S1-03. Reporting on education and the science of reading: Emily Hanford

Hey listeners! I had a great time learning alongside so many of you in part one of our summer learning academy. If we really want to know about their oral reading, fluency, their prosody, what's that look like? We need to listen to them read out loud. I'm already looking forward to part two on July 14th. And even if you missed part one, you can still join the fun on July 14th for part two. Together we'll be exploring more about comprehension skills and processes. Reserve your spot now at Amplify.com/SummerLearningAcademy. What if a change in classroom practice could lead to change in reading outcomes? What should reading instruction include to ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed? What does cognitive science tell us about learning to read? And why aren't those learnings applied in our classrooms? Welcome to Science of Reading the Podcast. I'm your host Susan Lambert from Amplify Education. Join us every two weeks as we talk with science of reading experts to explore what it takes to transform our classrooms and develop confident and capable readers. In today's episode, I sit down with Emily Hanford, senior producer and correspondent for APM Reports. Emily is best known for her podcast trilogy, hard to read, hard words, and at a loss for words. We talk about each of those along with what motivated Emily to focus on the topic of early reading instruction. Since we recorded this episode, APM has released a follow-up episode where Emily answers questions from listeners. We hope you enjoy. Welcome, Emily. We're so glad to have you on the podcast today. I think listening to your podcast over the last few years has just been really exciting for me as an early literacy educator to just hear what you're bringing to the conversation of early literacy. So thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. We've been asking all of our guests just to talk a little bit about how did you get to this place? How did you become a reporter in the science of reading? Well, it's a good question. I wouldn't have predicted it many, many years ago. I'm an education reporter. I've been reporting on education for more than a decade now. And over those 10 years, I would say that my main interests have been how family income generally and poverty in particular affect educational opportunities and outcomes. And I've also been really interested in how people learn the findings from cognitive science and how those play out or not in classrooms. So almost all of my reporting at American public media has focused on secondary and post-secondary education. And tell a few years ago I started to get interested in this early reading instruction question. And I realized that early reading instruction is truly where it is at if you're interested in educational equity opportunity and how people learn. Wow. Was it a particular situation that took you from sort of that older kid world into the younger kid world? Yeah. So several years ago, I was actually doing a radio documentary about so-called remedial education in college or developmental education in college. And the fact that like 40 to 50% and some schools even higher, college students, when they get to college, they end up in these remedial classes, which is basically they are doing high school work and often because they're in college, they're paying to do high school all over again. And what happened as I was doing this reporting is I was interviewing people who told me they had dyslexia. And I didn't know anything about dyslexia. I didn't have any personal or familial experience with dyslexia or struggling to learn how to read. It was totally new to me. And I was completely fascinated when these students were kind of telling me about how they kind of coped with not really being able to read the words very well. And not getting it identified in every case that I was talking to. Like no one, they didn't know they had dyslexia. They didn't know why they were struggling to learn how to read. In many cases, their sense that they had this thing called dyslexia came later in life. Some of these students were even older adults. So they didn't know until they were in their 20s or even 30s. And I just started to sort of generally get interested in this question of learning disabilities generally and reading issues in particular because that's the most common form of learning disability as I learned. I did not know that. I started to get interested in to what extent were sort of unidentified, unremediated reading disabilities, part of the reason why so many people were ending up in these remedial education classes in college. And most students who start in remedial education classes never get a college degree. So this all came back to my continued interest in sort of equity and opportunity because you see that so often the students who end up in these remedial classes are from lower income families. So often this becomes a stumbling block. They do college for a while. They try and try again and they never get there. So anyway, that's kind of a long-winded way to say that I got really interested in dyslexia. And I started to learn more about it and it opened up this whole Pandora's box about reading in general. Both what you know, I think one of the big takeaways from my reporting on dyslexia several years ago. Well, let me start again. One of the things that was really interesting to me, kind of shocking to me as a reporter when I started talking to parents about dyslexia, is I was hearing the same story over and over again. And the story basically goes like this. Kid goes to kindergarten and mom, maybe mom and dad are thinking something is not quite right. And they go to the kindergarten teacher and the