Emily Hanford
Appearances
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 2)
Er hat ein Stück Papier zu unserer Interview mitgebracht. Es hat mehrere Programme, die damals vorhanden waren, aufgeführt, wie viel Forschungserfahrung es gab. Und Erfolg für alle ist... But before a district can adopt Success for All, teachers have to vote on it. Success for All requires a teacher vote. This is Nancy Madden.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Lynette Gorman, who was a new teacher at the time, says there was a big sticking point for many of the veteran teachers. They didn't like the scripts. Das heißt, es ist im Grunde das Gegenteil von Choose Your Own Adventure. Das hat immer einen kontroversen Aspekt des Programms. A teacher in Nevada told the Wall Street Journal in 1999 that Bob Slavin was, quote, killing creative teachers.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
They wanted to do something about it. They wanted to make poor schools better. But there was doubt at the time about whether improving schools could help poor children, about whether the quality of a school really mattered. Because of a big report that had been released a few years earlier, a report that had shaken the field of education.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
But remember, success for all was a collection of effective practices. Ingredients that studies showed would likely result in a good soup. But you had to follow the recipe. It wasn't going to work if everyone was choosing their own adventure. Teachers in Steubenville remember hours and hours of training, learning how to use the program. And I just remember tables full of pies.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
When Steubenville started using Success for All, there were close to 2,000 other schools using it. Interest in the program was growing. And it seemed like interest was about to grow a lot more. You heard this earlier in the podcast. George W. Bush on the campaign trail, promising a big federal effort to overhaul reading instruction.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Die Präsidenten-Advisoren wollten die Nationen-Schulen entfernen von falschen, effektiven Praktiken, wie den Queuing-Strategien, die Sie in diesem Podcast gehört haben. Sie wollten Schulen tun, was effektiv war, wie Phonics-Instruktionen. Das Ziel war es, Schulen zu nutzen, Programme und Praktiken, die in wissenschaftlich basierenden Lesestrategien gegründet wurden.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Das ist mein Co-Reporter Christopher Peek. Er sagt, die Gesetzesordnung definierte wissenschaftlich basierte Recherche in einer speziellen Art und Weise für einen Grund.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Was man sehr schnell findet, wenn man extensive Level von Forschung und Bewertung benötigt, um etwas nutzen zu können, ist, dass es sehr wenige Programme gibt, die diese Bar treffen.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Im Gegenteil, die meisten Menschen, die mit der Leserarchie bekannt sind, scheinen damals zu stimmen, dass es wahrscheinlich nur zwei Lesprogramme gab, die mit wissenschaftlicher Forschung getestet und beurteilt wurden.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Success for All did have the studies, so you would think reading first would have been a boon for them, a real windfall. But to Nancy Madden's surprise, it wasn't.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Here's how the law ran into reality and ended in a bit of a train wreck. Ein Ziel der Gesetzesordnung war es, Schulen mit Forschungsprogrammen zu nutzen, die durch wissenschaftliche Forschung gefördert werden. Aber hier ist das Wichtigste. Der föderale Regierung sollte nicht sagen, was für Programme die Schulen nutzen.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Es ist eine Anwendung, um lokalen Kontrolle zu schützen, was ein grundlegendes Prinzip in der amerikanischen Bildung ist. Also gab es ein Problem, eine Unterschiedlichkeit. Und als das Gesetz in Praxis wurde, wurde es müde.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Eine Sache, die passiert ist, viele Lesungsprogramme sagten, sie seien mit wissenschaftlicher Forschung verbunden, auch wenn sie keine Studien, die zeigten, dass sie gearbeitet haben, hatten. The other thing that happened, some Reading First officials and consultants were authors of reading programs.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned a sociologist named James Coleman to do a big study of educational opportunity in America. He gathered all kinds of information from thousands of schools, data on academic achievement, student demographics, teacher training, curriculum. It was one of the largest educational studies ever at the time.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
And when they were giving presentations to state officials, Nancy Madden says they were promoting their own programs.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Nancy says schools that were using Success for All started dropping it.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
