TLDR: It is easy to walk away from both seasons so far of the Sold a Story podcast concluding that there are clear evidence-backed solutions to “fixing” schools and we just need to apply them. However, as the podcast also compellingly illustrates, multiple competing agendas are always seeking to influence what happens in schools and classrooms, often by leveraging evidence – of all kinds and of varying quality – toward diverse ends. The work of implementation, of putting evidence into practice, is complex. But complexity can be hard to sell.
Part of my daily dog walking routine involves catching up on podcasts. Most recently, I’ve been tuned into the second season of Sold a Story. In Season 1, investigative journalist Emily Hanford walked listeners through how and why American schools spent decades teaching children how to read using a discredited instructional approach. Specifically, when students are taught to guess unknown words based on context clues and pictures (an approach known as “three-cueing”), many of them don’t become proficient readers. Instead, a large body of research indicates that students need explicit systematic instruction on how to both decode words and comprehend text. Decoding, it turns out, is an especially critical building block for literacy because it gives readers the skills necessary to sound out unfamiliar words instead of just guessing.
As someone who spends much of my professional life working to make evidence from educational research useful and usable, Season 1 of Sold a Story left me feeling disappointed that strong evidence about effective literacy instruction had been ignored or dismissed for so long by influential experts. When season 2 appeared in my podcast queue, I wondered where the story would lead.
Can I Be Direct?
The second season of Sold a Story begins by introducing us to Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann who, along with colleagues, developed the Direct Instruction (DI) approach in the 1960s. Direct Instruction is a highly structured teaching method, emphasizing short, explicit lessons in math, reading, and language development. In episode 3, listeners also hear about Project Follow Through, which began in 1968 and remains one of the largest educational experiments in history. Project Follow Through examined numerous instructional approaches at different sites throughout the country to determine which among them demonstrated the largest academic gains for students.
Direct Instruction was the only approach that demonstrated substantial gains, on average, for students across all the numerous study outcome measures. Despite this, the results were quietly shelved and Direct Instruction was largely disavowed by influential leaders within the education establishment, seemingly, we learn, because it did not align with their personal beliefs about what ideal classroom instruction should look like.
Since Season 2 launched, there has been no shortage of commentary debating the merits of Direct Instruction, whether the podcast accurately represents the results of Project Follow Through, and whether we’ve given teachers too much autonomy. What is most striking to me however, as with Season 1, is what Hanford powerfully reveals about just how hard moving research evidence into practice can be. Too often, we are quick to place blame for this with schools and teachers. But in Sold a Story, we witness some of the other factors – politics, egos, personal belief systems, curriculum vendors, money – that create obstacles.
The Real Story of Sold a Story?
It is easy to walk away from both seasons so far of Sold a Story concluding that there are clear evidence-backed solutions to “fixing” schools and we just need to apply these solutions. However, as the podcast also compellingly illustrates, multiple competing agendas are always seeking to influence what happens in schools and classrooms, often by leveraging evidence – of all kinds and of varying quality – toward diverse ends. Thus, as Kelsey Piper aptly summarizes, “fixing classrooms takes more than bold truth-telling about what works.”
The work of implementation, of putting evidence into practice, is complex. Teachers bring to instruction what they learned in their teacher preparation program and this becomes intertwined with curricula and guidance from their district, with requirements from the state education department, with the knowledge they build over time based on observing how their students learn, and (sometimes) with research they encounter.
This means that evidence-backed change in schools takes not only the availability of rigorous evidence about what works, but also the capacity of leaders, who are often already overworked, to wade through competing bodies of evidence. Next, it requires consensus at the local level about what the evidence says and a shared commitment to act on it. And if all of that is in place, teachers and others responsible for enacting change need sufficient time and consistent support to do so. And, as Sold a Story helps reveal, this whole process only works well if researchers and other influential leaders are transparent about where the evidence leads, even when it contradicts their own hypotheses or beliefs.
The real story is complex, and complexity can be hard to sell. Yet this is the reality that solutions in education, even when they are grounded in the most rigorous evidence, must contend with if they are to take root and endure.