Popular Reviews of Sold a Story

The entire time I listened to this podcast, I just kept thinking about how I wanted to share it with every parent I know. One of my favorite podcasts this year.

Really good look into how our school system got wrecked by business, ego, and opportunists.

I sent this podcast to like 5 friends right away such a good listen. I love the way she doesn't really villainize any one party in this podcast, it was just pure research sharing. Also made me realize my reading came from my grandma not school!

Parents, teachers, anyone invested in how children learn to read should listen to this

I really liked this podcast. It was a good explainer about literacy education, and how trendy ideas can catch on and become accepted practices even if they turn out to be quite wrong.

TLDR: What started as deeply promising analysis deteriorated dramatically into limp GOTCHA by a middling mind. Disappointing, b/c there was so much potential, yet "𝗦𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗮 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆" ultimately concluded as shallow moral about personal fallibility on the part of a few educators & academics—positioned as villains—rather than a nuanced read (hah) about how reading education might be better in light of neurological research.  In fact, this is ultimately a MAGA story. 𝗛𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗱 by Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider far superior; see in particular #𝟭𝟱𝟮 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗪𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗢𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸.The long read:1) This could have been a report on how efforts to correct a problematic lack of nuance in 20th-century educational practices went sadly awry. Also could've been a critique of neoliberalism, about how a technique designed to provide extra tools for kids struggling with the current method was unwisely 'scaled up' by a bunch of bureaucrats, choosing to invest in shiny printed materials rather than understanding that LEARNING TO READ JUST TAKES A LOT OF WORK AND WE SHOULD HONOR THAT AND GIVE MORE ONE-ON-ONE ATTENTION.  B/c honestly, that's the potential lesson that I heard here:  we can't just scale educational methods to short-cut and reduce costs.  But in Sold A Story one has to read between the lines to see that message.  Rather than citing slashed public education funding over the past four decades, Hanford points solely to the misappropriation of funds, implicitly suggesting that money spent on education is wasted money.  Defunding an expensive venture like public education, then complaining that it's ineffectual (and should be privatized or eliminated) = classic GOP trope.  What I heard from Hanford is: we CAN scale education, only it has to be via phonics and 1960s teaching methods.  Her analysis suggests there is only one way to teach reading, and it's the 1960s way.  Which ignores the fact that plenty of kids struggled under that system too: a teacher needs to have myriad tools to help kids, not regress to the rigid educational conservatism of 'one size fits all.'2) Hanford truly lost me when she painted GW Bush as a kind of reading folk hero. PSA: believing 'literacy good' doesn't undo selling the country on a gratuitous war, instantiating widespread Islamophobia. (Nor, to return to the topic of education, the harm mass-testing imposed via 'no child left behind,' massive deregulation of for-profit universities, billions slashed and withheld from public school systems.)  Just don't white-wash war criminals. It's gross & undermines APM's credibility as a reliable narrator, or even an institution with any kind of moral compass. If APM insists on tying the failed reading initiative to 9/11, a better framing of this tale would be:  problematic & infamously poorly informed president who himself coined the 'with us or against us' mantra, squanders all political capital in order to plunge nation into devastating vanity war. Domestic life suffers.3) Hanford fetishizes "science" in a way that suggests she doesn't think very critically (or have a very keen personal understanding of) how "science" functions practically, nor see its blind spots. STOP DOING THIS WHITE LADIES - IT'S AKIN TO CLAIMING THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IS AN IMPARTIAL ARBITER OF TRUTH. "Science" has lots of problems, just like the pre-1990 way of teaching reading has plenty of problems.  Failure to simply acknowledge and reckon with the institutional shortcomings that also exist within "science" just makes Hanford look like a shill, esp when combined with efforts to whitewash GWBush. 4) The structure of the narrative deliberately withheld key pieces of information throughout, which was annoying and felt manipulative. The constant deferral as a means of spinning out a story rather than simply telling it straight reinforced the sense of manufactured drama, further undermining the credibility of Hanford's critique.

Podcast about the move away from phonics to whole word reading, why it became so popular, and the money attached to educational materials. I found this really interesting and it does explain why many struggle with reading.