To be clear, there was no official reading first list. Not from the federal government anyway. But some states were making lists. And when a state left Success for All off its list, the message seemed to be, Success for All isn't backed by research. It's not an evidence-based program. And that had a big impact on Success for All.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education, an internal watchdog that investigated alleged wrongdoing in federal education programs.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
In his complaint, Bob Slavin wrote, the Reading First legislation itself is sound, well-intentioned. But Slavin said Reading First had strayed from its intended purpose, that it was not promoting scientifically based reading research, that it had become instead a giant giveaway to publishers who were making millions of dollars on programs that hadn't been tested or proven.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Und Bob Slavin war nicht der Einzige, der sich durch Reading First entschlossen fühlte. So war auch Marie Clay, die Kreatorin des Reading Recovery Programmes. Das Reading Recovery Programme verlor die Schulen auch wegen Reading First. Und nur ein paar Monate nachdem Bob Slavin mit dem Inspektor General eine Befragung mitgebracht hat, hat Reading Recovery eine Befragung mitgebracht.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Ihre Befragung sagte, dass wir eine wachsende Anzahl von Bildern und Schülern einbeziehen, die für eine Befragung anrufen. Und wie Sie vorhin in diesem Podcast gehört haben, gab es eine Untersuchung und kongressielle Beratungen und einen verdammten Bericht von dem Inspektor-General.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
The Inspector General's report said some Reading First officials and consultants with professional ties to reading programs were promoting those programs. And the report said some states felt pressured to use those programs in order to get funding. Reading First was ensnared in a scandal over programs.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Congress killed the funding and Reading First collapsed. Bob Slavin had spent decades studying effective educational practices and trying to get schools to use them. Er hat gezeigt, dass Schulen für Kinder einen Unterschied machen können, wenn sie die Beweise folgen. Aber er hat die große Arbeit der Regierung unterstützt, um Schulen so zu machen.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Ich habe einige Leute über die Jahre gesprochen, die Begeisterung, sogar Angst, über die Rolle von Bob in der Hilfe, Reading First zu bringen. Weil sie dachten, dass Reading First, auch mit seinen Fehler, die beste Hoffnung für die Verbesserung der Bildungsinstruktion auf der Ebene war, um Millionen von Kindern zu helfen. But Bob didn't think Reading First was going to do that.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Because schools were using programs that hadn't been proven. And in some cases, they were dropping a proven program, his program, in favor of something else.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Und was Coleman fand, war, dass die akademischen Erfolge einer Studentin viel auf ihren Familiensozioökonomischen Status hielten. In der Tat, die Familie, in der ein Kind geboren wurde, sah mehr an, als an die Schule, in die ein Kind gegangen ist. Dies unterkotzt den Argument, dass die Verbesserung der Schulen die Ergebnisse für Kinder verbessern könnte.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Nancy and Bob continued working with schools and districts in the United States that had stuck with Success for All, like Steubenville. Steubenville didn't drop the program. Success for All was working for them. SFA just fit us.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
But Success for All is not a popular program. About 800 schools use it now. That's fewer than half as many as 25 years ago. And the requirement in federal law for programs to be based on scientific research? Christopher says Congress dropped that in 2015.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
According to current federal law, a program can be considered evidence-based without any studies at all. All you need is a rationale, an idea about why your program should work.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Reading First was trying to get schools to follow the science of reading by using evidence-based programs. But the whole thing ended up blowing up over controversy about programs. By the end of Reading First, programs seemed kind of like the problem, not the solution. And Christopher says the entire educational publishing industry just looked bad.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Heinemann What Heinemann and its star authors were offering wasn't really a program.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Heinemann flourished in the wake of Reading First's collapse in part because what they were offering didn't come from scientists. It came from other educators. But now people are talking about the science of reading again. And states are making lists, lists of approved programs, because of Solda's story.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Aber Nancy und Bob, und auch andere Menschen, waren überzeugt, dass es mehr zu der Geschichte gab, Because if you dug into the details of Coleman's report, what you could see in the data was that some schools were having more of an impact than others. Some schools were making a difference for kids. And Bob and Nancy wanted to figure out, what were those schools doing? What made them effective?
