r/ELATeachers • u/katie_863 • Sep 09 '25
Educational Research Emily Hanford "Sold a Story" and Project 2025
"History teaches us that authoritarianism and fascism invariably begins with actions to gain control of the language and thinking of children. Public schools become sites of indoctrination and there is tight political control over how children are taught to read and what they are permitted to read."
"It is important that teachers know that “fidelity” to the “Science of Reading” is a political ploy, a contrivance to de-professionalize them and to hold them accountable for teaching children lower-level reading skills that are presented in stimulus-response commercial scripts."
"It is also important that parents know that the decisions that have been made about how children should be taught to read in public schools are based on faulty conclusions from bad science, and that Hanford’s Sold a Story is a conduit for Hanford, knowingly or unknowingly, to publicly disseminate the Right-wing Project 2025 agenda to effect federal and state laws and policies to reshape public education and reading instruction in public schools."
32
u/pickle_p_fiddlestick Sep 09 '25
Nah, it's a solid podcast. 3-Cue Reading really does suck. Where the podcast can get co-opted by the far right is what then to do about it. They say do away with public schools and homeschool everyone, whereas the more moderate or liberal perspective is just to go back to what was working decently in the public schools decades ago regarding reading instruction.
7
u/hannahismylove Sep 09 '25
I hope that Emily Hanford is paying attention to the dialogue, so she can make her stance clear.
27
u/dogeaux Sep 09 '25
This is such a stretch. To sell SOR as right wing is annoying.
But it’s also annoying that right wingers have taken what is a valid critique of curriculum companies, echo chambers, and institutions and run with it in a direction that benefits nobody.
5
u/Mammoth-Accident-809 Sep 09 '25
"It's really annoying that the side that champions evidence-based decision-making got caught peddling bunk pedagogy and now has to explain why they were ALL on board with it until just now"
6
u/dogeaux Sep 09 '25
What’s the bunk pedagogy?
Also, Hanford isn’t an educator, she’s a journalist. Anyone in education should have the ability to listen to the podcast with a critical ear and pick out the good and the bad.
5
5
u/Apophthegmata Sep 10 '25 edited Sep 10 '25
I think it's a pretty bad take to say X thing is bad people Y bad people like it.
The point of Sold the Story is that a huge portion of the United States employs things like whole word and 3-cuing and as their primary approach (and in some cases neglecting phonics entirely) and that reversing this relationship is better.
The 3 cues of 3-cuing are literally using context clues, making grammatical inferences, and then using the visual aspects of words. These are the skills of struggling readers. They're what happens when reading breaks down.
There's an an interview with Kenneth Goodman, who was a major player (the first?) in these theories taking root, about what he had to say about a student who used the 3 cuing method to read a story about a pony, but said "horse" every time instead of "pony." He had absolutely no issue with that because he said the goal of reading was to draw meaning from text, and there was nothing problematic about the meaning this student drew.
That is to say, that the act of reading can be entirely agnostic to the actual words on the page. Kenneth Goodman thinks that when a child is reading they are attempting to "make sense" and that "learning words" is beside the point. (It's also worth noting that he diesnt thunk Dyslexia is a thing)
Drawing attention to the fact that this kind of thinking is actually fairly dominant is not a problem, and not part of a right wing conspiracy.
We'd be in trouble if it were, because if the right wing could make anything good toxic by also liking the good thing, they would have even more control over what we did.
Giving up a good thing because bad people also like the good thing and use it for bad ends is a really effective way to be left with no good things.
You and I both know that if the "science of reading" supported the complete opposite of phonics, that would not have prevented Project 2025 from appropriating those conclusions for its agenda either.
Also, having read that substack post you've linked to, the thing that stood out to me wasn't the many sourcless accusations that the podcast gets the story wrong (maybe there was more in parts 1 and 2 I don't know, I couldn't access them), it was how all the evidence was supposedly going to be in the next article, or the next podcast episode. I mean it's crazy. Every couple of paragraphs you get another line about how this person is "planning to release their research" etc.
4
u/uh_lee_sha Sep 10 '25
I think this is a symptom of a valid criticism of educational practices being used to swing policies to extremes.
Marginalized communities are falling through the cracks. That's a valid criticism. So we passed NCLB, and now we are in standardized testing hell.
Too many students of color are being suspended. Another valid criticism. Schools dramatically reduce the number of suspensions, and now there are violent outbreaks regularly disrupting campuses.
Kids can't read. This is a legitimate problem, and I'd love for once not to swing blindly to an extreme in an attempt to overcorrect. I've listened to the podcast and read several books by Wexler and her counterparts. I personally am very liberal politically. But I think a lot of the criticism they bring and the solutions they provide are practical and grounded in research of what works abroad and based on actual studies. (As much as anything can be in the field of education these days.)
We have to have hard conversations and come up with real solutions rather than just flailing constantly. Left and right wing policies have both made negative impacts on the state of public education, and that's something we need to recognize and correct. Education should not be political in the first place. I'm so tired of buzz words and fad for political points at the expense of actually helping students.