kindergarten teacher is like, oh no, he's fine, don't worry, it'll all come together, it's all good. But the parents are thinking like he's not really reading and he doesn't seem to like reading and he's avoiding reading. So they go to the first grade teacher and they're like, I think that there's something wrong with this kid. He's not reading very well. And the teacher says it's fine, don't worry about it, it'll all come together. You know, we just have to find him a book that sparks his interest. And it goes on and on like this, you know, get to second grade, third grade, go to the school, maybe the mom is saying like, ah, maybe he has this thing called dyslexia. Like I think my dad might have had dyslexia. I think maybe my brother has dyslexia. Like, don't you think maybe my kid has dyslexia? And you know, for the most part, the school is saying, nope, nope, we don't use that term. Nope, kid doesn't have dyslexia. And the parents thinking, well, I guess he doesn't, right? Because the school's the education experts and they're just kind of mired in confusion about like, why is my kid struggling to learn how to read? And what happens is that eventually if the mom and the parents have the time and the money, often they figure out that their kid isn't going to learn how to read in public school. They might pay thousands of dollars to get them tested and try to identify if there's a learning disability. They might pay thousands of dollars for private tutors. They might end up paying tens of thousands of dollars for specialized private school. I was actually interviewing a bunch of moms in a dyslexia advocacy group a few years ago and realized as I was talking to them that none of them had their kids in public school anymore. They had all given up on the idea that public school was going to teach their kids how to read. And many of these families were making big sacrifices to pay for tutors and pay for private school tuition. They were taking out mortgages. They were barring from family members. They were going into debt, but they were doing it somehow. And one of the things that I started to realize, one of the moms said to me after spending, she has five kids with dyslexia. And she basically said, "If your kid is struggling to learn to read in American schools, it's basically like a rich man's game to get them help." And I thought, "Oh my gosh, like reading the most basic thing, we're in a situation where if your kid is struggling to read, the way you get help is to have the money to solve the problem." So that took me back to the inequity thing. What about all those kids from low income families, from moderate income families, who just private tutors and private schools are not an option for them. What about them? And so what I really took away from the reporting on dyslexia several years ago is that the big issue when it comes to dyslexia is that schools just sort of writ large don't know that much about how reading works, about how skilled reading works, about what kids need to learn to be able to do it, and thus about what's going wrong when kids are struggling. And because they don't have a general sense of how reading works, they don't know how to help struggling readers. But that got me interested in this question of just like core reading instruction. Like, what do we know about how all kids learn how to read? And are schools teaching kids in ways that line up with what we know about how reading works? Yeah, that's a really interesting story. I mean, I know I shared with you before we started recording that I had a similar experience as a parent and that's why I'm doing what I'm doing now is because I had to go through all of those hoops and the misinformation and the school not wanting to test and And so in your podcast, you actually now have an official trilogy on this subject. So congratulations on the trilogy. (laughing) Thank you. But that's like where you started first in this arch with your first podcast called Hard to Read, was you started with dyslexia from really a student or a personal journey and then the parents journey and then you sort of made the shift to what it looks like in schools. Why do you think it is that it's been parents that have had to figure this out and highlight this? It's not like we haven't known about dyslexia for a long time. - Yeah. Well, I think because what happens is when you have a little kid and he or she is struggling to learn how to read, you get really desperate, right? I mean, reading is fundamental. And what happens to kids when they start, when they don't get off to a good start in reading, right? Is it, it multiplies into all kinds of other problems. Like, kids start to fall behind in other subjects. They don't like school. It makes them really anxious. For some kids, this turns into behavior problems and acting out. Kids will act out in order to get out of reading in school in order to avoid anyone asking them to read out loud. They're trying so hard to hide the secret they have. And by the time they get to like second or third grade, they're aware that it's like this secret that a lot of the other kids seem to be getting this and they're not, right? And it also manifests in for little kids, anxiety and depression. I mean, the number of times that I had parents say to me, you know, I knew I needed to go figure this out of my own because my nine year old said, I want to die. And now, oh my. And that was said to me many times. And when you have a little kid who is that miserable in school, you as a parent, if you can do it, if you have the time, if you have the resources, if you yourself are a pretty good reader, right? If you can go find out, you go onto the internet and you start to Google this stuff. And I think what's happened over the past couple of