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The Outlier (Part 2)
The State Lists and why Success for All isn't on a lot of those lists. Next time on Sold a Story. We have more about this podcast on our website, including a video that tells the story behind Soul to Story. You can find links in the show notes. If you want to help other people find this show, one of the best things you can do is leave a review on your favorite podcast app.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Sol de Story ist ein Podcast von APM Reports, produziert von mir, Emily Hanford, mit Reporter Christopher Peek. Curtis Gilbert ist unser Editor. Chris Julen macht Mixing und Sounddesign. Unser Fakt-Checker ist Betsy Towner-Levine. Andy Cruz ist unser Digital-Editor. Unsere Theme-Musik ist von Wonderly. Der letzte Mastering dieses Episodes war von Derek Ramirez.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
The Soul to Story Reporting and Production Team includes Kate Martin, Olivia Chilcote, Carmela Walianone, Emily Havik and Emily Corwin. Additional help on this episode from Kaspar von Au. Special thanks to Margaret Goldberg. Tom Scheck is the Deputy Managing Editor of APM Reports. Our Executive Editor is Jane Helmke. Wir sind Theresa und Nemo und deshalb sind wir zu Shopify gewechselt.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
I'm Emily Hanford and this is Sold a Story, a podcast from APM Reports. In diesem Video erzähle ich Ihnen die Geschichte eines Programms, das Bob Slaven und Nancy Madden erschaffen haben. Ein Programm, das zeigt, dass Schulen eine Unterschiede machen können. Es ist das Programm, das Steubenville 25 Jahre hervorragend benutzt hat.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Ein Programm, das seit langer Zeit studiert wurde und von substanziellen Beweisen unterstützt wird. Im Grunde genommen ist es ein Art Poster-Kind für ein Beweis-basiertes Programm. Aber was bedeutet es, für etwas Beweis-basiertes zu sein? It's a critical question right now, because states are making lists. Lists of approved programs. Programs, they say, are backed by the science of reading.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
But approving programs, making lists, we've tried that before in this country. And it kind of backfired. And it might be backfiring again. Nancy Madden und Bob Slavin sind nach der Schule verheiratet. Sie sind nach Baltimore geflogen. Sie haben beide Ph.D. Und in den 1980er-Jahren arbeiteten sie zusammen in einem Forschungszentrum an der Johns Hopkins Universität, um Bildungspräzise zu studieren.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Sie suchten für Dinge, die funktionierten, Dinge, die Schulen tun könnten, um effektiv zu sein, um eine Unterschiede in den Kindern zu machen. And one day they were at Johns Hopkins eating lunch. And a former member of the Baltimore City School Board joined them at their table. Nancy says they struck up a conversation.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
In 1969, a young woman named Nancy Madden graduated from high school in Minnesota and went off to Portland, Oregon to go to Reed College.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Nancy und Bob hatten studiert, was in der Bildung funktioniert. Der Schulabgeordnete wollte wissen, was sie eigentlich tun würden, wenn es ihr Job wäre, ein Schulsystem zu reparieren.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
So the former school board member said, I'll find the money, you go do it. Create a program that will help us fix the schools. Bob and Nancy started with preschool.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Sie waren interessiert in dem, was funktioniert. Und nicht nur, was funktioniert, wenn es um Lesungsinstruktionen geht. Sie versuchten, effektive Praktiken zu implementieren, um all die Dinge zu beantworten, die eine Schule machen muss, um erfolgreich zu sein. Und wie Sie in der vorherigen Episode gehört haben, braucht es mehr als gute Instruktionen, um eine erfolgreiche Schule zu sein.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Nancy und Bob haben ein sogenanntes ganze Schulreformprogramm geschaffen. Es war nicht nur ein Lesprogramm. Es war ein Programm, um eine ganze Schule zu verbessern. Sie nannten ihr Programm »Success for All«. Und ein großer Fokus von Success for All ist die Prävention. Die Prävention von Kindern, die im ersten Moment verfehlt werden.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
I wasn't able to interview Bob. He died four years ago. This is from a video.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
She was a child of the 60s, protested the Vietnam War, marched for civil rights. And what Nancy was most interested in disrupting was education. She wanted to figure out how to make schools better, especially for poor black children.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