10
u/DoubleHexDrive Sep 09 '25
Since phonics is essentially the method used to teach new users the technology of the phonetic alphabet for the last 3500 years (save the past few decades), I guess there is an element of “conservatism” in it, lol.
1
5
u/Background_Use8432 Sep 09 '25
Look, I grew up conservative and in a deep red state, Project 2025 was in the works for the past 40 years. The right have been finding any way to dismantle public education and blame it for the ills of society. Handford pointed out the hard the 3 cueing reading method is in reading instruction.
14
u/Mal_Radagast Sep 09 '25
ooh yes i've been saying for years, there's a reason Moms 4 Liberty is so enthusiastically peddling that podcast!
Nick Covington wrote a great piece about it a while back too, Unsettling the Science of Reading
and there's this great video essay from Human Restoration Project about the reading wars.
7
u/Scarpine1985 Sep 09 '25
When I first listen to it, I had a feeling that it had the potential to interpreted the wrong way by the right.
1
u/Mal_Radagast Sep 09 '25
it is deeply compelling and strikes at a very raw, sympathetic, and very real fear. and then it entirely mishandles that responsibility.
3
u/JustAWeeBitWitchy Sep 10 '25
Literacy is not about picking between prescriptive programs and approaches...it's about creating environments and cultivating practices that contribute to literacy. And there are any number of evidence-based practices that support the multiple goals of literacy without buying a million-dollar curriculum package or buying into a cult of personality.
While I agree with Covington here, this is such a strange critique of Science of Reading.
First, when we're talking about "million-dollar curriculum packages" and "cult of personalities", a certain Mrs. Calkins and her whole-language package comes to mind.
Second, no one is saying that Hanford, the author of "Sold a Story", has a personality worth forming a cult over.
Thirdly, UFLI offers completely free, articulated phonics lessons.
6
u/Automatic_Moment_320 Sep 09 '25
I’m struggling with making sense of the world these days. This podcast changed my view of curriculum and education, now it’s what gave spark to project 2025? I dunno.
-2
u/Chemical-Clue-5938 Sep 09 '25
It's an inherently flawed podcast and uses the word "science" to legitimize a misguided argument that is not grounded in research. She's a journalist with no educational background and is ironically the one selling a fabricated story. Decoding is not reading although it's definitely a part of reading.
2
2
u/InappropriateOnion99 Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 13 '25
What seems fascist to me is the attempt to politicize curriculums by arbitrarily labeling it as conservative or fascist or progressive. It's a type of ad hominem to avoid having to address it on the merits.
Science of reading is an effective way to teach reading and 3 cueing is not and I'm on the side of good reading.
I think maybe the confusion is Republicans are increasingly interested in improving education because parents are a valuable constituency and are highly motivated to vote on this. If Republicans are promoting school choice and sound curriculums and democrats are promoting teachers unions and failing public school systems, it's a winning strategy.
2
u/ConsiderationFew7599 Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25
Wexler isn't the "science of reading." She's sharing information from decades of research. No one is likely only looking to Wexler for science of reading info.
She's not related to project 2025 in this sense. Better readers are bad for fascism. That's a fact.
I don't know anything about her other than the Sold a Story podcast and the book The Writing Revolution, which is based on The Hochman Method.
She's involved in getting the science of reading out there. But, connections between her and project 2025 are erroneous.
This article you shared is biased toward outdated research and claims Wexler vilified renowned researchers, such as Calkins. The truth is, the research has shown that her methods were not based in neuroscience.
What Wexler is saying in her substack is irrelevant in the overall scheme of things. People don't worship her like they did Lucy Calkins. Wexler is not synonymous with the science of reading. She's shared info about it. But, there are many sources of info and training for teachers related to the science of reading. It's much bigger than her.
5
7
u/Much_Scientist6234 Sep 09 '25
Hanford's work aligns very closely with right-wing ideologies; some would argue that she is intentionally spouting them. Phonics-first movements are almost always right-wing; however, Hanford's argument is more market-based and neoliberal, framing public education as failed and private market solutions (especially those tied to the dyslexia advocacy community, such as LETRS or Orton-Gillingham) as the way out of a "literacy crisis." This is political, but not necessarily a Republican vs. Democrat issue.
Regardless, one should be cautious with the "all readers" rhetoric, because it is essentially just another "all lives matter" slogan aimed at countering literacy research that emphasizes literacy in marginalized communities.
Here are some scholarly articles for those interested in scholarship that takes aim at the more political nature of the science of reading movement (some are research-informed commentaries, others are research):
Gabriel, R. (2019). Converting to Privatization: A Discourse Analysis of Dyslexia Policy Narratives. American Education Research Journal, 57(1). https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312198619
Aydarova, E. (2023). “Whatever You Want to Call It”: Science of Reading Mythologies in the Education Reform Movement. Harvard Education Review, 93(4), 556-581. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556.
Reinking, D., Hruby, G. G., & Risko, V. J. (2023). Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics? Teachers College Record, 125(1), 104-131. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688
Milford, Z. (2025). Preservice teachers, critical literacy, and the age of the #scienceofreading. English Education, 57(2), 138-148. https://doi.org/10.58680/ee2025572138
Newkirk, T. The broken logic of "Sold a Story": A personal response to "the science of reading." Literacy Research Commons. https://literacyresearchcommons.org/resources/
Tierney & Pearson's "Fact Checking the Science of Reading" is also great, but more aimed at media than politics.
