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Episode: What the Words Say

Author: APM Reports
Duration: 00:53:04

Episode Shownotes

There are kids like C.J. all over the country. Schools tell their parents they are reading at grade level, but the kids are not. And whether they ever get the help they need can depend a lot on their family income and their race. In this documentary, originally published in

August 2020, host Emily Hanford shows that America’s approach to reading instruction is having an especially devastating impact on children of color.Read more: Children of color are far less likely to get the help they needSupport this show: Donate to APM ReportsDive 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.

Summary

In the episode "What the Words Say," APM Reports' Emily Hanford explores the challenges in reading instruction across the U.S., particularly affecting children from low-income families and communities of color. The episode reveals how miscommunication about children's reading levels and inadequate teacher training contribute to educational disparities, resulting in many students falling behind. Notably, the importance of effective reading practices, grounded in cognitive science, is emphasized, alongside the urgent need for reform in reading education to address these systemic issues.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (What the Words Say) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:05 Speaker_03
Hi, it's Emily again, host of Sold a Story. If you're just finding this podcast, please stop, go back, and start with episode one. If you're looking for more now that you've finished Sold a Story, you're in the right place.

00:00:20 Speaker_03
I made four documentaries about reading before Sold A Story. This is the fourth of the four. Making these documentaries is what led us to make Sold A Story. We will have a bonus episode of that podcast coming soon.

00:00:36 Speaker_03
In the meantime, this is What the Words Say. It was first released on August 6, 2020. From American Public Media, this is an APM Reports documentary. I'm Emily Hanford.

00:00:49 Speaker_03
Two years ago, I visited a juvenile detention facility in Houston called the Burnett Bayland Rehabilitation Center. It's a large brown building surrounded by metal fencing.

00:00:59 Speaker_07
Welcome to BBRC.

00:01:01 Speaker_03
I'm led through two large locked doors.

00:01:03 Speaker_05
We are a secured facility. We have both pre-adjudicated kids here, meaning before they go to court, and post-adjudicated kids. Once they've gone to court, they come here to serve out their time and to get treatment.

00:01:16 Speaker_03
I'm getting a tour from Jennifer Hunley, the assistant administrator. It's all boys here, as young as 10. They walk the halls in blue jumpsuits, their hands clasped behind their backs.

00:01:26 Speaker_03
We pass the units where they sleep on thin plastic mattresses, and the isolation room where they're sent when their behavior is out of control. And then we get to a windowless cinder block room with heavy locked doors on each side.

00:01:39 Speaker_03
There's a table and two green chairs. This is where the boys get to visit with their families once a week. It's also where some of them are learning to read. A tutor is sitting across the table from one of the kids locked up here at BBRC.

00:01:58 Speaker_03
I'm not allowed to ask why he's here or use his real name. I'll call him Deshawn. He's 17. All that noise you hear in the background is a kid banging on something in the hallway. Each lesson begins with some instruction.

00:02:10 Speaker_03
Things like how two letters can blend together to make one sound. Then the student does some writing and some reading.

00:02:16 Speaker_11
Deshawn says he's learning a lot of things in these lessons that he never knew. Okay, like, P-H, it's a, I never knew that, like, that's a, like a F. You know, when you put a P-H together, that's like physics. You know what I mean? Like that.

00:02:41 Speaker_03
Deshawn is getting this tutoring as part of a study being conducted by researchers at the University of Houston. The researchers are investigating the relationship between reading problems and involvement in the juvenile justice system.

00:02:53 Speaker_12
These are kids who are reading at or below the third grade level.

00:02:56 Speaker_03
This is Leslie Hart, one of the researchers working on the study.

00:02:59 Speaker_12
There are an awful lot of kids who are coming in who simply can't read at all.

00:03:04 Speaker_03
A lot of them have learning disabilities that were never identified, says Latasha Crenshaw. She worked for the Juvenile Probation Department, advocating on behalf of kids in the justice system who need special education services.

00:03:15 Speaker_03
She told me when she talked to their parents, they would say things like this.

00:03:19 Speaker_16
I knew that my son had a problem in first grade when I was coming up to the school every day, telling you something was wrong and no one listened. So, you know, and for many parents, we get tears, like, I was right, I knew.

00:03:36 Speaker_16
and my child is finally getting the help. And then we get the tears of the, but they're in the justice system when all this possibly could have been avoided.

00:03:46 Speaker_03
She says when she'd review student records, she'd often see a pattern that starts in elementary school. When kids are having a hard time learning, they act up.

00:03:55 Speaker_03
Henry Gonzalez, who was Assistant Executive Director of the Juvenile Probation Department when I visited, says behavior problems and reading problems go together all the time.

00:04:04 Speaker_01
I don't know how to read, and I don't want everyone to know about that, but I know how to make you laugh, therefore I'm going to be the class clown. I don't know how to do these things, but I can fight, therefore I'm going to beat you up.

00:04:15 Speaker_03
Not all struggling readers act out, of course. Some withdraw, stay quiet, hope no one will notice. The research on the links between reading problems and social and emotional problems is sobering.

00:04:26 Speaker_03
Struggling readers are more likely to say they are sad, angry, lonely, and depressed. They're also less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

00:04:40 Speaker_03
After Deshaun's reading lesson, I got a chance to interview him. So, what do you remember about reading when you were first learning how to read?

00:04:48 Speaker_11
That it was hard. That's really it.

00:04:52 Speaker_03
Tell me more about that. What was hard? What did it feel like?

00:04:56 Speaker_11
When I was just reading, I just didn't know none of the words. Like, the only reason I knew how to read a little bit is because I hear people talk, you know? Like, I knew, I could, I see the way I can, you know what I'm saying?

00:05:07 Speaker_03
So you, like, memorize the words?

00:05:08 Speaker_11
Memorize the words.

00:05:11 Speaker_03
This is what a lot of struggling readers have told me. They memorize words, store them like pictures in their mind. But there are tens of thousands of words in the English language. You can't memorize them all.