You met someone else in this podcast who was trying to do exactly the same thing. Someone who was trying to prevent reading difficulties. Trying to prevent kids from falling off the cliff.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Marie Klee hatte das gleiche Ziel wie Bob Slavin. Aber ihr Fehler war, wie Kinder lesen zu lernen. Ein Fehler, der, zumindest in Teilen, zu der Art, wie sie ihre Forschung gemacht hat, zurückgeführt werden kann. Sie hat Kinder beobachtet und eine Theorie, eine Idee, über wie sie lernen. Sie hat ihr Programm aufgrund dieser Idee gebaut.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Aber dann kam eine Menge kognitiver Wissenschaftsforschung, die ihre Idee falsch zeigte. Bob Slavin und Nancy Madden haben eine andere Ansicht genommen. Sie haben nicht mit einer Idee angefangen, wie Kinder lesen lernen. Sie haben mit einer Kollektion von Praktiken angefangen, die von rigorierter Forschung gefördert wurden.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Praktiken wie die Instruktion von Phonik, die bereits studiert und gearbeitet wurde.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Nancy and Bob were betting that if you put a bunch of effective educational practices together, the result would be a successful school, a school that would make a difference for kids. But Bob and Nancy didn't know if their program would work. It was kind of like they were making a soup. They knew the ingredients were good, but what about the soup? Would the soup taste good?
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Would the recipe actually work? They wanted to know the answer to that question more than anyone. So as soon as Bob and Nancy created their program, they were studying their program. Their first study compared five schools in Baltimore that had chosen to do Success for All with five similar schools that had stuck with business as usual.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
What they found was that the kids in the Success for All schools did better on several key measures. They were absent less, less likely to repeat a year of school, and by the end of third grade, they were about eight months, almost an entire school year, ahead in reading. Bob und Nancy did more studies.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
And it wasn't just Bob and Nancy studying their own program. By the 90s, independent researchers were also taking an interest in success for all. Yes, hi. My name is Jeffrey Borman. Jeffrey Borman was a newly minted University of Chicago Ph.D. in 1997 when he got a job as a research scientist at Johns Hopkins. Education research was his thing. Here's why.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
When Jeffrey Borman got to Hopkins, he decided he wanted to do his own study of Success for All. He wanted to know if kids who had been in Success for All elementary schools were still doing better as they got older.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
His study showed that by 8th grade, the success for all kids were still ahead in reading. They were still less likely to be held back. And they spent less time in special education. That's a big deal. Special education is expensive. So is holding a child back. Think about it. You have to pay for an additional year of schooling.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
In his study, Jeffrey Borman compared the costs of doing Success for All to not doing Success for All.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
The main impact was the kids were better readers. Ja. The US Department of Education evaluates programs based on whether the research to support the program was rigorous and well designed. Success for all meets the highest standard for an evidence-based program. And that's what Steubenville was looking for 25 years ago. More on that after a break.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
What can we do? Nancy had tutored kids at poor schools in Minneapolis when she was in high school. And Bob had worked with kids in Washington, D.C.,
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Hey, it's Emily. Thanks for listening to Sold a Story. I'm here to tell you that producing work like this takes a lot of resources, reporters and editors and fact-checkers and engineers. And it takes a lot of time. I've been reporting on this topic for years. We rely on listener support to provide the resources to do this kind of work.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
You can make a gift to support us today at soldastory.org slash donate or follow the link in the show notes. Thank you. It was the late 1990s and the Ohio legislature had just passed a new law. A law that said students were going to have to pass the state's fourth grade reading test to move on to fifth grade.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
And it looked like as many as a third of fourth graders in Steubenville might have to be held back because they weren't reading well enough. The school district had a reading curriculum at the time, but it was basically just a big textbook. A textbook with lots of stuff in it.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
This is Melinda Young, who was an elementary school principal and is now the district superintendent.
