How a Podcast Toppled the Reading Instruction Canon

Eight years ago, journalist Emily Hanford met a college student with dyslexia who could barely read. “She described to me how she got through text—without really being able to read very well at all,” Hanford recalls. “This woman was clearly bright. How did this happen?”

Her curiosity piqued, Hanford, a senior correspondent and producer at American Public Media (APM) Reports, dug into the research on reading and reading disabilities and produced podcast episodes such as “Hard Words” in 2018 and “What the Words Say” in 2020. The shows garnered moderate interest. 

Then came “Sold a Story,” Hanford’s 2022 blockbuster podcast episode examining how disproven ideas about reading had made their way into the country’s most popular reading curricula, downloaded more than 3.5 million times last year. “‘Sold a Story’ really hit a new audience. It reached the general public,” Hanford says. “I’ve gotten notes from people who say, ‘I’m not in education, I’m not a teacher, I don’t even have kids. But I found this really interesting.’”

Hanford’s reporting tapped into decades of research in cognitive science, educational psychology, and neuroscience about how the brain learns to read—a body of evidence often referred to as “the science of reading”—and made the case that many schools used debunked strategies to teach the skill. Fluent readers, research shows, must develop a deep understanding of phonics, allowing them to sound out and make sense of words—something that children must be explicitly taught. Many schools, Hanford’s reporting revealed, were using programs that weren’t aligned with the research and relied on methods like teaching kids to look for “context cues” to help guess words, instead of sounding them out phonetically. 

In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a long-standing battle over the best way to teach young children how to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. “Teachers don’t actually need someone to connect the dots; many just needed someone to explain to them some basic things about how people learn to read, and then they said, ‘Oh my God, why have I been doing it this other way?’”

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have passed laws pertaining to teaching children how to read according to the science of reading since 2019—and about 15, according to Hanford’s count, are directly in response to her reporting. In 2022, Lucy Calkins, creator of the Units of Study reading curriculum investigated in “Sold a Story” and used by nearly a quarter of all U.S. elementary schools, revised her curricula to include more phonics. Meanwhile, sales at Heinemann, one of the biggest publishers of reading curricula, including Fountas & Pinnell, declined 75 percent in 2023, according to APM Reports, as schools have opted to invest in more evidence-aligned approaches.

We spoke with Hanford about the tectonic shifts created by “Sold a Story,” her take on the criticism of her work, and what she thinks lies ahead after the dust settles. 

HOLLY KORBEY: Your thesis that students are being taught to read using disproven methods hit a nerve—“Sold a Story” has been downloaded millions of times. What are some of the measurable, concrete outcomes in response to the podcast that you’ve been able to track? 

EMILY HANFORD: The outcomes that mean the most to me are the thousands of emails and social media posts I got from teachers—overwhelmingly, these have been positive. Not positive like “We’re so happy about this.” It’s more like “Oh, wow, this is really important stuff that I needed to know. Thank you for putting this out there.” Those notes are often full of emotion, but many are also characterized with “We can do this, I’m psyched. I want to learn more about this.”

At our last count, about 15 pieces of legislation had actually passed. I have mixed feelings about the legislation; obviously, it’s a way to show the impact of journalism, and I hear from teachers that legislative changes are needed, so there’s a role for policy here. 

But one of the problems with policies is they have lots of different impacts. For example, they make it possible to galvanize a certain kind of resistance; they give critics something to shoot at. I don’t disagree with some of the points being made, like the criticism of bans on three-cueing. I think policies like the three-cueing bans give detractors an opening to say, “All of this science of reading stuff, we just need to move on.” And I think that’s disingenuous at best.

KORBEY: What do you wish people would focus on? What do you think the important takeaway is from “Sold a Story”?

HANFORD: “Sold a Story” took on one really small question about reading: the idea that kids don’t have to be taught how to sound out words. They can, but they don’t have to, because they have all these other strategies they can use to figure out the words. If you look at what it takes for kids to read, decoding is just one little part. The podcast took on that one small idea because I think it’s at the foundation of the problem we are having with how we teach reading. 

I try very hard to stay in my lane. I’m a journalist, I’m not an advocate or a policy expert. But one of the things I think a lot about are three-cueing bans, for example. I think cueing bans partly exist because people got a message—one I wanted them to get from “Sold a Story”—that you have to take some stuff away. Improving reading instruction isn’t just about adding phonics, it’s about taking something away. Whether or not it’s right to do that through a ban, I don’t know. 

KORBEY: Can you define what three-cueing means? 

HANFORD: The idea with cueing is that kids don’t need to be taught how to sound out written words. Instead, they can be given a whole bunch of different strategies to figure out what the words are. [Editor’s note: Popular three-cueing strategies include looking at a picture, looking at the first letter of the word, and guessing what word would make sense in context.] Three-cueing is a misunderstanding of how people learn to read, and you can trace it way back to the 1960s, before a lot of the research was done revealing how reading really works.

As many balanced literacy defenders will say—and they’re right—balanced literacy usually includes some phonics instruction, but phonics is often presented as just one way for kids to read the words. They can also do all these other [three-cueing] things to read the words. But that’s not necessarily making sure kids get good at looking at written words; sounding them out; coming up with the pronunciation of the word; then connecting the pronunciation of that word, the spelling, and the meaning. That’s the way we get words into our brain—so that we know how to read lots of words, tens of thousands of them, in a split second.

KORBEY: But with three-cueing, kids are getting cues from the book that aren’t necessarily connecting the sounds and the letters? 