decades, especially over the last few years, is first of all, there's been, and we can talk about what the science says or whatever, but there's now sort of just such an accumulation of evidence from the cognitive science and other research that shows very clearly how skilled reading works and what's up when kids are struggling, right? There's this huge body of scientific evidence. It's just mountainous. And parents go to Google and they start to find it. They start to realize like, oh, there's so much known about reading. There's so much known about reading disabilities. There's this thing called dyslexia and we know a lot about it. How come this knowledge isn't in schools? So I think this has been a parent-led movement in many ways because the parents have been desperate, so they've had a reason to find this information. And I will tell you that in many cases, when teachers and educators themselves really get to know this science, sometimes it's because they themselves have a struggling reader. They were teaching reading in one way for many, many years then they have their own child and that child gets a second and third grade and they still are really struggling with the words on the page. And that teacher begins to seek out answers and comes upon this vast body of scientific evidence that they didn't learn about in their teacher preparation programs that they don't for the most part learn about in their professional development and that they don't learn from the curriculum materials they get. In fact, what I found in my reporting is that a lot of really popular approaches to teaching reading and curriculum materials are teaching educators wrong things about the way reading works. So I think a lot of this has really bubbled up from desperate parents. And maybe there's a moment happening now where it's starting to spill over more into schools and people inside schools who they themselves have struggling readers or just have been struggling for years with the fact that they can only get 40 or 50% of the kids to proficiency, right? We're in a situation where in a lot of schools, we'd have a whole lot of kids who can't even read at a basic level. And I think once educators realize that there's this huge scientific evidence base and that they haven't really been consulting it when trying to figure out what to do about this problem, they are shocked and overwhelmed. And then many of them want to do something about it. So I think it's just that we have such a preponderance of evidence in this evidence is finally kind of getting out there. And like I said, it's kind of shocking that it's take, 'cause this evidence has actually been around for decades. I mean, like coming on 50 years, cognitive scientists have really discovered a whole, discovered a whole lot about how reading works back in the 70s and 80s. And it's just making its way into the mainstream. - Yeah, I think it was one of your podcasts where you mentioned and referenced Louise Emote who said, you know, really this is the most researched area of education. And when we look to our classrooms, it's not being implemented across the countries. And we should be doing better. And I mean, everybody seems to know the NAEP results, the fourth grade NAEP results, and basically being flat year after year after year after year. I'm just continued to be amazed that we haven't been making some changes in our classrooms. - I think, and I think with things like NAEP results or other kinds of standardized test scores, it's been, they've been so poor for so long that I think in many ways we've just to come to accept that that's the way things are. - That's really sad. - Yeah, that's just the way it is. And also, you know, we've also, there's a lot of people who are like, well, we have a lot of kids who come to school with a lot of struggles. They come from poor families, they come from challenging backgrounds. That is true, and that has a big impact on literacy development. There is no denying that. However, there is so much research that shows that virtually all kids can learn to read pretty well. We're not gonna get 100% of kids to proficiency on NAEP or other standards. Like, that's not gonna happen. But there's no reason why we should have the scores the way we are if there was a better understanding of exactly how like the process of skilled reading works, and like what kids need at different stages of development to eventually become skilled readers. If there was more knowledge of that in schools, if there were more and better materials and training that helped teachers understand all of that, we should have much better reading scores, but we've just come to accept that it's the way it is, and I think we've come to accept poverty as an excuse. And I'm not denying that poverty doesn't play a role. But kids from poor families can learn to read. They do all the time. They can learn to read. And the other thing that I think this, the aha of the dyslexia movement is so many of the parents who are out there advocating for better help for kids with dyslexia in school, a lot of them are people from relatively well to do families. A lot of them are people who are in the, quote unquote, good school systems in this country. A lot of them are people who did everything right when it comes to reading development. They read to their kids all the time. They buy books, they go to the library. They're surrounded by books in their house. And then these people who did all the right things who are not from poor backgrounds are like, and my kids in second grade, and he still can't make sense of what's on the page. And what that shows is that a lot of the assumptions that undergird reading instruction in this country, which when you sort of dig down deep, you realize that an underlying