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The Outlier (Part 2)
Richard Rinaldo war ein Assistenz-Supervorsitzender. Er erinnert sich, dass er zu Beratungen mit Staatsanwälten ging, die Städte anrufen, wie sie die Erhöhung der Lesungen verbessern können. Es war an einem dieser Beratungen, dass er über den Erfolg für alle lernte.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
This teamwork thing, kids working together and actually teaching each other, it's a central component of how Steubenville teaches reading. They call it cooperative learning. And I was kind of skeptical at first. When you look at the research on effective reading instruction, what you see over and over are references to the importance of direct instruction.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
That's when a teacher explicitly teaches students how to do something, like how to sound out a word. Putting kids together in small groups and having them teach each other is kind of the opposite of that. But in my tour through Steubenville schools, I did see teachers provide direct instruction, quite a bit of it, even in preschool. But there's always this cooperative learning time built in, too.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
Steubenville's an old steel town. The mills had shut down. Jobs had vanished.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
What I realized is that cooperative learning provides something really important, something kids need to become good readers. It provides a lot of time for practice.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
One of the concerns I hear about schools trying to do the science of reading is that sometimes there's not enough time for practice, that schools may now be providing too much instruction and not giving kids enough time to actually read.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
So here are my observations so far on reading instruction in Steubenville. The district has preschool, and most children go. There's a big focus on spoken language skills. There's phonics instruction, there's a lot of writing, not just reading, and there's direct instruction. But there's also cooperative learning, and that provides a lot of time for practice.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
And perhaps one of the most unusual things about how Steubenville approaches reading instruction is that every teacher teaches reading. Like, even this guy.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
This is Josh Meyer. He's wearing shorts and a hoodie with the sleeves cut off. He looks like a football coach, and he is. He's also the gym teacher at one of the elementary schools. But in the mornings, he's not in the gym. He's teaching a second grade reading class.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
But it's part of the deal when you teach in a Steubenville elementary school. Gym teachers, music teachers, science teachers, they all teach a reading class. And here's why. If you have a lot of teachers to teach reading, the reading classes can be really small. I was in one that had only six kids.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
And it's not just that every teacher teaches reading. It's that every student in the school has reading class at the same time, every morning from 9 to 10.30. That's the reading block. Having all the kids in a school in reading instruction at the same time means students can be assigned to a reading class based on their skill level, regardless of what grade they're in.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
So if a second grader is still reading on a first grade level, she goes to a first grade class during the reading block. And if a first grader is reading on a second grade level, she goes to a second grade class. This way of grouping kids is rare in American schools. In fact, it's controversial. Standard practice is for all kids to get instruction at their grade level.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
In the heart of the depressed downtown was the elementary school Karen was there to see, a school where the majority of kids were from low-income families.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
The idea is to prevent kids from getting stuck behind. But Steubenville has a system to make sure that doesn't happen.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
It shows every child at her school and where they are in reading. And not just what grade level they're on, but more detailed information about the specific skills they've mastered and what they still need to learn. So I can look at this student right here. She clicks on a first grader who's behind.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
It's about two months into the school year, and he's still working on reading skills from the end of kindergarten. So during the school's reading block, he goes to a class with other kids who are still working on the end-of-year kindergarten skills.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
The underlying philosophy here is moving a child ahead before he's mastered the basics is like trying to build a house without finishing the foundation. And so what are you going to do?
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The Outlier (Part 1)
There's a plan to get this child reading on grade level. He's in a small reading class, so he can get plenty of attention from a teacher. And he gets tutoring during the school day. In fact, every first grader at this school gets a reading tutor until they've mastered all the first grade material.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
And as kids reach mastery and their tutors are freed up, the first graders who are still behind get even more tutoring. I asked Jen Blackburn how much tutoring the boy we've been talking about could end up getting.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
That's a lot of tutoring. But that's what it could take to get this kid up to grade level. Where does Steubenville find all these tutors? Some are paid staff, others are community volunteers, and a lot of them are students. College students from a local university and students from Steubenville High School. Can I listen in for a couple minutes? You want to read the speech for her?
