4: The Superstar

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Speaker 6 So we were in Dayton, Ohio.

Speaker 6 My parents had just gotten a divorce. I was in first grade.

Speaker 9 This is Lacey Robinson.

Speaker 13 She started first grade in 1978 in a suburb of Dayton called Englewood.

Speaker 14 Her mother had moved there after her divorce, seeking better schools for her children.

Speaker 6 We actually integrated the neighborhood. When we get to school, it was my sister, myself, and maybe one other African-American male.

Speaker 11 And first grade was awful for Lacey.

Speaker 18 Not just because she was one of the only black children in the school. She wasn't learning how to read.

Speaker 6 I remember my mother being extremely worried. Because my mother was like, wait a minute, she doesn't know her letters.
She doesn't know her sounds. And she finally gets frustrated enough.

Speaker 6 She goes up to the school because she gets the end-of-the-year report card and sees that they're passing me on to second grade.

Speaker 6 And my mother's like, How in the world is this child going on to second grade and she can't read?

Speaker 6 And they were like, Oh, but she's so nice and she's so quiet.

Speaker 1 And she's like, Yeah, but she can't read.

Speaker 6 And they were like, Well, Miss Robinson, you know, what do you want to do? And she's like, I want to hold her back.

Speaker 21 They're like, Oh, no, no, no, you can't do that.

Speaker 14 She's like, Why?

Speaker 14 Why can't I hold her back?

Speaker 6 And so she forced them to make me do first grade over again.

Speaker 22 She got a different teacher the next year.

Speaker 23 Her name was Miss Montgomery.

Speaker 6 And she smelt like oatmeal cookies.

Speaker 6 And she had short brown hair and she seemed really tall.

Speaker 6 And I walk in her class and she gives me the warmest squeeze.

Speaker 13 And Miss Montgomery taught Lacey how to read.

Speaker 6 She taught me how to decode words.

Speaker 19 It was old school phonics instruction, sounding out words, and it worked.

Speaker 28 And that summer, after Lacey finished first grade for the second time, she helped teach her grandmother how to read.

Speaker 6 I would sit next to her and she would say, you know, we would sit there and I'd be like, no, grandma, that's a B. It says B.
Like I was, and I was so excited to be able to teach her.

Speaker 14 Her grandmother had grown up in rural Georgia. in the Jim Crow South, had to drop out of school when she was about nine years old.

Speaker 3 She worked and she raised a family without being able to read.

Speaker 29 And then when she was in her early 60s, she became a Jehovah's Witness and wanted to be able to read the Bible.

Speaker 27 The people in her religious community taught her how to read and little Lacey helped too.

Speaker 6 And I'm telling you, she got that reading down. All of a sudden, now she became a part of a community where she was going to meetings and they were reading and she was trying.

Speaker 21 And I just watched her come alive.

Speaker 6 I've had other relatives and close family friends that as I got older, my mom would say to me, well, you know, she can't read. Well, why can't she read? Well, she grew up in the South.

Speaker 6 There were 11 of them. They were sharecroppers.
They couldn't afford to go to school.

Speaker 27 That's when Lacey Robinson knew that she wanted to be a teacher.

Speaker 31 She was going to teach children how to read. And in particular, she was going to teach black children how to read.

Speaker 11 I'm Emily Hanford, and this is episode four of Sold a Story, a podcast from APM Reports.

Speaker 29 Lacey Robinson knew what it took to learn how to read.

Speaker 37 She knew what it took to teach someone how to do it.

Speaker 24 And she knew how important it was.

Speaker 27 But even Lacey was wooed by people who had other ideas.

Speaker 13 Ideas about how to teach reading that went against what she knew.

Speaker 12 That's the story I'm going to tell you in this episode.

Speaker 18 I'm going to tell you why even Lacey Robinson believed.

Speaker 34 And I'm going to introduce you to the person she believed in.

Speaker 14 One of the most influential people in American elementary education today.

Speaker 38 Lacey Robinson started teaching first grade in 1996 in Marietta, Georgia, at a poor elementary school where more than half the students were black.

Speaker 6 And there was no reading program.

Speaker 38 She says there was no curriculum to teach kids how to read and no training for teachers.

Speaker 6 I got so angry that I spent that next summer creating my own reading program.