00:05:23 Speaker_03
Research shows you need to understand the relationships between letters and sounds. That's why Deshawn is working on things like understanding that PH makes a F sound. Deshawn says he wants to be a better reader.

00:05:35 Speaker_11
I can't be no flunky. I don't want to be a bum, you know, trying to take care of myself. I don't want to be out there on the streets.

00:05:43 Speaker_03
Deshawn wants to go back to high school when he gets out to get his diploma. But the sad truth is most kids in the juvenile justice system never graduate from high school.

00:05:52 Speaker_03
One study found that 49% of juveniles who'd been in detention were in an adult prison by the time they were 25. From APM Reports, this is what the words say.

00:06:07 Speaker_03
For the past several years, I've been reporting on what scientists have figured out about how skilled reading works, and the fact that a lot of teachers aren't being taught this scientific research in their preparation programs or on the job.

00:06:20 Speaker_03
I've found that some of what teachers learn is actually at odds with the scientific research. Why is this happening? In large part, it's because reading instruction is political and has been for a long time.

00:06:32 Speaker_03
The basic debate comes down to a centuries-old chicken-or-the-egg argument about what it takes for kids to be able to understand what they read. One side said, start with letters and sounds.

00:06:43 Speaker_03
If kids know how to decode words, reading comprehension will follow. The other side said, no. If you focus too much on the letters and sounds, kids won't pay attention to the meaning of what they're reading. Focus on comprehension.

00:06:56 Speaker_03
This debate misunderstands what cognitive scientists have figured out about how reading comprehension works. This hour I'm going to tell you about what they've learned.

00:07:05 Speaker_03
Their research not only sheds light on what children need to learn to become good readers, it helps explain why some children are more at risk of becoming poor readers than others.

00:07:14 Speaker_03
I'm also going to show you that when kids do struggle, some of them are more likely to get help. White kids from families with money can often get what they need. But those kids locked up in Houston?

00:07:25 Speaker_03
Almost all of them are Black or Hispanic, and many of them were once the struggling readers in their local public schools who didn't get help. There are a lot of students like that in schools all over the country, including Nashville, Tennessee.

00:07:38 Speaker_03
That's where we're going next to meet a woman named Visha Hawkins. She was shocked to discover just how far behind so many of the children in her city actually are. Visha Hawkins was a school system insider.

00:07:54 Speaker_02
I was the system.

00:07:56 Speaker_03
Like, I was a company girl. She was the liaison between the director of the Nashville Public Schools and the elected school board. She went to all the board meetings, listened to every presentation about academic performance, for years.

00:08:08 Speaker_03
The test scores were never very good.

00:08:10 Speaker_02
But it was always couched in something, right? Like it was always some kind of spin.

00:08:16 Speaker_03
Test scores aren't good, but they're growing. Test scores aren't good, but we're doing something about it.

00:08:21 Speaker_02
And I never, I mean, quite honestly, like I never just went to the website and looked at the data myself. Never.

00:08:29 Speaker_03
until I left the district. That's when it hit her. It was the fall of 2017. She'd started writing about education. New test scores had just been released, and she went online to take a look.

00:08:40 Speaker_02
And I sat at my desk at home, and I mean, I was just crying. Like, I could not believe we were doing this to our children. And I couldn't believe that I had missed it.

00:08:51 Speaker_03
The test scores showed 86% of students from low-income families were below grade level in reading. Black and Hispanic students 82% of them were behind.

00:09:00 Speaker_02
We live in a city, a great city, right? A beautiful city, a growing city. Cranes and construction crews were everywhere. We've got cranes galore. And underneath the cranes are kids who cannot read. Unbelievable to me.

00:09:17 Speaker_02
So I decided to go on a little, I don't know, research tour. She started asking people out for coffee. And so I had about 50 coffees with people, with educators, administrators. And she asked them, why are so many kids struggling with reading?

00:09:36 Speaker_02
And every single person I talked to, every single person I talked to, except one, blamed the parents for the reading crisis in our city.

00:09:47 Speaker_03
They all said, parents don't read enough to their children. Only one person pointed to the schools. Everyone else said, it's the families, it's the home environment, it's poverty. But that didn't sit right with Visha Hawkins. She grew up poor.

00:10:00 Speaker_03
No one read to her.

00:10:01 Speaker_02
And she learned to read. And then I thought, maybe I'm asking the wrong people. What educator really is going to say, it's our fault? You know, we don't have the right curriculum.

00:10:12 Speaker_02
We don't, you know, we didn't really learn how to teach reading in college. Like, who's going to say that?

00:10:20 Speaker_03
So she started talking to parents, and she met Sonia Thomas. Sonia is a founding member of a group called Nashville PROPEL. PROPEL stands for Parents Requiring Our Public Education System to Lead.

00:10:32 Speaker_03
It was started by parents whose local schools are on what is known as the priority schools list. Priority school sounded good to Sonia Thomas until she found out those are the schools with the lowest test scores in the entire state, the bottom 5%.

00:10:47 Speaker_03
Sonia says many parents don't realize how far behind their kids are.

00:10:52 Speaker_04
They don't know that their children are not reading at grade level and their children truly don't know how to read.

00:10:59 Speaker_03
They don't know until it costs them. This is what happened with her youngest son, CJ. The story starts in first grade. I knew something was going on with him, but I could not figure it out. He just didn't seem to be getting it when it came to reading.

00:11:14 Speaker_03
The school said he was behind, but nothing to worry about. They were giving him extra help.

00:11:18 Speaker_04
There was never a conversation of, he's struggling with reading. It's, he needs some intervention. So we're going to take him out of class, you know, read with him a little more. I'm like, okay, great, good, you know.

00:11:30 Speaker_03
She asked what she should be doing at home and the answer was, read to him. She did, says she always had. But things didn't seem to be getting better. Second grade, third grade, fourth grade. Sonya was really worried.