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The Outlier (Part 1)
A high school student is tutoring a first grader at a small table tucked into the corner of a hallway.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
All the tutors get training, so kids get consistent instruction. But this high school tutor was already familiar with how Steubenville teaches reading. It's the way she was taught when she was a little kid in Steubenville schools.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
All the third graders at this school were passing the state reading test. Every single one.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
Steubenville has been teaching kids to read the same way for 25 years. I think consistency may be one of the secrets of their success. Something else that's critical for success? Attendance. Attendance is huge. A school can offer fantastic reading instruction, but kids aren't going to get that instruction if they're not in school. So Steubenville puts a lot of effort into making sure kids show up.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
I am Dr. Allen. Suzanne Allen is the dean of students at East. She's in charge of attendance. If a kid is absent, it's her job to find out why right away.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
She's calling about a kindergartner. He wasn't feeling well on Monday, but now it's Friday. He's been absent four days. No word from his mom. Dr. Allen gets voicemail every time she calls. She's worried about this kid.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
If he doesn't show up on Monday, she says she'll drive to the homeless shelter and find out what's going on. She does this a lot, knocks on doors, brings kids to school if she has to. She does other things to get them there, too. I have attendance contests. It's called Stay in the Game. Homerooms compete against each other for the best attendance.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
Every morning, Dr. Allen gets on the intercom to announce the homerooms that had perfect attendance the previous day.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
My first reaction to the attendance contest was, isn't getting little kids to school more of a parent thing? Like, don't you need to motivate the parents more than the students? Not necessarily.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
They live in the housing projects next to the school. And this first grade teacher, Julie Battistell, says a lot of kids are responsible for getting themselves to school and their younger siblings, too.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
Absenteeism is a big problem in many American schools, especially since COVID. In Ohio, more than a quarter of students were chronically absent last year. That means they missed close to a month of school, sometimes more. But Steubenville has one of the lowest absenteeism rates in the state. They're getting kids to school and teaching them to read.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
Here's what it sounds like by the time students are in middle school.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
This is a fifth grade English class. Middle school starts in fifth grade here.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
The sad fact is, schools with lots of low-income students usually have low reading scores. But according to state test score data, this school was one of the best in Ohio. Karen often thought about that amazing little school, wondered how things were going in Steubenville. And then one day in 2016, Karen arrived at work and opened up the New York Times.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
I told you that students in Steubenville are grouped for reading instruction based on their skill level. What you're hearing now is the lowest level English class at the middle school, and they're all reading on grade level. There are no kids here who are behind.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
Steubenville is a place full of confident readers and confident teachers. I asked teachers here if they ever feel unequipped to teach a child how to read. They looked at me funny, like they didn't understand the question. No.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
I asked another question that got me some baffled looks. I asked if they'd heard of the authors we focused on in this podcast. Have you ever heard of Fountas and Pinnell? No, I'm sorry. Have you ever heard of Lucy Calkins?
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The Outlier (Part 1)
You've, like, literally never heard of these people? No. I also asked about the term balanced literacy, a term used to describe the Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell approach, a term that had become ubiquitous in American education, or so I thought.
