig in.

Speaker 1 It's not working.

Speaker 1 This is Carrie Chi again. the teacher whose own daughter said, I can't read.
You know, there's kids sinking everywhere and they're looking for help and it's, you know,

Speaker 1 it's on us.

Speaker 1 This is where we originally planned for Solda's story to end. But we have more because a lot has happened in response to the podcast, much more than we ever imagined.

Speaker 1 So we are continuing to report on this story. We have more episodes and they're available in this feed right now.

Speaker 1 If you go to the show notes, you can sign up for our email newsletter to get alerts whenever we have something new to share.

Speaker 1 And be sure to follow us in your podcast app so new episodes will come into your feed.

Speaker 1 Now it's time for the credits, and I'm going to get some help from some kids you've met. Uh, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 Zoe and Charlie.

Speaker 1 Soul Day Story is a podcast from American public media. It's reported and produced by Emily Hanford and Christopher Pico.
The editor is Katherine Winter.

Speaker 1 Addie Cruz.

Speaker 1 Andy. Andy Cruz and Dave Mann are the digital editors.
Reporting and production help from Will Callan,

Speaker 1 Cole,

Speaker 1 Maureen, Marie Rivera, and and Angela Caputo Caputo

Speaker 1 Fat Checking by Betsy Townier Betsy

Speaker 1 Towner Levine

Speaker 1 Mixing and Sound Design are by Chris Julian

Speaker 1 Julian Julian

Speaker 1 say Julian Julian And Emily Havoc

Speaker 1 Havoc with original music by Chris Gulen

Speaker 1 The scene music is by Jim Bergenbergen.

Speaker 1 So this is...

Speaker 1 Put a lot of extra letters in there.

Speaker 1 This is Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg. Of Wonderly.
The final master of this episode was by Derek Ramsey. Derek.

Speaker 1 Ramirez. Ramirez.
Ramirez.

Speaker 1 This podcast wouldn't have been possible without support from Chris Worthington. Some great interns helped with this project.

Speaker 1 Caitlin Vo Vu

Speaker 1 and Farah

Speaker 1 Mina

Speaker 1 and Alanja

Speaker 1 Sarah. Sierra

Speaker 1 Sierra. Excellent.

Speaker 1 Thank you to the people who listened to early versions of episodes and provided valuable feedback. Anna Canney, Molly Bloom, Maya Beckstrom, Camila Kirwin, and Margaret Goldberg.

Speaker 1 Jill Barchet provided editing help. Mark Anfinson provided legal advice.
We have lots of other people to thank.

Speaker 1 Lauren Humpert and Christine

Speaker 1 Hutchins.

Speaker 1 This is a lot of names. I know.

Speaker 1 Holly Corby, Grace Stockton. Gracie Steck,

Speaker 1 Gracie,

Speaker 1 Gracie, Derek Stevens, Sarah Sparks, Sarah White Kongskin. This is hard.
Let's try this one. Sarah White's Koda Check.
Sarah White's Koda Check.

Speaker 1 Marvie

Speaker 1 Hagopino. Marvy.
Marvy Hagopian.

Speaker 1 Excellent. Yes, Marvy Hagopian.

Speaker 1 Joseph

Speaker 1 Wyckoff.

Speaker 1 Yes, Joseph Wyckoff.

Speaker 1 Melon.

Speaker 1 Mean.

Speaker 1 Melanie. Melanie.
Melanie

Speaker 1 Splin. Es Splin.

Speaker 1 Cooper Marsden. Yep.
Marsden? Yes.

Speaker 1 Lynn Stone. Oh, this is one of the hardest ones.

Speaker 1 David.

Speaker 1 Yeah, David

Speaker 1 Stray Hair I'm gonna help you with this one David Strathairn

Speaker 1 David Strafern Clark Young

Speaker 1 and Jeremy

Speaker 1 Android

Speaker 1 and Jeremy

Speaker 1 Jeremy Arnold

Speaker 1 Arnold

Speaker 1 We have a website where you can find transcripts of all the episodes. It's soldestory.org.

Speaker 1 There are articles by Christopher Peake and me, a discussion guide, a version of this podcast in Spanish, and much more. It's all at soldestory.org.

Speaker 1 The easiest way to get there is to click the link in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Support this podcast comes from the Hollyhawk Foundation, the Oak Foundation,

Speaker 1 and Wendy and Stephen Gall.

Speaker 1 Wendy and Stephen Gall.

Speaker 1 Wendy and Stephen Gall.

Speaker 1 Really good.

Speaker 1 That's it. That's it.