Education

ILEC Response: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

International Literacy Educators Coalition

ILEC Vision: To promote literacy learning practices that enable all children and youth to realize their full potential as literate, thinking human beings.

Download a PDF of the response.

ILEC Response: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

In 2017, Emily Hanford wrote a piece about dyslexia. In it, she concludes that “This is for all kids, not just those with dyslexia.” In 2022, her podcast, Sold a Story continues a theme in her 2018 “Hard Words.”[1] Her journalistic efforts since then have remained unchanged with the underlying message described by Hanford about Sold a Story:

It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

A critical read of  the segment titles highlights the biased, binary, and productionist view of this podcast: The Problem; The  Idea; The  Battle; The  Superstar; The  Company; The  Reckoning.

Positive Aspects of the podcast:

  1. Brings attention to the importance of early screening of reading.
  2. Highlights that students benefit from direct, explicit instruction in reading.
  3. Attempts to bridge research to practice.
  4. Allows consideration of race/social class inequities of student reading proficiency.

ILEC Concerns:

  1. The reporting relies heavily on sensational anecdotes from parents and teachers, and uses dramatic phrases, such as “children harmed” and “money wasted” instead of citing representative research.
  2. The reporting misrepresents many practices, people, and organizations as well as oversimplifies key issues and ignores nuance. 
  3. It perpetuates misunderstandings such as Balanced Literacy is the same as Whole Language and the three cueing system teaches students to “guess.”
  4. The podcast focuses on small pieces of information taken out of context such as old audio recordings of Marie Clay. This shows the author’s lack of awareness that education research and resulting practices constantly grow and change (not simple, not settled).
  5. Hanford’s conclusion is that there is one way to teach reading that works for all students. This conclusion is unsubstantiated and not based on current research.
  6. The claims are grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of NAEP data[2], using this to consistently perpetuate a manufactured reading crisis.

[1] See How Media Misinformation Became “Holy Text”: The Anatomy of the SOR Movement

[2] See Loveless, T. (2016, June 13). The NAEP proficiency myth. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2016/06/13/the-naep-proficiency-myth/ and Loveless, T. (2023, June 11). Literacy and NAEP proficient (Web log). https://tomloveless.com/posts/literacy-and-naep-proficient/; also Scale Scores and NAEP Achievement Levels