Speaker 27 When she returned to school in the fall, she went to the lead teacher and showed her what she'd come up with.

Speaker 6 We got to teach reading. Here's my program.
I laid out this program. I was like, we got to start with phonics.

Speaker 6 We got to teach them the code. We got to give them books and da-da-da-da-da.
And like, silence.

Speaker 6 And then the principal got called in.

Speaker 6 And then I basically got told to stay in my place.

Speaker 40 This was the 90s.

Speaker 25 Phonics was not something you were supposed to be teaching.

Speaker 6 And then interestingly enough, that same year, the principal hired a woman from New York who was an expert in reading and writers workshop.

Speaker 11 The woman was a literacy coach whose job was to help teachers at the school implement something called the Reading and Writing Workshop.

Speaker 43 Lacey had never heard of the Reading and Writing Workshop, and she was kind of suspicious because it didn't include phonics instruction.

Speaker 6 But by the end of the year, I was curious.

Speaker 14 The Reading and Writing Workshop was not a curriculum.

Speaker 26 It was more like a framework, a set of routines.

Speaker 20 It has since become a published curriculum.

Speaker 11 Here's how it works.

Speaker 45 The teacher starts with something called a mini lesson.

Speaker 46 An example of a mini lesson for kindergarten is, What is an avid reader?

Speaker 28 The teacher shows the class photographs of avid readers and asks the children to discuss what they notice.

Speaker 37 Then the children are sent off to find comfortable spots so they can practice avid reading.

Speaker 47 These are kindergartners, most of them don't know how to read yet, but they're supposed to spend 35 to 45 minutes reading independently and with partners and in small groups.

Speaker 9 The teacher circulates and observes and confers with the children.

Speaker 28 At some point, the teacher gets the attention of the whole class for what's called a mid-workshop teaching point.

Speaker 27 She might share something she's noticed.

Speaker 48 The example in the teacher guide is to say something like this.

Speaker 32 Everywhere I look, you are reading avidly.

Speaker 9 I don't need those photographs of strangers to see avid reading.

Speaker 14 No way.

Speaker 26 It's right here in front of me.

Speaker 11 The kids then go back to their books. Eventually, the teacher brings the children back together so they can share what they learned about avid reading.

Speaker 11 Like I said, Lacey Robinson was suspicious at first, but this is what her school was telling her to do.

Speaker 14 And the workshop approach grew on her.

Speaker 6 You didn't have to spend your entire entire summer or weekends trying to cobble together a reading program. And it came with a lot of professional development coaching.

Speaker 40 She was finally getting some training. And the best thing about the workshop approach is that it came with a lot of books.

Speaker 6 It brought volumes of books in my classroom.

Speaker 49 To do the reading workshop, a teacher needs a big classroom library.

Speaker 25 Kids will browse the library on a Monday, pick a bunch of books on their reading level, and then read read those books all week, maybe even bring them home in a baggie.

Speaker 50 Lacey loved that.

Speaker 14 She was in a poor black school in Georgia, same state where her grandmother had grown up, and Lacey's students were getting books, tons of books.

Speaker 44 But Lacey was kind of frustrated with her job.

Speaker 10 She was working with the children she wanted to teach, but it was a struggling school, and she still didn't feel like she was getting all the resources and training she needed.

Speaker 11 She had a friend, another first grade teacher at the school, who was from New York.

Speaker 27 And this friend started telling Lacey about schools in affluent communities outside New York City.

Speaker 6 She began to talk to me about schools in the suburbs and one of her goals was to get there, was to get there. The pay was better.

Speaker 6 You know, she knew she was going to be professionally developed better.

Speaker 13 Lacey decided she wanted to get to the suburbs too.

Speaker 12 Not because she was going to spend her career there.

Speaker 16 Her plan was to go to wealthy schools in the suburbs, learn everything she could about how the kids were taught, and come back to schools like the one where she started in Marietta.

Speaker 3 She wanted to give poor black children what rich white children were getting.

Speaker 21 Her friend had an idea about how to get a job in the suburbs.

Speaker 11 She said, go to graduate school first at Columbia University, the prestigious teacher's college there.

Speaker 24 I was like, all right, I'll apply.

