There’s a school district in eastern Ohio where virtually all the students become good readers by the time they finish third grade. Many of the wealthiest places in the country can’t even say that. And Steubenville is a Rust Belt town where the state considers almost all the students “economically disadvantaged.” How did they do it?Explore: Steubenville, by the numbers Read: Transcript of this episode Book: Districts that Succeed Book: How It's Being Done Podcast: ExtraOrdinary Districts Donate: Support our journalism More: soldastory.org Email us: [email protected] Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit.
Chapter 1: What makes Steubenville's reading success unique?
previously on Sold a Story.
He doesn't look at all the letters and words. He doesn't look at all the words and sentences. And reading is miserable for him.
Josh.
The kids struggle and they suffer.
You know, there's kids sinking everywhere and they're looking for help and it's on us.
I'm calling for a renewed focus on literacy and on the way we teach reading in the state of Ohio.
My bill requires the science of reading.
The challenge of bringing literacy on a massive scale to an entire population is a tall order.
What I'm fearful of, because I've seen it so many times, is... Movements sometimes gloss over detail, and here the details are so critical.
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Chapter 2: Who are the key figures behind the literacy movement in Ohio?
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.
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.
Each dot was a school district.
My eye was immediately drawn to this little dot on the upper left corner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: How did Karen Chenoweth discover Steubenville's success?
Amy Crow teaches kindergarten in Steubenville.
They were like, why are you teaching them? Don't they have to know what the letter's called? And I said, actually, to read the word, it's more important for them to know the sound first. So my son was 20 months old, and he was naming letters, like, ah, buh. And my dad was frustrated by it. He was like, no, it's not. It's called A. And I'm like, no, Dad, I did this for a reason.
And this is what I do in my school, and this is what works.
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.
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.
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.
And the alphabet is just the beginning. after a break.
Think about what happened on page two, and I want you two to come up with a nice retell.
We're in a first-grade classroom now.
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