Sold a Story Podcast Strikes a Universal Nerve: Review and Discussion...Part 1 of 3
Samantha Hodder
Writer | Audio Producer | Critic | Host | Digital Product Creator | People Connector
Emily Hanford, a reporter for with APM Reports worked with American Public Media Group to create the dark horse hit podcast Sold A Story...all about the mystery, and a racket that has been taking place for decades in the most unlikely of places: Primary school classrooms.
Emily Hanford has been researching and reporting on education for more than a decade…but it took the pandemic, and the forced closure of schools everywhere, for the penny to drop. That’s when the wider public, the mothers and fathers of young students, actually saw how school was being taught.
The statistics are well-documented and shocking; In the US, only one in three 4th Graders are proficient readers. This is not an alarmist statistic wanting to sell you something. It’s taken from the US Department of Education NAEP Reading Assessment in 2019. In 2022, the number fell further.
In Canada where I live, the numbers tell a similar story: 26 percent of all Grade 3 students did not meet the Provincial standard in 2019 (literacy tests are taken here in Grade 3 and Grade 6, not Grade 4 and Garde 8).
Hanford knows this well. She and her co-reporter Christopher Peak spent more than a year investigating, interviewing, researching, and asking questions to get to the answer of why.
And perhaps more disturbingly:
This is where the story begins…two different parents in two different cities with two different economic backgrounds…who faced the same problem:
Neither of their children knew how to read well, nor read proficiently
One child was in Grade 1, the other in Grade 4.
Episode 2 dives into the idea that is woven throughout all levels of the education system, and it has informed curriculum development, in much of the English-speaking world since the 1970s.
And it’s such a simple idea that it might be easy to overlook its importance:
[Ep 2 6:50] Here’s the idea:That beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.They can, but they don’t have to, because there are different ways to figure out what the words say.
This was just that; an idea. But it was framed as science, based on observation. Decades later, when neuroscience had developed monitoring tools, we were able to monitor the brain to determine how our brain works when we read. That’s when this idea should have been relegated as bunk. But it wasn’t.
Starting in the 1960s
There were two competing methods of reading instruction:
A young Doctorate student named Mari Clay from New Zealand didn’t like either approach, and began her life’s work to find a third way.
Her new system would be called the:
The Whole Language Approach would also consider the pictures in the book, the other words on the page, and the greater meaning of the story. The concept is that young readers would put all these different clues to piece together the meaning, or the actual words, on the page.
It was also based on this core belief: that learning to read is a natural process, like learning to speak. That it happens spontaneously, from repeated exposure.
And it follows, then, that you can introduce more complex words and subjects to children, which will make them enjoy reading more, make it happen, faster and easier...because it’s natural.
A good part of this podcast series features the work and pedagogy of a New Zealand woman teacher-turned-academic named Marie Clay. She is not interviewed, as she passed away in 2007. The reporting does singularly point to her as the genesis of this theory, which spawned many books and copycat theories after her. There were others who had influence and did work like hers, but the reporting of this series clearly points to the connection and influence that Clay had with the US, through Ohio State University, as an advisor or lobbyist to George Bush I, and through various publishing enterprises, that began to grow in prominence in large school districts across the US.
As part of her doctorate work, Marie Clay began a study of her own. She had a cohort of 100 students in their first year of school in Auckland, New Zealand. She spent one year observing those children, some of whom were doing well, and some of whom were struggling.
Her analysis after spending a year observing these children would go on to influence public school curricula far and wide for decades to come. These 100 children, whoever they were, had a wide and lasting effect.
It would take decades, and some neuroscience, to realize that her conclusions were backward to reality, perhaps even actually anti-science. Learning to read, as neuroscience would later teach us, is not natural at all. And it doesn’t happen, outliers aside, without instruction.
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Clay’s observation was that good readers were good problem solvers…and what she meant by that was that they would ask themselves a number of questions if they didn’t understand a word that they were trying to read; they would look to the picture for a clue, or the meaning of the story, or the other words on the page.
In essence, they would do everything, anything, except sound out the word in syllables, in order to figure out the word. They were, by in large, guessing, at what the word could be, by looking around the page. They would ask themselves questions like: Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it fit what the picture depicts?
Clay determined that it was actually the poor readers who used letters to sound out the word, as an alternative approach.
Her defense of this was clear: In the English language, letters can be confusing. They’re don’t always they don’t always follow the same rules and the rules that exist are not uniformly applied.
Time, space and science aside, I can see some value in this. To understand whether or not the word is live or live, you must understand the meaning of the sentence:
English is full of inconsistencies and when you’re learning grammar, at some point you realize that all the rules were made to be broken because there are so many exceptions.
I use this as an example because it’s from a similar place of logic that Marie Clay used to create her theory….it’s a casual relationship, an observation, an opinion. It’s many things, but it’s not science.
Clay said strong strong readers did not look at each of the letters in the words to understand what they were, they used other “cueing” strategies to piece it together. But in the 1980s, advances in neuroscience came where brain monitoring could track the eyeballs of readers, and then track how the neurons fire in the brain. It was determined with accuracy, that humans actually do process every letter in the word as they are reading. Neuroscience tells us that phonics is a natural learning process to follow for brains that processes one-letter-at-a-time.
Her theory, which then went on to create bigger systems inside of giant publishing empires, around how to help struggling readers, based on what she felt good readers did, was actually, exactly wrong. It was the bad readers who used cues, not good the good readers. They were, in effect, guessing, instead of using phonetic logic to sort it out.
Bingeworthy is written and produced by Samantha Hodder on Substack. Go here to get all the perks of a Substack subscription.
f you haven’t listened to this series, yet, here’s
And then the Spotify link:
Series Details:
Sold a Story
American Public Media
6 Episodes
First published October 20, 2022
Release structure: October 20: Episodes 1 + 2, and then weekly
Final episode published November 17, 2022
Total Listening time: 4 hours, 8 minutes