Speaker 6 I had no idea the status. I had no idea any of that.

Speaker 45 She also had no idea how expensive it was.

Speaker 30 She got in and realized pretty quickly that she needed a job.

Speaker 27 And one of her professors offered her one, working as an administrative assistant at a teacher training institute the professor had founded.

Speaker 18 The professor's name is Lucy Cawkins.

Speaker 41 Her institute is called the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

Speaker 6 So I started working there, making copies, answering phones, helping prepare for meetings.

Speaker 49 Lacey didn't know it at first, but Lucy Cawkins is the person who created the reading and writing workshop approach she'd been using in Marietta.

Speaker 25 Lacey also didn't know that she was working for Lucy Cawkins at a pivotal moment for Cockins and her organization.

Speaker 12 Cockins Institute had been founded in the early 1980s to focus on writing instruction.

Speaker 10 The expansion into reading instruction was relatively new.

Speaker 44 And when Lacey started working for her in the late 1990s, Lucy Cockins was working on a book about how to teach reading.

Speaker 44 Problem was, Lucy Cawkins didn't know that much about how little kids learned to read.

Speaker 46 It was not her area of expertise.

Speaker 2 So she invited the Ohio State professor you met in the last episode, Gay Sue Pinnell, to come to Columbia.

Speaker 27 And Lacey Robinson was there.

Speaker 6 I remember saying to my friend, I think the mother of reading is here.

Speaker 22 Pinnell came to Columbia many times over the course of a year to teach Lucy Coggins and her colleagues what she knew about how children learn to read.

Speaker 6 I remember feeling like Gay Sue Pinnell talked about reading the way a

Speaker 6 ear doctor talks about the system of the ear canal in the throat. It was with such precision.

Speaker 12 Mari Clay came to Columbia too.

Speaker 30 Lucy Cawkins embraced her cueing theory and adopted the word reading strategies into her workshop approach.

Speaker 16 For Lacey Robinson, it was pretty heady stuff.

Speaker 46 She'd ended up at a prestigious institute at an Ivy League school that was developing an approach to teaching reading.

Speaker 16 She was learning from people who were clearly at the top of their field, famous people.

Speaker 26 None more famous, it seemed, than her boss.

Speaker 6 I got invited one day to go out with Lucy and the team to some schools in the Bronx and to witness her professionally developing a group of teachers. And it was like theater.

Speaker 6 I mean, the people, she was like a rock star walking into that building. And I just remember sitting there like, in awe.

Speaker 27 This was more than 20 years ago.

Speaker 13 Lucy Cockins is even more famous today.

Speaker 46 Her approach to teaching teaching reading and writing is used in schools all over the world. It's estimated that as many as one in four elementary schools in the United States uses her curriculum.

Speaker 27 And more than 170,000 teachers have come to the week-long teacher training institutes she offers in New York.

Speaker 23 These institutes often begin with opening ceremonies in a church.

Speaker 7 This is where we're gonna see Lucy.

Speaker 27 This is a teacher recording herself as she walks into the church. It's Riverside Church in Manhattan.

Speaker 7 Oh boy. Oh boy.

Speaker 7 This is so beautiful.

Speaker 7 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 14 It was like being at a rock concert, right?

Speaker 12 This is Lisa Karim, another teacher who came to one of Cochin's institutes in New York.

Speaker 52 One of the sessions was going into this big college auditorium.

Speaker 52 Everybody was whisper quiet and there was Lucy down at the front with a student teaching a writing lesson and it felt like you were watching something magical.

Speaker 48 Lisa Karim wanted to make the same kind of magic for her students.

Speaker 13 That's why she was there.

Speaker 16 It was, here's a person

Speaker 52 who knows how children learn to read and write, and I want to be able to teach children to read and write.

Speaker 53 Lucy Cockins tapped into a need among the nation's teachers.

Speaker 10 A need to know more about how to teach reading and writing.

Speaker 2 Her institute in New York is like a mecca.

Speaker 2 It was like this sense of the Ivy League and you always want to go there. That's Carrie Chi, the teacher you met in the last episode who didn't like George Bush.

Speaker 16 She loved Lucy Cockins.

Speaker 12 She never got to go to one of the Caucas Institutes in New York.

Speaker 16 Neither did Krista Velasquez.