00:11:42 Speaker_03
But the school said he was making progress.

00:11:44 Speaker_04
He did okay. But I just knew that he wasn't doing as well as my other kids.

00:11:52 Speaker_03
So I started asking myself, does he have a learning disability? She asked for CJ to be tested, but the school said no need, he was fine. She didn't know what to do. Tutoring, private school, those weren't things she could afford.

00:12:05 Speaker_03
She was desperate, and she knew something about how CJ felt. She had a hard time learning to read, and she says no one helped her. I don't remember being taught to read. She just remembers being expected to know how to do it.

00:12:22 Speaker_03
As she got older, she says her problem wasn't that she couldn't read the words. It's that she didn't know what a lot of the words meant. Because if I would read a sentence or read a passage, I'm like, OK, what did that mean?

00:12:32 Speaker_03
She says she was rarely assigned to read anything in school except stuff in textbooks.

00:12:37 Speaker_04
No books, no novels, no any of that. Like, I did not read books. until I actually got in high school in my English class and we read Fahrenheit.

00:12:49 Speaker_03
Fahrenheit 451, the 1950s dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. I hated that book because that book was hard.

00:12:58 Speaker_04
I didn't have the vocabulary. I didn't have the understanding. It talked around a whole bunch of things, and I just did not understand. I could never make the connection, and so I struggled.

00:13:09 Speaker_03
It wasn't just that words stumped her when she was reading. Words sometimes stumped her when people were talking, too. She noticed it at work, in the healthcare industry.

00:13:18 Speaker_04
I mean, I work in a corporate world, and I could tell sometimes when They would have conversations. I didn't know what they were talking about. And I would find myself Googling words.

00:13:28 Speaker_03
It was embarrassing. She did not want this to happen to her son. But the schools kept telling her not to worry. His grades were good. He was a well-behaved kid. And then, seventh grade. CJ had moved to a new school. It was September.

00:13:41 Speaker_03
CJ's advisor called Sonja in for a meeting.

00:13:46 Speaker_04
The advisor says that he's on task. He has turned in all his assignments. I'm like, yeah, I know. She said, but when we tested him, he reads on a second grade reading level. I lost it.

00:14:03 Speaker_03
It felt like I cried for 15 minutes. I sobbed. Eventually, she wiped the tears from her face, put her glasses back on, and looked up. The advisor told her the school would help CJ.

00:14:17 Speaker_03
Sonia wanted to believe it, but she'd been putting her faith in the school system for years, and this is where it had gotten her, a son in seventh grade at a second grade reading level.

00:14:27 Speaker_04
And it was from that day on, I said, nobody else will walk away feeling like that. No child, no mama, no daddy. Like, it's my life's work to make sure nobody else feels like that.

00:14:41 Speaker_03
That was when she helped start the parent group, Propel. I love what they do. This is Visha Hawkins again, the former school system insider. When she met the parents of Propel, she realized she was finally talking to the people she needed to hear.

00:14:54 Speaker_03
All those educators she'd had coffee with? They'd blamed poverty for the city's reading crisis and made it sound so unsolvable. But after listening to parents like Sonia Thomas, it all seemed much more urgent and clear. We should be able to expect

00:15:09 Speaker_02
that a kid goes to school and learn to read, if nothing else.

00:15:22 Speaker_03
In my years of reporting on reading, I haven't met a teacher or a school administrator who didn't want their students to be good readers.

00:15:29 Speaker_03
But I've met a lot of educators who didn't know what cognitive scientists have figured out about how reading comprehension works.

00:15:37 Speaker_03
For decades, those scientists have been studying what is going on in our minds as we look at words and make sense of text. And they've learned some fascinating things.

00:15:46 Speaker_00
So my name is Wes Hoover. I'm a cognitive psychologist by training. I am now retired after having worked in the field for almost 40 years.

00:15:56 Speaker_03
When Wes Hoover was in college in the late 1960s, he got really interested in language development.

00:16:01 Speaker_00
Just how it worked. How is it possible that you are able to learn a language just by being exposed to it? Language just became a fascination.

00:16:12 Speaker_03
His interest in how people learn to speak a language evolved into another question when he was in graduate school. How does a person learn to read a language? In the 1970s, that was a controversial question among academics.

00:16:25 Speaker_03
There were two big competing ideas.

00:16:27 Speaker_00
One of the ideas was that when kids are reading, what they're trying to do is complete comprehension. And the way they do it is to try and get a flow going about what meaning is being communicated in reading.

00:16:43 Speaker_00
And when they come up on a word they don't recognize, to try and guess at what it is based on the context of what they've read so far.

00:16:54 Speaker_03
The idea was that as long as kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they'll figure out how to read the words.

00:17:00 Speaker_03
This view assumed that learning how to read is similar to learning how to talk, that it happens naturally through immersion.

00:17:07 Speaker_00
The other model is that, no, reading, while it is focused on comprehension, getting the word off the page actually is based on analyzing the pieces of the word.

00:17:19 Speaker_00
doing what's called alphabetic coding, relating the letters to the phonology of the language.

00:17:25 Speaker_03
The teaching approach associated with this belief was phonics, teaching kids how the sounds and words are represented by letters. The assumption was that kids need to be taught how to read, that it doesn't happen naturally.

00:17:37 Speaker_03
But no one really knew how reading works. How do we even do it? When Wes Hoover went to graduate school in the 1970s, he studied under a professor who was trying to figure it out.

00:17:49 Speaker_03
This professor, Philip Goff, was trying to understand not just how we read, but what's going on when someone is having trouble reading.

00:17:56 Speaker_00
Phil was really trying to describe reading disability. What is it that defines whether someone can or can't read, and what are the categories of people that can't read?

00:18:06 Speaker_03
What Phil Goff knew was this. When kids start school, the vast majority of them are already quite good at speaking their native language.