assumption is that learning to read is basically a natural process. It basically will happen in time. It's what those parents with struggling readers are told all the time in school. It'll come together. Don't worry about it. All kids learn differently. All kids develop differently. He'll learn to read eventually. We just need to keep getting good books in his hands. And the truth is, for a lot of kids, it just doesn't work that way. In fact, it doesn't really work that way for anyone. The sign of those. Yes. Yeah. And in fact, we may be in a situation where most kids really need good direct instruction in how reading works to be able to do it well. And even people who are out there who are pretty good readers, if they were taught more about how their written language works early on, they'd probably be better readers and they'd be better spellers. How many people out there are like, I can read just fine, but my spelling is terrible. Well, there are such close links between spelling and reading. That if you have terrible spelling, it probably means that you weren't taught to read that well, because you'd probably be a better speller. And if you could learn more about how the written language works, you probably would improve your reading ability. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting research that's going on now about the sort of the links between reading and spelling. But these are tightly linked things. And we're just as a nation for a few generations now, we just haven't been doing a good job writ large, helping children understand how their written language works, because it was dismissed as unimportant. And what the research shows is that it's incredibly important. And we need to get back on track, not saying there was a good old days when we were necessarily doing it all well. But we need to get to a place where we accept that as a nation that we really have to be teaching kids other written language works to help them become good readers. Yeah. And the research about how important it is to do that right off the bat, right? Like early in kindergarten and early in first grade. And if you can get that, you can really prevent then later needs for intervention. I want to make a little bit of a segue shift here because that first podcast you did was all about exploring this idea of dyslexia, but you made a shift in the next one in your hard words podcast and that was really then you know using your example of when educators really own that and there's something that's not quite right here what's not quite right in this reading proficiency we actually have to dig in to understand how kids need to learn to read and that second hard word podcast really comes from the point of view then of a school that said we have a problem and guess what we actually don't know the science of reading can you talk a little bit about that yeah I mean you know one of the things I think is really amazing is that since there's not really an awareness that there's this vast body of evidence from the cognitive sciences about how reading works I mean I think a lot of schools just kind of don't realize that there's a lot known about how reading works and they're just kind of doing a lot of things the way that they've always done them and hoping it all turns out for the best and I think one of the things that I've learned in interviewing educators in Bethlehem Pennsylvania which was one of the focuses of that story hard words but also educators I've talked to all over the country is that a lot of educators deep down do have this kind of like little feeling in their stomach like it's not quite right but they're like but they don't really know what else to do I mean they're doing everything they've been taught right they they they they have they have at their tip fingertips what they think is the best information what they think is the best knowledge so they're doing it over and over again which leads to us finally being like well I guess I guess there's just a bunch of kids who aren't gonna learn how to read well right I guess it's just the way it is if only half your kids can read well I we got a lot of kids from four families I guess it's just the way that is I mean what do you expect me to do and the story of Bethlehem Pennsylvania was and I think this is important it was someone really out the top it was the assistant superintendent the chief academic officer who had this aha you know and so he's a person who had the power to be like oh okay he had an aha something's not right he started googling and found this unbelievable body of evidence and started realizing like oh and he didn't he didn't feel any shame either because he came from a background where he taught in the upper grades right so this was not he think he was ever expected to know right sure he didn't know anything about how kids learned to read but no one he didn't think he was supposed to know that he did know however that he had a lot of kids in middle school and high school who weren't that good at reading the words and he was like you know a little bit like not really sure what to do about that because I think once you get kids at that age and you don't know anything about how reading works are like well accommodate them the best you can right but can I really like teach this kid to read when they're in high school the answer to that question of course is yes kids can be taught to read when they're in high school but does the does the middle school history teacher you know with in eighth grade with 30 kids in this class have the ability to do that no which is why we have such a big problem on our hands in this country right because we need to figure out how to do early reading instruction right but in the meantime we've got a whole bunch of kids who are