Speaker 2 She's a teacher in Palo Alto, California.

Speaker 54 We would all apply and certain people would get picked to go and then certain people wouldn't get picked to go.

Speaker 26 A school district can't afford to send everyone.

Speaker 13 The institutes cost up to $850 per person plus expenses.

Speaker 27 Krista says everyone was envious of the teachers who got to go.

Speaker 54 There is this desire, you're going to go with your best friends. You guys go together.
You stay in a hotel together.

Speaker 54 The people who went, you know, they kind of got wined and dined and they would go to shows when they were out there. They got a free trip to New York.

Speaker 38 But a school district doesn't have to send their teachers to New York to learn from Lucy and her team.

Speaker 42 They can come to you for a few days of training or for ongoing coaching and support.

Speaker 11 The Palo Alto schools contracted with Cockins for years to have her trainers in their schools.

Speaker 39 Records show the district paid an LLC that belongs to Cockins more than a million dollars between 2013 and 2021.

Speaker 13 That's how Krista Velasquez learned to do the Cockins Reading and Writing Workshop.

Speaker 51 The Lucy trainers are phenomenal.

Speaker 54 And when you're sitting with them in a room and they're teaching you, you feel like you can do anything. They become a sunlight in a room.

Speaker 54 And when you're in these trainings with them, you see that there's a possibility to become that sun.

Speaker 13 Lucy Cawkins has visited Palo Alto too.

Speaker 55 If Beyoncé came and gave a private concert in my district, it would not have been a bigger deal for many of my teachers.

Speaker 14 This is Todd Collins, a school board member in Palo Alto, remembering a Caucas visit to the district a few years ago.

Speaker 55 And I've been stunned. I mean, I've sat in meeting with educational leaders in my district and have them talk about the curriculum as Lucy.

Speaker 55 Lucy says this. Lucy does this.

Speaker 55 She personifies this curriculum.

Speaker 33 Just a young man trying to learn through Lucy Cawkins, the writing guru.

Speaker 25 Songs have been written about Lucy Cawkins.

Speaker 16 Like this song a teacher posted to Twitter.

Speaker 33 Now in New York, we want to follow her.

Speaker 16 And this song about the reading strategies Lucy Caucins recommended.

Speaker 30 Teachers are being taught this song at one of Caukins' institutes. We found the video on Facebook.

Speaker 11 Those strategies.

Speaker 51 Check the picture, look at the first letter.

Speaker 30 Lucy Cockins recently acknowledged she was wrong about those strategies.

Speaker 3 She says there are important things about how children learn to read that she didn't know.

Speaker 42 She told the New York Times earlier this year that my reporting helped change her mind.

Speaker 26 But the research showing those strategies were a bad idea has been around for decades.

Speaker 21 Why didn't she know about it?

Speaker 29 That's what I've been trying to figure out.

Speaker 21 And I want to tell you a little about her background because I think it may reveal some things about why she got reading wrong and why she didn't realize it for so long.

Speaker 14 More on that after a break.

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Speaker 13 In January of 2019, before she acknowledged she was wrong about the queuing strategies, Lucy Cawkins appeared appeared on a podcast produced by her publisher and talked about her childhood.

Speaker 58 I think I grew up in a family that conveyed in every way that our role here on earth is to make a difference.

Speaker 42 Lucy Cawkins is from a big, well-to-do family.

Speaker 10 Her parents were both doctors.

Speaker 30 They had nine kids.

Speaker 58 My eight brothers and sisters are mostly all doctors or lawyers. Everybody went to Harvard or Yale or, you know, it's a very high-achieving family.

Speaker 3 She was kind of the black sheep of her family.

Speaker 14 Those are her words. She didn't go to Harvard or Yale.

Speaker 27 She went to a different elite school, Williams, a small college in western Massachusetts, where she majored in religion.

Speaker 58 And I did imagine myself becoming a pastor. And I wanted that because I wanted to be part of a community of people who dealt with things that matter.

Speaker 58 I wanted to be with people around issues that are life and death and that make a difference.

Speaker 24 But she wasn't actually much of a believer.

Speaker 58 You're not sure how cooked up some of this is.

Speaker 12 That was a problem when it came to being a pastor.

Speaker 43 So she decided to try something else.