00:18:14 Speaker_03
The average six-year-old, he wrote, has a mastery of English that would be the envy of any college graduate learning English as a second language. But young children do not know how to read most of the words they know how to say.

00:18:27 Speaker_00
What happens when they come to school is their language comprehension is fairly high. And what they have to do is learn word recognition.

00:18:34 Speaker_00
And so if they're taught word recognition, then they can read to the level at which they can comprehend the language.

00:18:41 Speaker_03
The idea was that reading comprehension has two parts. One is your ability to understand meaning when someone is talking or when text is read out loud to you. That's language comprehension.

00:18:53 Speaker_03
The other is your ability to read printed words quickly and accurately. That's word recognition. If you can do both of those things, Phil Goff thought, you can comprehend what you read. But if you can only do one, or neither, you can't.

00:19:08 Speaker_03
In 1986, he and a colleague published a paper where they laid out this model of reading comprehension. They called it the Simple View of Reading. The Simple View does not say that reading is simple.

00:19:19 Speaker_03
It says that reading comprehension can be divided into two parts. Here's Wes Hoover again.

00:19:25 Speaker_00
If you know someone's language comprehension ability and their word recognition ability, you will know how well they read. You can predict perfectly their reading comprehension. That's the hypothesis.

00:19:37 Speaker_03
The hypothesis was first tested and verified in a study that Wes Hoover published with Phil Goff in 1990. The basics of the model have been confirmed in more than 150 studies since.

00:19:48 Speaker_00
It's the big idea of reading. That is, reading is complex. Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex.

00:19:58 Speaker_00
But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two skills, those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension.

00:20:06 Speaker_03
When a person can't understand what they read, according to The Simple View, they have either a word recognition problem or a language comprehension problem, or both. Lots of struggling readers have both.

00:20:18 Speaker_03
That was obvious when I was at the juvenile detention facility in Houston. One of the kids I met there was a 15-year-old I'll call Mateo. I sat in on his second reading lesson. Here he is trying to sound out the word toast.

00:20:34 Speaker_20
Yes, that's it.

00:20:37 Speaker_03
Mateo is one of the kids who can barely read at all. The word is gloat. Sounding it out is a first step, but does Mateo know what the word gloat means? His tutor asks him. Mateo doesn't know what gloat means.

00:21:06 Speaker_03
His tutor tries to define it, struggles a bit, then turns to Jennifer Hundley, the assistant administrator, who's in the corner keeping an eye on us. The word gloat comes up again when Mateo is trying to read a story called Taking a Ride.

00:21:42 Speaker_03
I'm not sure Mateo remembers the meaning of that word. I'm not sure he has any idea what he's reading. Listening to him struggle through the text, I'm having a hard time keeping track of what the story's about.

00:21:53 Speaker_03
At the age of 15, Mateo is a beginning reader. His mental energy is still focused on figuring out how to sound out the words. There are a few moments when he successfully pronounces something and realizes it's a word he knows.

00:22:11 Speaker_03
But many of the words, like gloat and sneer and trait, it was clear from earlier in the lesson that Mateo didn't know the meaning of those words. You could have read this story out loud to him, and he wouldn't have understood at all.

00:22:24 Speaker_03
Mateo has a reading comprehension problem because he has a hard time with both word recognition and language comprehension. He's not going to be a good reader until he gets better at both.

00:22:34 Speaker_03
But if Matteo had learned how to successfully sound out words earlier in his life, he'd likely know the meaning of a lot more words now.

00:22:42 Speaker_00
Because there's a very powerful thing in reading called Matthew effects.

00:22:48 Speaker_03
This is Wes Hoover again.

00:22:49 Speaker_00
It's this idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

00:22:52 Speaker_03
It's a biblical reference. Here's how it works. Let's say you enter school and you get off to a good start when it comes to the word recognition part of the simple view of reading.

00:23:02 Speaker_00
Then what happens is that you tend to read more. You tend to read more difficult texts. You tend to engage in conversations about those texts. And all of those things then reciprocally build your language comprehension and your word recognition.

00:23:22 Speaker_00
Once you start to be able to read and you read more, the reading you do further develops the language comprehension and word recognition skills you have. That's the rich get richer.

00:23:34 Speaker_03
But the opposite can happen. You don't get off to a good start with word recognition. Either because it's something that's really hard for you. For example, you have dyslexia, which is characterized by difficulty with discerning the sounds in words.

00:23:47 Speaker_03
Or you don't get off to a good start with word recognition because no one teaches it to you. or both. It's hard for you and you're not taught how to do it.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
Those kids who can't read very well will start not reading very much at all. They'll try and read less complex texts. They'll get frustrated and stop reading altogether.

00:24:11 Speaker_00
And that will have the effect of not moving either their word recognition or language comprehension skills forward.

00:24:20 Speaker_03
When kids don't get the instruction they need, they can easily grow into adulthood without knowing basic things about how written language works. Like Mateo and Deshawn. I don't know what happened to them. The study they're part of is still going on.

00:24:34 Speaker_03
Struggling readers in the juvenile detention system in Houston continue to get tutoring. But not at the facility I visited in 2018. That shut down last year, as part of an effort to lock up fewer kids.

00:24:55 Speaker_03
You're listening to What the Words Say from APM Reports. I'm Emily Hanford. Studies show that almost all children can become readers. They have the cognitive capacity to do it. But a lot of them aren't becoming readers.

00:25:10 Speaker_03
The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that roughly half of Black and Hispanic children and nearly a quarter of white kids do not have basic reading comprehension skills by fourth grade.

00:25:21 Speaker_03
A lot of those children's parents have been told, don't worry, your child will catch up. But most of them won't catch up. Coming up, we'll hear about why so many kids like Mateo and Deshawn are not getting the instruction they need.

00:25:34 Speaker_21
I go into poor schools. Nobody has dyslexia in a poor school. In the face of a population where eight and a half out of ten are struggling with reading, who has a reading disability? The answer is, we have no idea.