absolutely got to figure out what to do about them anyway the story of Bethlehem Pennsylvania I think was someone at the top recognizing a problem being willing to confront it seeing that there were solutions out there recognizing that he needed to start by really introducing the knowledge base to the principles in his district so they really went kind of whole hog into sort of this inquiry thing like huh there's a lot of stuff we don't know let's learn it let's learn it first and then figure out sort of how we're gonna do it we're not gonna go out and buy some new curriculum as a first step we're gonna learn the science we're gonna have a whole bunch aha moments together we're gonna deal with the feelings of shame and guilt because there are a lot of feelings of shame and guilt and then we're really gonna spend many years and it I think it takes many years to then teach the teachers about this stuff and then really look closely at our curriculum materials choose new curriculum materials and see if we can move the needle over a long period of time but I think it's it's really like you know turning a turning a big ship around there's a lot of there's a lot of moving pieces and there's a lot to do and they've had some really good early success and it'll be interesting I'd love to go back there in a couple of years and see like how are those kids who were in kindergarten when I was reporting there how are they doing when they're in third and fourth grade yeah and I I mean I know as I was a I was a classroom teacher so I went through that undergraduate experience knowing that yeah I actually didn't nobody told me anything about phonics my classwork in reading was basically hey here's a bunch of children's literature let's figure out how to turn these into lesson plans or hey this semester we're gonna learn how to teach from a basal and so even me being excited and you know motivated to go back to school to get a degree in education because my son was having such a challenge in the classroom it was really wow this just doesn't sort of shore up with what I'm doing all that to say is I would imagine it's a little frightening for early elementary teachers to hear that what you're doing in the classroom right now is actually not working for kids and you need to do something differently that's got to be a frightening message yeah I mean it certainly is and it's really unfair to teachers at the end of the day that they weren't taught what they need to know about reading I mean it's really important not to blame them like it's it's really not there for absolutely yeah and and I know you know that and and I've really come down to just feeling like this is an injustice for teachers like there's all this knowledge about reading and they're not being given it and it would help them so much so yeah it's it's it's really hard when teachers confront this and the teachers who really like own it and confront it are deserves so much like credit it's a hard thing to do and then it's a really hard thing to then learn all the stuff you don't know because there's a lot to know I mean at one level there's just a lot to know about the structure of the English language just at that I think that's a big impediment right there what do teachers need to know because they themselves often weren't taught it right what do they need to know about how the English language works to teach it to little kids and then how do you do that so we're facing a really really big challenge I think in this country and I think teachers really need and deserve a huge amount of support and they need administrators above them to invest in them to like invest in their knowledge and to invest in this as a long-term thing I think that we've had a lot of like fits and starts with improving reading in this country I've found so many examples of schools and school districts that I think have tried to really change things with reading instruction and then a new superintendent or new principals or new leadership come along and change it and it all goes away or it doesn't really seem like it's working like the gains aren't good right at the beginning and some people think well that's not working we'll just change things we really need consistent strong leadership that wants to stick with this for many many years and wants to really if things aren't working if they're making changes and things aren't working to not like abandon it all and go back to the way things were but to like get inside and be like why isn't it working so Emily it feels like a really good place to segue then and talk a little bit deeper about sort of the third episode that you did called at a loss for words and you really sort of started to dig closer into the classroom and what was happening inside of the classroom can you explain a little bit about what that was about sure one of the things that became clear to me while I was reporting for the hard words documentary which focused a lot on phonics instruction and why phonics instruction is so important but one of the things that I realized in my reporting is that most schools not all but most schools I think in 2019 do some kind of phonics instruction or word work right there are many questions to be asked about the quality of the phonics instruction whether teachers have good materials to use whether the teachers themselves have been taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach it well to little kids but most schools and curriculum materials increasingly at least acknowledge the importance of phonics instruction and so you know one takeaway from that is this is we were on the right path right you know the instruction is starting to line up with the science but what I looked at closely in at a loss for words is that question like just