Speaker 3 Another career where she thought she could make a difference.

Speaker 25 Teaching.

Speaker 20 After college, she went to her childhood minister for advice.

Speaker 17 He had recently completed a doctorate in education, and he told her to check out the primary schools in Britain.

Speaker 28 This was the 1970s, and these British primary schools were at the forefront of the progressive education movement.

Speaker 27 There were no desks in these schools, no strict schedules.

Speaker 53 Children learned through experience and exploration, not formal lessons.

Speaker 13 It was very appealing to a young Lucy Cawkins.

Speaker 58 So I flew to Heathrow Airport and stuck out my thumb and I hitchhiked to Oxfordshire.

Speaker 44 She went to the office of the man in charge of the local schools and convinced him to give her an unpaid apprenticeship.

Speaker 11 She lived in a nursery school, says she actually slept on a mat in a classroom surrounded by little red chairs, got up and out each morning before the children arrived, and rode her motorcycle to the Bister Primary School.

Speaker 20 She spent a year in England.

Speaker 58 In the British primary schools at the time, there were these retreats for teachers. And so on weekends, I would be part of these study retreats and they were held in castles.

Speaker 58 And you arrive Friday night, and there's sherry in front of the crackling fire.

Speaker 58 And then on Saturday, you do things like observe a mushroom and make little delicate drawings studying the mushroom close-up with the magnifying glass and the fungi and you know or you would do creative movement, Le Ban movement.

Speaker 11 Lucy Cawkins says this is where she first got the idea for her workshop approach.

Speaker 9 She focused first on writing instruction because she was a writer.

Speaker 43 Her goal was to turn the elementary school classroom into something like an adult writer's workshop, a place where children are inspired to write and to think of themselves as authors who have something to say.

Speaker 4 What do you like about writing?

Speaker 59 Putting my own feelings into stories and knowing what I'm writing about

Speaker 59 and it's fun.

Speaker 12 This is Lucy Cawkins interviewing a child at a school in rural New Hampshire as part of a research project on student writing in the late 1970s.

Speaker 4 Do you like rewriting or do you find it a chore or?

Speaker 59 Depends on what kind of mood I'm in the day. See, my writing sort of depends on the way I feel that day and that kind of thing.
Because if I don't really want to.

Speaker 25 Lucy Cockins was to writing instruction what the whole language movement was to reading instruction.

Speaker 43 The basic idea was that if kids are motivated to learn, they will.

Speaker 18 Create the right environment, give students lots of freedom to make their own choices, and they'll develop the skills they need.

Speaker 31 Cockins was not particularly interested in teaching children the mechanics of writing.

Speaker 24 She thought focusing too much on grammar and spelling was part of the problem with writing instruction.

Speaker 48 By the early 1980s, Lucy Cockins had joined the faculty at Teachers College Columbia.

Speaker 39 She had started her teacher training institute.

Speaker 27 And according to an article back then in the New York Times, she was already transforming instruction in many schools.

Speaker 56 You come from Cincinnati, Ohio, and from Atlanta, from Springfield, Massachusetts, from Hartford.

Speaker 27 This is Lucy Cawkins giving a talk at an education conference in 1985.

Speaker 56 And the revolution in the field of writing has come because we've realized that teachers need to be coaches, they need to be master craftspeople working with an apprentice, they need to be researchers in their classroom, they need to pull their chair alongside a kid and watch how this person goes about writing.

Speaker 13 A few months after she gave this talk, Lucy Cockins published a book called The Art of Teaching Writing.

Speaker 23 In the book, she says that children learn to write by writing and by living with a sense of I am one who writes.

Speaker 27 This self-perception, she says in the book, will give children the eyes to see and they will notice the conventions of written language everywhere.

Speaker 23 They will learn about punctuation, spelling, and the many rhythms of written language from billboards and labels and books.

Speaker 36 They will ask about the monogram letters on their bath towels.

Speaker 25 I've thought about that sentence a lot.

Speaker 14 They will ask about the monogram letters on their bath towels.

Speaker 30 It's one detail in a 550-page book, but I think it's a revealing detail.

Speaker 3 Lucy Cockins had an idea about how children learn, and I think that idea was influenced by privilege.