00:25:51 Speaker_03
Support for APM Reports comes from the Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and the Hollyhock Foundation. More in a minute, this is APM American Public Media. Welcome back. I'm Emily Hanford, and this is What the Words Say from APM Reports.

00:26:08 Speaker_08
Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for being our guinea pigs today in our simulation.

00:26:13 Speaker_03
We're in an elementary school classroom in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There are about 20 teachers seated at tables.

00:26:19 Speaker_03
A consultant named Michael Hunter is taking them through an exercise to demonstrate some of the things scientists have figured out about how reading works.

00:26:27 Speaker_08
I need four brave volunteers.

00:26:30 Speaker_03
A few hands go up. Michael sends them into the hallway. Before I tell you what happens next, I want to go back to the two big ideas about how people read that academics were arguing about back in the 1970s.

00:26:44 Speaker_03
One idea was that readers use the meaning of what they're reading to predict what the words will be. Learning to read is not about sounding words out, it's about using context to guess what the words are.

00:26:56 Speaker_03
According to this theory, readers don't necessarily have to read every word accurately to comprehend what they're reading.

00:27:02 Speaker_03
The other theory was that learning to read is a process of looking carefully at words, sounding them out, and matching those pronunciations with words you know in spoken language.

00:27:12 Speaker_03
If you can't accurately identify the words, your comprehension will suffer. That's the idea that decades of scientific research has confirmed. And that's what Michael Hunter wants to demonstrate with the teachers in Harrisburg.

00:27:24 Speaker_08
So let's bring in our first reader.

00:27:27 Speaker_03
A first grade teacher named Katie comes in from the hall. Michael projects a passage onto a screen at the front of the room and asks her to read it out loud.

00:27:34 Speaker_13
A tragnex is a simple geed used for finding plibbins. Most will fit in your Brisbane.

00:27:44 Speaker_03
30% of the words in this passage are nonsense words. Katie does her best to sound them out, but she has no idea what they mean. When she's done, Michael asks her some questions.

00:27:53 Speaker_07
Katie just demonstrated what reading comprehension is like when you're faced with a bunch of words you don't know.

00:28:11 Speaker_03
The next volunteer comes in from the hall to read the same passage, but this time, fewer of the words are nonsense, just 20%.

00:28:17 Speaker_14
This is Jalissa.

00:28:26 Speaker_03
There are two kinds of nonsense words in this passage to demonstrate an important point about decoding. Some of the words are hard for Jalissa to sound out. Plivens, for example. P-L-I-Y-V-N-S.

00:28:40 Speaker_03
She hesitates and stumbles on that one because English words aren't spelled that way. She's not sure how to decode it and she doesn't know what it means. A word like tragnets, that's pretty easy for her to decode.

00:28:52 Speaker_03
But decoding doesn't help much because Jalissa doesn't know what the word means. The point is, you can sound like a decent reader if you have good decoding skills, but it doesn't necessarily mean you understand what you're reading.

00:29:05 Speaker_03
How was Jalissa's comprehension when she didn't know 20% of the words? So when do the benefits of context kick in? At what point can you figure out what the words say from the meaning of what you're reading? The next reader comes in from the hall.

00:29:21 Speaker_08
Now just 10% of the words are nonsense.

00:29:30 Speaker_03
This reader figures out what the passage is about.

00:29:33 Speaker_08
She knew enough of the words to get a gist of what was going on and then it clicked. It's about a compass.

00:29:36 Speaker_03
But she already knows what a compass is and how it works. She was able to fill in the gaps left by the handful of words she didn't know by relying on her background knowledge. This happens all the time in reading.

00:30:02 Speaker_03
Even when you can easily read all the words, your comprehension can be aided or impeded depending on what you already know about the topic.

00:30:10 Speaker_00
Easy example is if, I don't know if you know cricket.

00:30:14 Speaker_03
This is reading researcher Wes Hoover again, and I don't know anything about cricket, except that it's a bat and ball game not played much in the United States.

00:30:21 Speaker_00
If you read a sports column about cricket, you most likely would have great difficulty understanding it as opposed to a column written about baseball.

00:30:30 Speaker_03
This assumes I know something about baseball, and I do. Probably more than a typical kid growing up in New Zealand, for example, where there's a lot of cricket, but not much baseball.

00:30:39 Speaker_00
So kids in New Zealand can quickly understand accounts of cricket matches, but they have great difficulty understanding accounts of baseball matches. And the problem is they don't have the background knowledge to interpret what's going on.

00:30:52 Speaker_03
Your ability to comprehend what you read is linked to your knowledge. This is one reason there's an association between a child's reading comprehension and their family's income.

00:31:02 Speaker_03
More income often means more opportunity for experiences that build knowledge of the world. The teacher who figured out tragnex meant compass already knew something about compasses.

00:31:13 Speaker_03
If you don't know anything about compasses, one way to learn about them is through reading. But your chances of learning something about compasses through reading will be impeded if you can't read the words.

00:31:24 Speaker_03
That's why teaching kids how to read words is so important.

00:31:27 Speaker_22
I have a master's degree in reading and I didn't learn this.

00:31:31 Speaker_03
Lisa Flute is a reading specialist in Harrisburg who participated in the demonstration we just heard.

00:31:36 Speaker_03
It's part of a year-long professional development series on what scientists have discovered about how reading works and how to apply that to teaching. Lisa Flute says she didn't learn about the science of reading in her preparation to be a teacher.

00:31:48 Speaker_03
She learned that idea from the 1970s. The goal is meaning, meaning, meaning. What she didn't understand is how kids get to meaning. She didn't spend much time teaching kids how to decode words because she didn't think it was necessary.

00:32:01 Speaker_03
They had other ways to get the meaning. She now realizes what a mistake that was. Some of her students needed much more help.

00:32:09 Speaker_22
And there are kids that I'm picturing in my mind right now that I want to say I'm sorry to.