because you've added phonics instruction does that mean your early reading instruction lines up with the science and I'm afraid that the answer to that question is no not necessarily so as you said what I tried to do in this piece is sort of dig a little bit more deeply into the science and reading and kind of ask what is the theory of how kids actually read words that's embedded in a lot of popular approaches to teaching reading and does this theory align with the science of reading so many curriculum materials that have been around for a long time popular authors are adding phonics and selling phonics but the question is, what are you doing in the rest of the reading day? Because we all know that phonics instruction is not the end all be all. There's much more to reading than learning phonics. So what else are you doing in your day? And that's what I was trying to investigate. Like what's the theory of how reading works in a lot of what's happening out there in schools when kids are being taught to read? >> Oh, interesting. So I think what I'm hearing you say is that as you look across schools, everybody sort of figured out yeah, phonics is important. And they're trying to layer that on or maybe even trying to do pieces in parts of phonics in the classroom that may be disconnected from a whole. >> That's what I'm finding when I go into schools and when I talk to teachers and educators who've begun to really learn about this science. They say you know what? I think maybe our phonics instruction is a little bit disconnected from the west of what we're doing. And possibly some of the rest of what we're doing is undermining our phonics instruction. One of the things that I have been learning from teachers and other educators who have started to gain some knowledge about what the scientific evidence on reading really says is that when they look at their own instructional practices, the things that are going on in their school day, the stuff that they're doing, they're finding sometimes that they're like phonics instruction is a little bit disconnected from what's happening in the rest of their literacy block. And one of the things I hear for example is that kids will learn in their phonics instruction particular letter patterns and how to read words. And then they'll go over to like a guided reading group where a reader's workshop and they'll be given books to practice reading, but they contain a whole lot of words that the kids haven't actually been taught how to read. And one of the things that happens when you do that is that kids really have to guess what the words say. They use context and pictures to try to figure out these words that they really haven't been taught how to read. And that idea that what a reader does when their reading is use context and cues to figure out what the words are rather than sounding out the words or identifying the words sort of through their decoding skills, that goes back to a theory about reading that really undergirded the whole language movement in instruction. The whole language movement was really sort of a new idea about how people read words. And what happens is that while there really hasn't been a lot of evidence for a lot of what the whole language philosophy emphasizes in reading instruction, the scientific research has not found good evidence for a lot of that stuff that you find in a whole language classroom, what you will actually find is that sort of deeply embedded in a lot of the materials that we now mostly refer to as balance literacy, that a lot of those ideas are evolved from whole language. And so that when you look carefully at how kids are being taught to read, in many ways they're really being taught to read in a very whole language way. And we've added in some new things like phonics because the evidence of phonics is so convincing. And I think that in 2019 you just can't even say that your reading instruction is research based or that the curriculum that you're selling is research based if it doesn't include phonics. So people know to check that box. The question is whether or not we have really thoroughly investigated the materials we're using, the stuff we're teaching teachers about the way reading works, the routines and the way that time is spent in classrooms, whether or not that really lines up with what scientists have figured out about how little kids learn how to read. >> Yeah, that's interesting. The idea that yes, we need to teach phonics and guess what the research also tells us that kids need to have a lot of practice in decoding words. But what we're doing is we're teaching phonics but actually putting them into the world of practice using another point of view. So it feels disconnected and really confusing to kids. >> Yeah, and teachers really have these aha moments when they discover this science and really dig in and start to understand it. They then look at the things they're doing in reading instruction and think, "Huh, why are we doing that?" Why are we teaching kids how to read words over here and then having them practice and they have to sort of guess at words and use pictures. And what we know from the cognitive sciences is that people who are guessing at words and using context and aren't really good at looking carefully at those words and figuring out what they are, that's what's up with struggling readers. You know, we know that this word identification problem, like problems at the level of word reading, those are the most common source when you dig back into it of reading problems. I mean, struggling readers often have problems just understanding what those little mysterious words say. And we need to teach kids how to read them and we need to make sure that they practice them and we need to not teach them reading strategies