Speaker 25 Her idea was kind of romantic, that learning is fun and beautiful, that it's a natural process, kind of magical.

Speaker 43 And that a teacher's job is to unlock a child's potential, to observe and nurture, to help children fall in love with reading and writing.

Speaker 9 I think I used to believe this too.

Speaker 27 that learning to read was a natural process, that if you read enough to your kids, they'd learn.

Speaker 42 And I think my belief was influenced by privilege.

Speaker 15 I grew up in a family not unlike Lucy Cockin's family.

Speaker 27 Upper middle class, white, well-educated.

Speaker 15 Both of my parents went to Teachers College Columbia in the 1960s.

Speaker 45 I even had some monogram bath towels.

Speaker 2 And as I mentioned in an earlier episode, I think learning to read was pretty easy for me.

Speaker 9 and it was pretty easy for my kids.

Speaker 20 Nothing challenged my view that learning to read is a natural process.

Speaker 26 Until I began doing this reporting a few years ago, that's when I started hearing the same story again and again from parents all over the country.

Speaker 9 My kid can't read, and the school isn't teaching her how to do it.

Speaker 46 A lot of these kids were in schools in affluent suburban districts, districts with great reputations.

Speaker 10 The kind of district Lacey Robinson wanted to get to.

Speaker 34 And she did.

Speaker 14 But she discovered that things weren't quite what they seemed.

Speaker 26 Lacey got a teaching job after she graduated from Columbia at an elementary school in New Rochelle, a suburb north of Manhattan.

Speaker 14 And it was just like what her friend in Marietta had described.

Speaker 6 The classrooms were smaller. The supplies were endless.

Speaker 6 The teachers seemed to be more professionally developed.

Speaker 11 And the school district was all in on the Lucy Cockins approach.

Speaker 6 The students were immersed in complete readers and writers workshop.

Speaker 6 Not only did you have the level libraries, you got the pretty baskets and the stickers and the labels and you had a pair that came in and helped you organize it and the posters were laminated and it was like, it was like teachers are us.

Speaker 6 It was my version of teachers are us.

Speaker 19 Lacey thinks one reason she got the job in New Rochelle is that she she was an expert on Cockins' approach.

Speaker 23 Back when she was in grad school working for Lucy Cockins, Lacey had worked her way up to being one of the trainers that helps schools implement the reading and writing workshop.

Speaker 49 That approach seemed to be working beautifully in New Rochelle.

Speaker 44 She says almost all her students were good readers.

Speaker 43 They could decode the words.

Speaker 27 But she soon realized something, and it was kind of a secret, something no one seemed to be talking about.

Speaker 6 Those white affluent students who weren't learning how to decode in school, they were learning how to decode at home with tutors.

Speaker 6 I know because I became one of them.

Speaker 39 She became a private tutor to make extra money to pay off her student loans.

Speaker 12 And as a tutor, she did a lot of direct and explicit instruction.

Speaker 23 The kind of instruction that had helped her when she was a little girl.

Speaker 30 the kind of instruction that had helped her grandmother.

Speaker 10 She eventually left New Rochelle and went to another suburban school district, Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.

Speaker 11 It's the school district where my children went to school.

Speaker 32 And she says she saw the same thing she'd seen in New Rochelle, private wealth taking care of the problem when schools weren't teaching children how to read.

Speaker 23 Lacey Robinson wanted it to be true that there was something in rich white schools that she could take and give to poor black children. She'd been hoping for that, betting on it.

Speaker 6 I thought I was playing Robin Hood.

Speaker 44 But what she ultimately discovered is that a lot of rich white kids weren't getting what they needed in school either.

Speaker 18 She realized that she was looking for something that wasn't really there.

Speaker 6 When I think about it now, and I talk to friends, especially a lot of my friends of color

Speaker 6 who move into middle-class neighborhoods,

Speaker 6 who have worked tirelessly to shift the trajectory of their family for their kids.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 6 they send them to the neighborhood schools under the assumption,

Speaker 6 same assumption my mother had why she moved us to an all-white neighborhood. That if I'm in this area, that my kid will learn, only to find out

Speaker 14 I gotta hire a tutor.

Speaker 49 Lacey Robinson says she feels regret and shame about the years she spent spreading the Lucy Cawkins Reading and Writing Workshop.