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The Outlier (Part 1)
Steubenville had no need to pursue the latest trend, to even know what the latest trend was, because what they were doing was working. It's been working for 25 years. And what Steubenville has been doing is not something they invented here. They didn't come up with this way of teaching reading.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
Everything you heard — the focus on preschool and language development, the sounds-first approach to teaching letters, the way they group kids, the gym teacher teaching reading, the direct instruction, the cooperative learning, the tutoring, the attendance — it's all part of a program.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
In our next episode, I'm going to tell you about this program, where it came from, and how it got caught up in that big federal effort to improve reading instruction more than two decades ago.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
If you like this podcast, please follow us in your podcast app and leave a review. It's one of the best ways to help other people find the show. Reporter Karen Chenoweth wrote a couple of books that include Steubenville, and she has a podcast, too. We'll have links in the show notes.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
There will also be a link to our website where you can find much more about this podcast and sign up for our newsletter. Sold a Story is an APM Reports podcast produced by me, Emily Hanford. My co-reporter is Christopher Peek. Our data reporter is Kate Martin. Our editor is Curtis Gilbert. We had mixing and sound design by Chris Julin.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
And reporting, production, and editing help from Olivia Chilcote, Carmela Walianone, Emily Havik, Emily Corwin, and Lindsay Sievert. And fact-checking by Betsy Towner Levine. Andy Cruz is our digital editor. Final mastering of this episode was by Derek Ramirez. Our theme music was created by Wonderly. Tom Sheck is the deputy managing editor of APM Reports, and our executive editor is Jane Helmke.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
Leadership support for Soul to Story comes from Hollyhock Foundation and Oak Foundation. Support also comes from Ibis Group, Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and the listeners of American Public Media.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
And there was an article about a huge new data set from Stanford University that allowed you to compare academic achievement at schools across the country. This was new. Before, you could only compare schools within a state. This new data allowed you to compare schools across state lines. The New York Times story included a graphic. The graphic had thousands of dots on it.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
The dots in the upper left were the poor school districts where the kids were doing well. And the dot Karen was looking at was out there all alone, doing far better than the others. And that was Steubenville. Kids in Steubenville were more than two grade levels ahead of kids in other school districts in the United States with similar levels of poverty.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
And kids in Steubenville were actually doing better than kids in some of the country's most affluent districts. Steubenville had some of the best little readers in the nation, and it still does. How did Steubenville do it? I'm Emily Hanford, and this is Sold a Story, a podcast from APM Reports. Today, we have the first of three new episodes.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
In this episode, I'm going to take you to Steubenville and show you how they teach reading there. They do a bunch of stuff that a lot of other schools don't. In the next episode, I'm going to tell you about the program Steubenville uses and where it comes from. And then a surprising twist. For much of the past year, the program that Steubenville uses was under threat because of this podcast.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
After Sold a Story came out, the state of Ohio created a list, a list of approved reading programs. And when that list first came out, the program Steubenville uses wasn't on the list. When I visited Steubenville, I stayed at a hotel across the river in West Virginia and drove to the city early in the morning, just after sunrise. It's a gorgeous day, beautiful blue sky.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
As I drive down into the Ohio River Valley from the hills of West Virginia, the blue sky disappears and I'm surrounded by thick fog. As I enter the city, I can just barely make out the street signs. Dean Martin Boulevard. A fun fact about Steubenville, the legendary singer Dean Martin was born here. I'm headed to East Garfield Elementary, which most people just call East.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
It's the school here with the most students living in poverty. The school is next to a public housing project. As I get out of my car, I see little kids with big backpacks emerging out of the morning fog from the projects. Kids who live in the neighborhood walk to school.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
When I arrive, teachers, staff, and a couple of local police officers are greeting students at the door. Of course I am, my friend. Just inside the school entrance, there's a girl standing in the hallway, looking unhappy.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
She's a little blonde girl with skinny legs, wearing a dirty tan skirt and sneakers. She's upset about her hair. It's tied up in a messy ponytail, uncombed, hair kind of spilling out everywhere. Apparently, she's often upset about her hair when she arrives at school. And what's the story? She just doesn't get it done at home the way she wants? Yes. At all. She doesn't get it done at home.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
She says mom doesn't have time. So we make time. This is Nancy Beattie, a teacher at the school. Miss Beattie bought a brush and hair ties that she keeps at school just for this little girl. And she fixes the girl's hair when she needs it. Sometimes the girl needs socks, too, or a sweatshirt. There's a clothes closet for that.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
This is Jennifer Blackburn. She's an instructional coach at East and the keeper of the clothes closet.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
The staff and teachers at this school know that they have to meet kids' basic needs first, that children need to be fed and clothed and cared for in order to learn. And the staff and teachers here clearly care deeply about their students and take the time to do the little things that matter, like fixing a girl's hair or giving her socks. This is true in many high-poverty schools I visit.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