00:32:22 Speaker_03
I've talked to a lot of teachers who express regret about what they didn't know. For many of them, the simple view of reading is a big aha moment.

00:32:31 Speaker_03
They didn't fully appreciate the importance of word recognition, and they didn't quite get how the language comprehension part works either. Language comprehension is critical.

00:32:41 Speaker_03
Research shows that once children have mastered the basics of decoding, their ability to understand what they read is largely determined by their oral language skills, their knowledge, and their vocabulary.

00:32:53 Speaker_03
And a large body of research shows that children from low-income families come into school knowing the meaning of far fewer words, on average, than higher-income kids.

00:33:02 Speaker_03
This can put them at a disadvantage at the outset because making sense of what you're reading is about matching what you see in print with what you already know in spoken language.

00:33:11 Speaker_03
This also means that if the language you speak at home is different from the language you use in school, learning to read is likely to take more time and may be more challenging.

00:33:21 Speaker_03
This is true for English language learners, kids who speak Spanish or Korean or Arabic at home. It can also be true for children who are native English speakers. Julie Washington studies language and reading development in African American children.

00:33:34 Speaker_03
She's specifically interested in the role of African American English. African-American English is a dialect of English. Every language has dialects.

00:33:44 Speaker_03
There are variations of a parent language, different ways of pronouncing words, and different vocabulary and grammar, too.

00:33:49 Speaker_21
So an example of African-American English is, one day, me and my mom was at home. That is completely acceptable in African-American English.

00:34:00 Speaker_03
There was a moment when Julie Washington realized that children who come into school speaking African-American English might have a harder time learning how to read.

00:34:08 Speaker_21
This was way back in the beginning of my career. Worked with a four-year-old. And we were reading Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman.

00:34:17 Speaker_19
Today, we're going to read a story about a little bird looking for his mother.

00:34:21 Speaker_21
And so the baby bird jumps out of the nest, goes to different animals, objects, and says, are you my mother?

00:34:28 Speaker_20
Are you my mother? He said to the hen. No, said the hen.

00:34:35 Speaker_21
And so it's this, are you my mother? I am not a that goes through the story. So when this little girl, African-American dialect speaker goes to retell the story to me, she says, is you my mama? I ain't none of yo mama.

00:34:50 Speaker_21
I laughed, it was hilarious and it was fun. But then I went back to my office and I thought about what she had to do in order to listen to this story that was told in a language form that she doesn't actually use.

00:35:05 Speaker_21
She recoded it into her own dialect and then she told me the story. That takes a lot of working memory. It takes a pretty good vocabulary.

00:35:16 Speaker_03
The kid who comes to school whose language system mirrors the book doesn't have that work to do. The kid who looks at the book

00:35:30 Speaker_21
It's exactly the same system he uses, can go straight for decoding and not have to do all those other steps in between.

00:35:38 Speaker_03
Julie Washington says schools need to understand that children who are heavy dialect users may need more time and more help to be successful with reading. She says almost all low-income African-American children use African-American English at home.

00:35:52 Speaker_21
Middle-income kids are more likely to either not use it at all or to be able to code switch.

00:35:59 Speaker_21
Because they've had more access outside of the community, they go to schools where there are more kids who are using mainstream English, they are more likely to be able to code switch in and out.

00:36:15 Speaker_03
Think of family income as a kind of buffer when it comes to the risk of being a struggling reader.

00:36:21 Speaker_03
The more resources your family has, the more opportunities you're likely to have for early life experiences that tilt things in your favor when it comes to learning how to read. But it's not just how affluent your family is.

00:36:33 Speaker_03
It's how affluent your school is, too. High-poverty schools are less effective, on average, when it comes to promoting reading achievement. And according to the U.S.

00:36:42 Speaker_03
Department of Education, nearly half of all Black students in this country go to high-poverty schools. Nearly half of all Hispanic kids, too. White kids? Only 8% of them go to schools where most students are from low-income families.

00:36:58 Speaker_03
And here's the thing. If you're a struggling reader and you go to a school where most of the students are from low-income families,

00:37:05 Speaker_03
Your problems with reading may go unnoticed, because a lot of the other kids are probably having a hard time learning to read, too. Here's Julie Washington again.

00:37:13 Speaker_21
I go into poor schools. Nobody has dyslexia in a poor school. In the face of a population where eight She says part of the problem is the way federal law defines learning disabilities. The law says a child cannot qualify for a learning disability.

00:37:40 Speaker_03
if that child's learning problems are primarily the result of economic disadvantage.

00:37:45 Speaker_21
So what that policy is saying, we've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor. Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor.

00:38:00 Speaker_03
The goal was to prevent low-income kids of color from being over-identified for special education. But the policy has had unintended consequences.

00:38:09 Speaker_15
We hear from teachers that they have been told not to refer any more children of color, that they're already at their threshold.

00:38:17 Speaker_03
This is Paul Morgan, a professor at Penn State. His research shows that if you look at children having the hardest time with reading, kids who score in the bottom 10 percent.

00:38:28 Speaker_03
you find that white children are much more likely to be receiving special education services than children of color. He says there are likely a number of things going on. Part of it is expectations.

00:38:39 Speaker_03
The white child struggling must have a disability, whereas the black child struggling is just struggling, like so many other kids in her school.

00:38:48 Speaker_03
And then there's the fact that getting special education services for a child with a reading disability can be difficult no matter what kind of school the child goes to.

00:38:56 Speaker_15
Too often, I think parents have to fight. And when the school says no, there's not much of a recourse for the parent to engage in short of legal action, which is very costly.

00:39:09 Speaker_03
It's a system that favors people with money. Some parents spend thousands of dollars trying to get their kids into special ed. But a child who is having a hard time learning to read doesn't necessarily have a learning disability.

00:39:23 Speaker_03
Paul Morgan points to the experience of his own two kids.