that take their focus away from figuring out what those words really say. >> Right, right, right, the fluency. Well, this has been really interesting for our listeners out there that this might be new to. You have, I think it's almost three hours of documentary that folks can listen to with the hard to read, the hard words and then the add-a-loss for words. So we will be sure to link our listeners to all three of those in our show notes. And I'm really interested to hear what's next for you in your work. >> Well, I don't entirely know yet. I think there's a lot of questions that I still have about early reading instruction and sort of about why the science and what schools are doing don't line up better. I'm becoming really interested in the long-term consequences when kids don't get off to a good start in reading. We know that it leads to all kinds of other problems in school research shows that it actually causes behavior problems. When kids don't -- we know from the research that it actually causes behavior problems and that when kids don't get off to a good start in reading, they fall behind in other subject areas. I can lead to all kinds of like depression and anxiety. I've talked to a number of parents who have told me they knew they had to do something about this. When like they're eight-year-old who was struggling to read looked at them and said, I want to die. And I've had many parents say that to me. So I'm really interested in the long-term consequences when kids aren't taught to read, when they don't learn to read early on, what happens in middle school, what happens in high school, what happens as you follow it on into the criminal justice system, for example. We know that if you go into the criminal justice system, you will find that a disproportionate percentage of people who end up in the criminal justice system are struggling readers. And I think there's a good evidence to show that struggling to learn to read is a cause of ending up in the juvenile justice system and in the adult prison population. Yeah, there's a reason they call these things foundational skills and they're important in the early grades because they really do build the foundation for lots of other things in our lives. Yeah, absolutely. We really appreciate you joining us today, Emily. I know our listeners are going to be thrilled to listen to this and also be reminded of these, you know, these, the trilogy that you put out there. So as we sort of wrap up and conclude here, what's the one thing that you really would love for our listeners to take away from your work? You know, I guess I would like to end on a positive note. I mean, sometimes I think the challenge before this country right now with early reading instruction is quite large. I mean, I think there's a lot to do to sort of turn the shop ship and really line instruction up well with what the scientific evidence says. And, you know, I do think it's intimidating and uncomfortable for a lot of people. I think some schools and some educators kind of wish it would all go away, you know, they don't want to, they don't want to change practice and it's hard. And it's, you know, I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for educators who may have a lot of work to do to really get this right. And I've been hearing from some people on Twitter who are really worried, you know, that teachers are feeling turned off to this, that they're really intimidated by all this, that we're sort of losing them right now. And I guess one of my messages here is, it's so important to recognize that this is not something to like blame on educators or teachers. Like, you, they don't, no one knows what they don't know, right? And as far as I know, when teachers know better, they do better. It's become kind of a cliche in the reading world, but when we know better, we do better. Anyway, I guess I will just end with this one tweet that I got, which I thought was really great. It was in response to someone saying, I think teachers are getting really freaked out now. I think we're losing teachers. I'm worried that teachers aren't going to like, sort of want to come along on this conversation about improving reading instruction. And someone responded this way. I often wonder if there's a way to reframe the conversation, to portray this as an absolutely amazing time to be an education, a moonshot, to say helping every kid read, sorry, to say helping every kid read proficiently is hard, and means doing things in a new way, but we can do it. And I think I would like to leave it with that because I think we kind of ended up in this situation because for some reason, all of this evidence has not made its way to schools, but as people discover this evidence and see how vast and convincing it is, I think it really is potentially a moment. Maybe there's a tipping point, right? Where there's enough of this knowledge, and there's beginning to be enough awareness of this knowledge about reading, that maybe this for really is a moonshot moment. - I love that. I think perhaps we should start a new hashtag, the moonshot moment. It's really great. Well, thanks again for joining us, Emily. - You're welcome. I'm really happy to have been here. - We're so grateful to our amazing guest today and to all of you making a difference in the lives of students every single day. Be sure to check the show notes for resource links from today's podcast and we want to hear your stories and successes. Follow us on Facebook at Science of Reading, the community, or send an email to [email protected]. Tell us what guests you think we should book or tell us about the research that really excites you. And be sure to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, I'm Susan Lambert from Amplify Education. (upbeat music)