Speaker 27 She says she should have recognized the problem sooner.

Speaker 22 There were clues she wishes she'd paid more attention to back when she was training teachers in New York City.

Speaker 6 I started supporting the school system in Harlem and I would go in, read and writers, guru, let me show you how to set it up. And I was supporting them.

Speaker 6 And the teachers would be like, come here, Miss Robinson. Now I understand this Readers and Writers Workshop is beautiful.
We get our level library books and everything. But when will

Speaker 6 he learn how to decode these words?

Speaker 14 And Lacey remembers saying, don't worry, he'll learn.

Speaker 26 And the teacher said,

Speaker 6 And because it's the other thing, a lot of those teachers' children were in that school. My son needs to learn how to decode these words.
Where is that in this operating system?

Speaker 14 She remembers taking note of that, thinking, yeah, there's some stuff missing here.

Speaker 18 But the reading and writing workshop was still the ideal in her mind. She was thinking the goal was to get to a place where kids in Harlem didn't need anything else.

Speaker 22 It took her getting to the suburbs and seeing that kids there needed help with decoding words too for her to finally grasp the scope of the problem.

Speaker 44 Still, she thinks there are elements of the Cockins workshop approach that are important and shouldn't be discarded, like getting lots of books in kids' hands, inspiring them to want to read and write.

Speaker 3 But she says what got lost in the romance with the workshop approach is what it takes for a child to learn how to read and write, and that a child is not going to love reading and writing if she can't do it.

Speaker 6 Listen, I devour words. I love literature and books, but everybody don't have to love to read and write.
But everybody has a right to learn to read and write.

Speaker 6 So that whole, I want them to love, I don't want them to love, I want them to know how to do it. Love comes later.

Speaker 27 I wanted to talk to Lucy Cockins about all this, about why she sold an approach to teaching reading that was contradicted by research, and what she's doing now that she's acknowledged she was wrong.

Speaker 16 I emailed her and she got back to me right away.

Speaker 27 She said she was anxious about the idea of doing an interview, but she ultimately agreed. I'm going to tell you about that interview and let you hear what she had to say.

Speaker 15 But first, in our next episode, I want to talk to you about money.

Speaker 30 Because the people I've been telling you about, Mari Clay, Gay Supinal, Irene Fountis, and Lucy Cockins are all top authors for the same publishing company.

Speaker 30 And that company has made a lot of money selling their ideas.

Speaker 16 It was a place where people were passionate about education.

Speaker 17 It became a very lucrative business.

Speaker 9 Do you remember ever asking, is there like research or evidence behind this program?

Speaker 54 No, we just assumed there was.

Speaker 60 I want them to be held accountable. They've promoted flawed theories that are not ground in science and they have profited off of it.

Speaker 53 If you like this podcast, please follow us in your podcast app and leave a review.

Speaker 18 It's one of the best ways to help other people find the show.

Speaker 18 We have a website, it's soldastory.org.

Speaker 15 There are articles there about the impact this podcast is having on parents, on teachers, on policymakers.

Speaker 53 We also have a discussion guide and a version of this podcast in Spanish.

Speaker 11 It's all at soldastory.org.

Speaker 36 You can follow the link in the show notes.

Speaker 36 Solda Story is a podcast from APM Reports.

Speaker 26 It's reported and produced by me, Emily Hanford, and Christopher Peake.

Speaker 9 Our editor is Catherine Winter.

Speaker 34 The digital editors are Dave Mann and Andy Cruz.

Speaker 19 Mixing and sound design are by Chris Julin and Emily Hovick with original music by Chris Julin.

Speaker 9 Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Speaker 27 The final master of this episode was by Cameron Wiley and Derek Ramirez.

Speaker 14 We had reporting and production help from Will Callen, Cole Marie Rivera, and Angela Caputo.

Speaker 36 And fact-checking from Betsy Towner-Levine.

Speaker 26 Special thanks to Chris Worthington, Lauren Humpert, and Christine Hutchins.

Speaker 35 Support for this podcast comes from the Hollyhawk Foundation, the Oak Foundation, and Wendy and Stephen Gall.

Speaker 8 A Sapphire Reserve story from David Chang.

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I would do a layover for that burger.

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