00:39:26 Speaker_15
Our oldest is a voracious reader and took to it readily. He seemed to benefit from what our local school did in terms of teaching reading.

00:39:38 Speaker_03
This wasn't the case with his younger son.

00:39:40 Speaker_15
He really was starting to experience difficulties fairly early, by kindergarten, first grade.

00:39:49 Speaker_03
The school's advice to Paul and his wife?

00:39:51 Speaker_15
Read storybooks to him. Surround him with books.

00:39:54 Speaker_03
But they'd been reading to him since he was a baby. They had tons of books in their home. Language comprehension wasn't the issue. Paul's son needed to be taught how to read words. So he and his wife started doing that.

00:40:08 Speaker_15
We were in a position to reorganize our work schedules. And we, just every morning before he went to his classroom, set aside 10, 15 minutes of regular practice. And then he was OK. Things made sense to him.

00:40:24 Speaker_15
He was decoding and starting to read quickly and fluently. And that was what he needed.

00:40:31 Speaker_03
They caught the problem and were able to fix it pretty easily. That's not going to be the case with every child. Some kids will need lots of instruction. But intervening early is critical.

00:40:41 Speaker_15
If you can't read well in the early grades, your peers notice, your teacher notices, you notice. And it really starts to have negative consequences on your social-emotional development and your behavior.

00:40:55 Speaker_03
Most children who are struggling with reading at the end of first grade don't catch up. Because the kids who got off to a good start in reading are catapulting ahead. Those good readers are soon able to read everything they know how to say.

00:41:10 Speaker_03
And now, because they can read lots of words, they're gaining knowledge and teaching themselves the meaning of new words through reading. That's the rich get richer.

00:41:19 Speaker_03
When kids struggle, they tend to read less and miss out on tons of little opportunities to learn through reading. All those missed opportunities add up. One study estimated that a fifth grader who was a good reader

00:41:33 Speaker_03
at the 90th percentile compared to her peers, encounters almost 2 million words in text every year just in stuff she reads outside of school. The average child who reads at the 10th percentile encounters just 8,000 words outside of school.

00:41:50 Speaker_03
Think about that. And then think about a kid who gets to 7th grade reading on a 2nd grade level. That's what Sonya Thomas was told about her son. What happened with CJ?

00:42:02 Speaker_22
Hello.

00:42:03 Speaker_03
Hello. So I'm Emily.

00:42:06 Speaker_22
I'm CJ.

00:42:07 Speaker_03
I never got a chance to meet CJ in person. The coronavirus abruptly canceled travel while I was reporting this story. So I met him on Zoom with his mom. I asked him what he remembers about being taught to read. Not much, he says, except that it was hard.

00:42:22 Speaker_03
What was hard? What was it about it that was hard? Do you know?

00:42:27 Speaker_11
Saying the words out loud and reading out loud.

00:42:29 Speaker_03
Reading out loud. Could you sound them out and say the words, and then you didn't know what they meant? Or did you have a hard time just sounding them out?

00:42:40 Speaker_09
Both.

00:42:41 Speaker_03
Both. Do you remember anyone teaching you how to sound out words?

00:42:47 Speaker_09
No.

00:42:48 Speaker_03
No. But maybe they did and you don't remember. Yeah. Sonya had warned me that CJ isn't much of a talker, so I wasn't surprised by his one-word answers. He's being 13. Don't want to do it. My big question about CJ's reading is this.

00:43:06 Speaker_03
Does he have a disability that the school system missed, or is the problem that CJ was never taught how to read, or both? His mom wants to know the answers to those questions, too.

00:43:21 Speaker_03
So Sonia requested all of CJ's school records, and APM Reports hired a professor named Zach Barnes to review those records.

00:43:28 Speaker_18
I'm assistant professor of special education at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.

00:43:33 Speaker_03
Before that, Zach was a special education teacher in the Nashville schools, so he's familiar with the forms and assessments in CJ's file. Sonia and I met with Zach virtually, and he went through what he found in CJ's records, starting in kindergarten.

00:43:46 Speaker_18
From the data that we're seeing, CJ was starting off behind.

00:43:50 Speaker_03
The records are sort of frustrating, though. They don't say what he was behind in, just that he was below benchmark. When CJ started first grade, he took a reading test that placed him at the 24th percentile nationally.

00:44:04 Speaker_03
That means more than three-quarters of first graders in the country were doing better than he was. There's a form in the file that says CJ had no problem understanding and using vocabulary, but that he spoke slowly. Sonja noticed this too.

00:44:17 Speaker_04
I do remember me having some concerns about his speech and him being really shy, like not talking a lot.

00:44:28 Speaker_03
There's no indication CJ was evaluated for a speech issue or a reading problem. But there is a handwritten note Sonja wrote when CJ was in first grade. asking the school to test him for a learning disability.

00:44:41 Speaker_03
At the end of first grade, CJ took the same assessment he took at the beginning of the year, the one that showed he read at the 24th percentile. This time, he scored at the 12th percentile.

00:44:52 Speaker_03
That means nearly 90% of kids his age were doing better than he was. Sonya tears up when Zach points this out.

00:45:00 Speaker_04
Sorry, but this tears me up to pieces.

00:45:04 Speaker_03
We spend nearly two hours going over CJ's entire school file, grade by grade. There are nearly 200 pages of records, and Zach notices a pattern. Some years, CJ got pulled out of the classroom for extra help with reading. His test scores went up.

00:45:20 Speaker_03
Then the help stopped. I asked Zach later if this is unusual. He said no, and not just in Nashville, in lots of schools. He likened it to a lifeguard saving someone and then allowing them to drown a few minutes later.

00:45:34 Speaker_03
Things might have been different for CJ if he'd been in special education. He would have had an individualized education program and rights to services protected by federal law. But to get into special ed, you need to be identified with a disability.

00:45:48 Speaker_03
Zach says to determine if CJ has a disability, he'd need a full evaluation from a school psychologist. CJ never got one of those. Zach says he should have.

