Hanford Returns
Apr. 17th, 2025 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretHa! A couple years ago I ranted about Emily Hanford's Sold a Story podcast, which I thought perpetuated some misleading myths about how science works even though she was probably at least partially right about some problems with American reading education. Now Hanford is back with a three part followup series. I feel vindicated.
In my previous essay I questioned why we didn't see a magical school bucking the educational winds, where they used the science of reading and every student was an expert reader. Even if Hanford were wrong, I argued, one would typically expect outliers. Here Hanford shows us a school bucking educational trends and every student is an expert reader- and it doesn't exactly use the science of reading!
The premise of the new miniseries is that there is a school in a poor district of Ohio that has consistently delivered far better reading test scores than would be expected- nearly every student in this school district can read. And yet! Ohio state law changes inspired by Hanford's podcast were threatening to force this school district to make changes that might disrupt its educational model.
The Ohio school district's main innovations seem to me, based on Hanford's descriptions, to not actually be about the pedagogy, because I've been insisting since the beginning that probably the pedagogy is not the most determinative factor and nobody has convinced me otherwise. Hanford of course disagrees with me. She claims that it is things like an emphasis on teaching students lots of verbal language at an early age, and giving them significant time to practice. But while discussing these strategies and others, she plays recordings of the teachers and what their strategies seem to have in common is that they are extremely high touch, they are being implemented in classrooms with small class sizes, and the teachers are enthusiastic and engaged. My entirely unbacked by science intuition is that these factors matter more than pedagogy. This is why I've always referred to schools like this (ironically) as magic. These are of course the most expensive and difficult strategies to scale, so it's like saying, we've figured out the way to get every student to learn to read! Get more engaged teachers and don't overwhelm them with too many students! But this school district actually does have some clever ideas about the economics of teaching reading, such as enlisting gym teachers and music teachers as auxiliary reading teachers and giving them training, to allow the school to teach reading in small classes without having to add additional reading teachers. And also putting resources into solving problems of truancy so that you aren't wasting teacher time while students aren't there to benefit.
Hanford's starting point in the first series is that the science of reading says that three cuing is harmful and phonetic decoding is helpful, but this time around her theme is that implementation matters, not pedagogical theory, and again I must repeat that I am not an expert on teaching reading and I am talking without any authority, but I am so here for the new Hanford. She spends a lot of time on the intersection of new educational ideas and government's limitations, like the fact that federal law actually prohibits the Department of Education from endorsing specific programs, for fear of government overreach, putting schools in a funny position where they're required to meet specifications in laws like NCLB that can't actually be communicated, pushing them towards unreliable private organizations with unclear ideological objectives for guidance.
The whole thing was way more satisfying than the original series, and since I much prefer praising things to criticizing them, I had to note the improvement.
In my previous essay I questioned why we didn't see a magical school bucking the educational winds, where they used the science of reading and every student was an expert reader. Even if Hanford were wrong, I argued, one would typically expect outliers. Here Hanford shows us a school bucking educational trends and every student is an expert reader- and it doesn't exactly use the science of reading!
The premise of the new miniseries is that there is a school in a poor district of Ohio that has consistently delivered far better reading test scores than would be expected- nearly every student in this school district can read. And yet! Ohio state law changes inspired by Hanford's podcast were threatening to force this school district to make changes that might disrupt its educational model.
The Ohio school district's main innovations seem to me, based on Hanford's descriptions, to not actually be about the pedagogy, because I've been insisting since the beginning that probably the pedagogy is not the most determinative factor and nobody has convinced me otherwise. Hanford of course disagrees with me. She claims that it is things like an emphasis on teaching students lots of verbal language at an early age, and giving them significant time to practice. But while discussing these strategies and others, she plays recordings of the teachers and what their strategies seem to have in common is that they are extremely high touch, they are being implemented in classrooms with small class sizes, and the teachers are enthusiastic and engaged. My entirely unbacked by science intuition is that these factors matter more than pedagogy. This is why I've always referred to schools like this (ironically) as magic. These are of course the most expensive and difficult strategies to scale, so it's like saying, we've figured out the way to get every student to learn to read! Get more engaged teachers and don't overwhelm them with too many students! But this school district actually does have some clever ideas about the economics of teaching reading, such as enlisting gym teachers and music teachers as auxiliary reading teachers and giving them training, to allow the school to teach reading in small classes without having to add additional reading teachers. And also putting resources into solving problems of truancy so that you aren't wasting teacher time while students aren't there to benefit.
Hanford's starting point in the first series is that the science of reading says that three cuing is harmful and phonetic decoding is helpful, but this time around her theme is that implementation matters, not pedagogical theory, and again I must repeat that I am not an expert on teaching reading and I am talking without any authority, but I am so here for the new Hanford. She spends a lot of time on the intersection of new educational ideas and government's limitations, like the fact that federal law actually prohibits the Department of Education from endorsing specific programs, for fear of government overreach, putting schools in a funny position where they're required to meet specifications in laws like NCLB that can't actually be communicated, pushing them towards unreliable private organizations with unclear ideological objectives for guidance.
The whole thing was way more satisfying than the original series, and since I much prefer praising things to criticizing them, I had to note the improvement.