HANFORD: It’s a pretty subtle idea. People who are up in arms about cueing bans are saying things like “They’re making it illegal for kids to look at a picture!” That’s one of my worries; it shouldn’t be illegal to do those things. My concern with cueing bans is that they’re easily misunderstood because this is something subtle, and people are saying things like “Kids can no longer use context when they’re reading.” Of course they can!

The point is that when kids are first learning how to read, the most important thing to make the transition from speaking a language to reading a language is to look closely at the words and understand that those words and spellings connect to a pronunciation of words that they know, or maybe they don’t know, yet. That is how you are going to get to be a good reader. Even a beginning reader is using context all the time to try to understand the meanings of new words.

KORBEY: At first, Lucy Calkins pushed back at criticism that the Units of Study program you reported on didn’t focus enough on phonics—then she changed her curricula. Did her adjustments have anything to do with “Sold a Story”? 

HANFORD: The first part of your question is all stuff that happened before “Sold a Story” even came out. She responded to my earlier reporting calling out problems with Units of Study in terms of its foundational ideas about how kids learn to read. 

I think she eventually learned some new things from the larger conversation about the science of reading—Calkins told me she said that to the New York Times. I think she was genuine; she didn’t know some of this. She is a leading teacher in the United States, and her reaction to some of this reporting was similar to the reaction that I got from many teachers: “I didn’t know this. Why didn’t I?”

Of course, the question for Lucy Calkins is: Why didn’t she know it? It’s a question that comes with a certain amount of accountability, because she has been so influential in guiding teachers over the past several decades. I think she should have known. 

KORBEY: Cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg, who you have used as a source, expressed concern about the rush to create “science of reading products,” noting in an article for Vox, “Now you have a huge demand for science-based practices pursued by advocacy groups and people who don’t have a great understanding of the science.” Do you agree with his assessment? 

HANFORD: He really knows the science, and he’s thinking hard about the implications. I can understand some of his critiques. But he isn’t an expert in curriculum or instruction; he doesn’t always know what it means to translate all of this into classroom practice. I always listen to his criticism, but I don’t think he has a 360 view. At the same time, I think he’s raising some very important questions. 

Curriculum is an important thing to look at—there are ideas about how people learn to read that are in the curriculum. In our reporting, we looked at very influential curricula—Units of Study, Reading Recovery, Fountas & Pinnell—because we were trying to understand what teachers are learning about how kids learn to read, where they’re learning it, and what’s wrong with it. But curriculum is just one piece—and maybe not the most important piece. When you walk in the door, it can be the first thing you see—and the first thing to get rid of or replace. 

We looked at curriculum for a reason, and people have mistakenly taken away from that that the curriculum is the thing to fix. That wasn’t actually the message of the podcast. Materials matter; teachers deserve and need good materials. But you can also teach kids to read with a whiteboard and some books and a marker.

KORBEY: Your critics say you’re pushing “false and divisive claims” about their methods. You’ve also been accused of “reigniting the reading wars” and politicizing teaching kids to read. Can you talk about the pushback? 

HANFORD: There’s been a few waves of pushback. I would say that I got a fair amount of criticism publicly on social media and in my email inbox from teachers and professors in schools of education, who were really upset about the reporting. Criticism I got from professors in schools of education was defensive; teachers were more shocked. 

More recent criticism came from within the reading science world. “But she’s only talking about phonics! There’s so much more to it!” A lot of that came from people who are already really engaged and knew a lot about how kids learn to read. And now there’s a lot of criticism and fear about the legislation: “There’s a bad law over here, and that’s your fault.”

KORBEY: Timothy Shanahan, who’s been a teacher and reading researcher for 50 years, says he’s watched the pendulum swing back and forth between phonics and whole-word reading methods. Where’s the pendulum at now, and is there anything different about the swing this time? 

HANFORD: I was hoping that the reporting would help this time be different. I don’t like the analogy of the pendulum; it swings back and forth, with no sense of progress.

What I want people to understand is why phonics matter, not just that you have to teach phonics. Why is it so important that all good readers have good phonics skills? If the pendulum is phonics—we teach some phonics, we don’t teach any phonics—I hope that never happens again. The whole point is, let’s not make phonics the thing that’s swinging here. Instead, let’s help people understand why that is one really crucial skill that kids need to have. If there’s something that children need to know, I think we should commit as a society to teaching it.

KORBEY: Hearing from kids and adults who struggled to read in “Sold a Story” is a reminder that real lives are affected when kids don’t learn to read well. What have you learned about the kids who aren’t learning to read well? 

HANFORD: I think that’s one reason why this has been so eye-opening to so many people. It cuts a very wide swath through society. 

I think people have misunderstood the reading problem in the United States as something that is mostly a problem in poor schools or among poor kids. It’s very clear that there are lots of kids from affluent homes who struggle with reading, but those kids are more likely to have parents as a backup plan. 

We can’t disentangle the role poverty and family income play when it comes to education outcomes in general. There’s clearly a connection. If you understand something about how kids learn to read, it’s very clear why kids in poverty are more likely to struggle. But that doesn’t mean that kids who aren’t in poverty won’t also struggle. It also doesn’t mean that kids in poverty can’t learn to be good readers and can’t be taught to be good readers—they can.

KORBEY: What’s next in your reporting? Are you going to continue investigating reading? 

HANFORD: One of the things I’m really interested in looking at are school districts that are getting good results with kids, often against the odds. 

I think we’re going to see that a common element is the long haul. Things don’t completely change in two or three years. Sometimes you can make changes over two or three years and then realize you’re getting some good results, but not enough, so you have to make more changes. 

In terms of what’s next for me, it’s going out there to see what’s working and what’s not. I really want to go into schools and districts and be able to see some schools figuring that out.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.