00:45:58 Speaker_18
He's this kind of student that we really need to dig deep on to figure out, how can we help CJ?

00:46:06 Speaker_03
Zach offers to help Sonya get CJ an evaluation. Sonya is grateful, but angry. Her son just finished eighth grade. She asked for him to be tested for a learning disability in first grade. She wonders how many other kids needed help and didn't get it.

00:46:24 Speaker_04
There's this heavy feeling that I have of, so many people that's not going to get it and worse off than him.

00:46:35 Speaker_04
And I don't know what to do except to keep telling parents to question everything and everybody so they don't have to go all of these years like I did to try to get down to the bottom of it.

00:46:45 Speaker_03
I contacted the Nashville Public Schools to see if someone could answer questions about what happened with CJ. A spokesperson declined to comment. There are kids like CJ all over the country. Learning to read does not come easily to them.

00:47:03 Speaker_03
Schools tell their parents, read to him, he'll be okay. But he's not. Some kids get help. Their parents pay for it, or they teach their child themselves.

00:47:13 Speaker_03
Or the child gets into special education, where he's more likely to get the kind of instruction he needs. But if your child is not learning to read in school, and you don't have the money or time to deal with it yourself, what do you do?

00:47:26 Speaker_03
The equity implications of this are stunning. A child from a low or even a moderate income family who is having a hard time learning to read may never get what he needs to become a good reader.

00:47:42 Speaker_03
There are several ways to view what's going on with reading in this country. One is to see it as a special education problem. We have lots of kids with learning disabilities who aren't getting the help they need. We do, but that isn't the whole story.

00:47:55 Speaker_03
A third of fourth graders in this country can't read on a basic level. They can't all need special education. Remember Paul Morgan's son? He got the help he needed and he was fine.

00:48:07 Speaker_03
He's doing well academically, about to start high school, the same age as CJ. Another popular explanation is poverty. Kids can't read because they're hungry. They're stressed. They weren't read to enough at home. Poverty plays a role, no question.

00:48:22 Speaker_03
There's lots of research on this. But children from low-income families can learn to read well. And when they do, it can change their lives. Visha Hawkins grew up poor. She learned to read. And now she has a master's degree.

00:48:37 Speaker_03
A third explanation is the tests themselves. They're not measuring reading ability accurately. The levels are set too high.

00:48:44 Speaker_03
Reasonable people can disagree on how proficiency levels are set on standardized tests, and no test will be able to measure everyone's reading ability accurately.

00:48:53 Speaker_03
For example, if you're a kid who doesn't know anything about cricket, and there's a passage about cricket on your fourth grade reading test, you may not do so well. Maybe you would have done better if the passage was about baseball.

00:49:04 Speaker_03
But arguing about the tests misses the big picture. Many kids are struggling, and there are parents like Sonia Thomas crying out for help all over this country.

00:49:18 Speaker_03
What I've learned from my years of reporting on this topic is that a big part of the problem is many kids aren't being taught how to read. Old assumptions about how reading works are pervasive in schools.

00:49:31 Speaker_03
The idea that readers don't need to sound out words, they can use context instead. The idea that kids who are behind will catch up. The idea that learning to read is like learning to talk, that it happens through exposure. It doesn't.

00:49:44 Speaker_03
Cognitive scientists have known this for a long time. Phil Goff, the guy who came up with the simple view of reading, published a paper in 1980 called Learning to Read, an Unnatural Act.

00:49:54 Speaker_03
He wrote this, The statistically average child, normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He does not learn to read naturally. The bottom line is that learning to read is not easy for many kids.

00:50:11 Speaker_03
Reading difficulty is natural. And a lot of kids are not being taught what they need to know. Visha Hawkins wants to see a movement of parents demanding better reading instruction.

00:50:23 Speaker_02
I mean, like, I just envision, like, just thousands of parents descending upon central office or the courthouse. You know, just force people to look at the kids, to look at the families that's not being served.

00:50:38 Speaker_02
I mean, y'all are taking our tax dollars, but we're not getting a return on that investment. Sonya Thomas wants to see a movement, too.

00:50:46 Speaker_04
Why isn't everyone in this country angry like me? Why are they not losing sleep? It's unacceptable for children to not have a chance right off the bat. And I'm not going to let anybody sleep.

00:51:07 Speaker_04
We are not going to let anybody sleep until we have changed and changed for the better for all children.

00:51:16 Speaker_03
Sonia is now executive director of Propel, the parent group she helped found. It's her full-time job, and she's determined to make sure that all the CJs and Mateos and Deshawns out there get what they need to learn how to read.

00:51:36 Speaker_03
You've been listening to What the Words Say from APM Reports. It was produced by me, Emily Hanford, and edited by Catherine Winter. Research and production help from Sabby Robinson and John Hernandez. Our associate producer is Alex Bombhart.

00:51:52 Speaker_03
Web editors are Dave Mann and Andy Cruz. The final mix was by Chris Juhlin and Craig Thorson. Fact-checking by Betsy Towner Levine. The APM Reports team includes Sasha Aslanian and Lauren Humpert. Our Editor-in-Chief is Chris Worthington.

00:52:08 Speaker_03
Special thanks to Stephen Smith and Shelley Langford.

00:52:13 Speaker_03
If you go to our website, apmreports.org, you can find a version of this story with lots of links to books and articles where you can read more about the simple view of reading and other research referred to in this program.

00:52:25 Speaker_03
You can find all of the reporting we've done on reading at a special collections page, apmreports.org slash reading, and on our podcast, Educate.

00:52:34 Speaker_03
Support for APM Reports comes from the Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and the Hollyhock Foundation. This is APM American Public Media. This is Emily again. You've been listening to What the Words Say from 2020.

00:52:53 Speaker_03
A bonus episode of the Soul to Story podcast is coming soon. You can go to our website for more about Soul to Story. It's soultostory.org.