The kids have a lot of basic needs, and the staff does a lot to try to meet those needs. But in a lot of those schools, a lot of the kids aren't learning how to read very well. In Steubenville, they are.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
My tour guide is Jen Blackburn, the instructional coach and keeper of the clothes closet. She takes me first to preschool.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
The preschoolers are on the rug, looking up at their teacher eagerly. She's assigning jobs for the day.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
A few years before this podcast came out, I met Karen Chenoweth at a conference.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
These preschoolers are constantly being reminded to speak in full sentences.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
In preschool, you want to get kids really good at talking. Because that's going to be a huge help when they start learning how to read. Knowing lots of words, how to pronounce them, what they mean, is essential. And teaching kids to speak in full sentences helps them learn grammar and syntax, how words and phrases are arranged in the English language.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
This is Lynette Gorman. She's the principal of West Elementary in Steubenville.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
There's a preschool program at all of Steubenville's elementary schools. That's not unusual to find a preschool inside an elementary school. What's unusual is how many kids here go to preschool. Across the country, fewer than half of children attend a preschool program. In Steubenville, it's nearly 80%. Children can start when they're three years old, and it's free for the poorest families.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
We hit it off immediately. We were both education reporters, and we were both kind of obsessed with reading instruction.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
Everyone else pays $100 a month. You heard that right. Just $100 a month for all-day preschool. So where are we going now? Ramsey Kindergarten. I'm back with Jen Blackburn on our tour of reading instruction in Steubenville. Kindergarten is where formal reading instruction begins. And there's something kind of unusual going on here, too, with how kids are taught the letters of the alphabet.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
But they're not saying the names of the letters. This is a particular way of teaching letters. It's sometimes referred to as the sounds-first approach. And it's not the way letters are typically taught in American schools. Typically, kids are taught the names of letters first, the alphabet song.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
I remember learning the alphabet song. I still sing it in my head when I need to remember the order of letters, like when I'm alphabetizing books. You need to know the names of letters and the order of the alphabet to be a literate person. But what do you need to know to learn how to read? To learn how to read, you don't need to know the names of the letters.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
In fact, the letter names can be confusing. For example, the most common sound of the letter E in English is not E. It's eh, as in bed and fed. And the most common sound of the letter I is not I. It's ih, as in sit and pin. The idea in a sounds-first approach is to focus children's attention on the sounds of letters.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
I knew more about Karen than she knew about me. For years, she'd been writing books about schools. I'd been reading her books. And in one of those books, she told the story of a school she visited back in 2008, a school in a small city in eastern Ohio, a place called Steubenville.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
So when they're trying to read a word, the sounds are what immediately come to mind. There's no interference, no confusion with the names of the letters. Like I said, it's unusual.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
There's actually some disagreement among cognitive scientists about whether it's better to start with the letter names or the letter sounds. The bottom line is that kids need to learn both. And it's not that kids in Steubenville aren't taught the names of letters. They are.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
It's just that there's an emphasis on letter sounds to try to reduce clutter, to minimize the chances that a child will be confused. In other words, there's an emphasis on how children learn and what might be difficult for a beginner. This is one of the things that stood out to me in Steubenville. There's a focus here not just on what kids learn, but on how they learn.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
I think how kids learn is sometimes missing in the conversation about the science of reading these days. It's one thing for everyone to agree that reading instruction must include phonics, for example. It's another to ask, how are you teaching phonics? Does your approach take into account how children learn? Steubenville stands out because they are paying attention to learning.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
And they still need reminders about what to do when they come to a word they don't know. But by first grade, these kids are putting it all together. They're reading and writing. I saw a lot of writing built into the reading instruction in Steubenville. What does your sentence say? Can you read it? Sipping did not help Scott.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
The students just read a story about a boy who's trying to get rid of his hiccups. Now they're writing about it. Each student has a partner whose job is to provide feedback on their sentences. And what are you pointing at, Araya? Araya thinks her partner's sentence should include what Scott was sipping. Scott was sipping water. Do you see what she's telling you about what is missing?
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
When she got there, she could immediately see that it was a city in rough shape.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
The boy erases his sentence and writes, sipping water did not help Scott. Araya gives him a high five. There's a lot of this in Steubenville. Kids working together in pairs and small groups, actually teaching each other. One moment that stood out to me was in a third grade class. The kids were taking turns reading a book about rainforests.
Sold a Story
The Outlier (Part 1)
I was walking around the classroom, and as I approached one group, a girl was giving her classmates some instructions.