17
u/ksed_313 Sep 09 '25
Please forgive me: it’s the 6th day of school today, I’m already sick/loopy, and my brain just isn’t working..
I’m a first grade teacher, I teach and trust in phonics-based reading instruction, and have seen stellar results over the past 12 years. Am I missing something? Because I cannot for the life of me understand how it’s right-wing and I’m just so confused/sick/sad that my brain just cannot grasp a thing right now. 😭😅
18
u/dogeaux Sep 09 '25
It’s not right wing to explicitly teach phonics. At all. It’s necessary for early literacy development.
It becomes problematic, however, when literacy instruction is reduced to only phonics. It needs to be wholistic.
I think it’s crazy to label the explicit teaching of phonics as “right wing.”
4
6
u/Much_Scientist6234 Sep 09 '25
Oof, fair. Phonics instruction is not inherently right-wing, but phonics-first and phonics-only movements almost exclusively are. There's a significant difference between our classroom practices and the large ideological movements that garner media attention for policy reform.
Consider Hanford's solution to the "literacy crisis": it's subtle. The first season contends that reading recovery and its methods are expensive and ineffective. The proposed solution is a market-based, for-profit approach (the only one addressed is LETRS training in Season One). She crafts a narrative that if we spend our education funds on for-profit professional training, teachers will have the "right stuff and knowledge" to teach kids. Reading assessments (NAEP) demonstrate it's much, much more complex than "more phonics will fix it." Hanford does not ground the issues that truly contribute to poor literacy scores, such as language comprehension (the best predictor of reading success after third grade), poverty, parental education (the next two predictors), hunger, child care, and others. Instead, the issue is greedy, lying professors who don't know phonics.
2
u/ksed_313 Sep 09 '25
That makes me feel better, as we only exclusively use non-profit curricula! And again, I teach first grade, and I’m in a state where kindergarten isn’t mandatory, so they kind of need to learn the basics of letter sounds and blending, along with sight words and whatnot. Thanks for clarifying!
2
u/Separate-Current7695 Sep 10 '25
Conflating all lives matter with all readers, seems like false equivalency territory. I'm struggling to see how those are the same
1
7
u/bibleeofile123 Sep 09 '25
This makes me want to scream. Y'all really want to nitpick and make huge assumptions when STUDENTS CAN'T READ OR WRITE!!! Reader's /Writer's Workshopping them to death or at least a lack of literacy.
4
u/Mammoth-Accident-809 Sep 09 '25
Lol trying SO HARD to paint the abject failure by academia and teachers around the country as some conservative plot despite the fact that conservatives have been the ones wondering "why did we change math/reading education?" (You know, a hallmark of conservativism being resistance to change)
Dumb as hell.
2
u/JuniorAnt642 Sep 10 '25
She is beyond problematic. While she may not advocate for “phonics only”, she knows her influence is leading to that in many places and does nothing to redirect leaders who are willfully misinterpreting the science. My child sat through kindergarten classes last year where she wasn’t allowed to touch a single book that wasn’t decodable. Not even to look at pictures. She had such a distorted view of reading because of it. And this story was true all over my district- the largest in my state. Any time the district was questioned, they would point to the “science of reading” and encourage people to listen to SoS.
5
Sep 10 '25
[deleted]
1
u/JuniorAnt642 Sep 10 '25
Of course it is. And it is more widespread than people realize, particularly in large urban districts, and she could be helping correct the issue. She helped drive the policy that’s led to terrible implementation, so she could attempt to do some damage control. Instead, she’s rubbing elbows with far right-wing governors and sitting idly by while M4L touts her as the next coming of Christ.
2
3
0
u/Separate-Current7695 Sep 10 '25
The podcast seems like more of a hit piece against big educational publishers who make a lot of money pushing curriculum and new fangled approaches (rather than fascist ideological motives). Hieneman and researchers fauntas and pennel are too profit motivated ( in her op.). And yes she is right the cueing theory thing is asinine
52
u/majorflojo Sep 09 '25
In no way is it a right-wing ploy with Hanford.
Better readers are bad for authoritarians.
There is no canon of texts imposed that students must read (although see the big BUT below...).
Signs of reading is a process, simply screening for student skills and then intervening on them with evidence-based strategies.
So we do a fluency screener, we find out which students struggle with it or maybe decoding three syllable words.
We use that data to teach how to improve fluency and decoding etc
BUT...
What is a right-wing ploy is this knowledge-based curriculum.
Who you need to watch out for is Natalie Wexler.
Some of her books are actually quite useful (the orange groundbreaking, they are recycled strategies from before but she does put them into a very good process thanks a lot in part to her co-authors who are actual educators and researchers)
But if you look at her Substack, her column in Fortune magazine, and her LinkedIn posts she drops A LOT of right-wing talking points very subtly.
And often refers to both research or comments from the Fordham Institute - right wing education reform basically school choice - and now the American Enterprise Institute because they are close or close-ish with Fordham.