Sold a Story - 11: The Outlier

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

There’s a school district in eastern Ohio where virtually all the students become good readers by the time they finish third grade. Many of the wealthiest places in the country can’t even say that. And Steubenville is a Rust Belt town where the state considers almost all the students “economically disadvantaged.” How did they do it?Explore: Steubenville, by the numbers Read: Transcript of this episode From Karin Chenoweth Book: Districts that Succeed Book: How It's Being Done Podcast: ExtraOrdinary Districts Donate: Support our journalism More: soldastory.org  Email us: [e-mail]  Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit. 

previously unsold a story. He doesn't look at all the letters and words. He doesn't look at all the words and sentences. And reading is miserable for him. The kids struggle and they suffer. You know, there's kids sinking everywhere and they're looking for help and it's, it's on us. They're looking for help and it's on us. I'm calling for a renewed focus on literacy and on the way we teach reading in the state of Ohio. My bill requires the science of reading.

The challenge of bringing literacy on a massive scale to an entire population is a tall order. What I'm fearful of, because I've seen it so many times, is movements sometimes gloss over detail. And here the details are so critical. A few years before this podcast came out, I met Karen Chenoweth at a conference. You and I sat next to each other at lunch. We didn't know each other. We hit it off immediately. We didn't know each other.

We hit it off immediately. We were both education reporters, and we were both kind of obsessed with reading instruction. I think I asked you what you were working on, and you started telling me, and I was very excited. I knew more about Karen than she knew about me. For years, she'd been writing books about schools. I'd been reading her books.

And in one of those books, she told the story of a school she visited back in 2008, a school in a small city in eastern Ohio, a place called Steubenville. I had never been there. I had never heard of it. When she got there, she could immediately see that it was a city in rough shape. It was one of the saddest places I've ever been to. Steubenville's an old steel town. The mills had shut down, jobs had vanished. There was a rusting hulk of a steel mill. There were abandoned buildings, a lot of rubbish, very little business downtown. The stores were empty.

very little business downtown, the stores were empty. In the heart of the depressed downtown was the elementary school Karen was there to see, a school where the majority of kids were from low-income families. It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was. All the third graders at this school were passing the state reading test, every single one. You would have been amazed, Emily. I mean, every kid knew how to read. They had a kid they were so proud of who had been measured with a very low IQ and he was reading. I mean, like, this was an amazing school. The sad fact is, schools with lots of low-income students usually have low reading scores. But according to state test score data, this school was one of the best in Ohio. Karen often thought about that amazing little school, wondered how things were going in Steubenville.

And then one day in 2016, Karen arrived at work and opened up the New York Times, and there was an article about a huge new data set from Stanford University that allowed you to compare academic achievement at schools across the country. This was new. Before, you could only compare schools within a state. This new data allowed you to compare schools across state lines. The New York Times story included a graphic. The graphic had thousands of dots on it. Each dot was a school district.

My eye was immediately drawn to this little dot on the upper left corner. The dots in the upper left were the poor school districts where the kids were doing well. And the dot Karen was looking at was out there all alone, doing far better than the others. And that was Steubenville. Kids in Steubenville were more than two grade levels ahead of kids in other school districts in the United States with similar levels of poverty.

And kids in Steubenville were actually doing better than kids in some of the country's most affluent districts. Steubenville had some of the best little readers in the nation. And it still does. How did Steubenville do it? I'm Emily Hanford, and this is Sold a Story, a podcast from APM Reports. Today we have the first of three new episodes. In this episode, I'm going to take you to Steubenville and show you how they teach reading there.

They do a bunch of stuff that a lot of other schools don't. In the next episode, I'm going to tell you about the program Stubenville uses and where it comes from. And then a surprising twist. For much of the past year, the program that Stubenville uses was under threat because of this podcast. After Soul to Story came out, the state of Ohio created a list. A list of approved reading programs. And when that list first came out, the program Steubenville uses wasn't on the list. When I visited Steubenville, I stayed at a hotel across the river in West Virginia and drove to the city early in the morning just after sunrise. In about three miles, keep left towards Steubenville.

It's a gorgeous day, beautiful blue sky. As I drive down into the Ohio River Valley from the hills of West Virginia, the blue sky disappears and I'm surrounded by thick fog. As I enter the city, I can just barely make out the street signs. Dean Martin Boulevard. A fun fact about Steubenville, the legendary singer Dean Martin was born here. Destination is on your right. East Garfield Elementary School. I'm headed to East Garfield Elementary, which most people just call East.

It's the school here with the most students living in poverty. Arrived. The school is next to a public housing project. As I get out of my car, I see little kids with big backpacks emerging out of the morning fog from the projects. Kids who live in the neighborhood walk to school. Others take a bus or get dropped off. When I arrive, teachers, staff, and a couple of local police officers are greeting students

at the door. Are you a policeman? Of course I am, my friend. Just inside the school entrance, there's a girl standing in the hallway, looking unhappy. What's wrong, girl? Come here. She's a little blonde girl with skinny legs, wearing a dirty tan skirt and sneakers. She's upset about her hair.

It's tied up in a messy ponytail, uncombed, hair kind of spilling out everywhere. Apparently, she's often upset about her hair when she arrives at school. And what's the story? She just doesn't get it done at home the way she wants? Yes. At all. She doesn't get it done at home. She says she doesn't have, mom doesn't have time. So we make time. This is Nancy Beaty, a teacher at the school. Miss Beaty bought a brush and hair ties that she keeps at school just for this little girl. And she fixes the girl's hair when she needs it. Sometimes the girl needs socks too, or a sweatshirt. There's a clothes closet for that. We also have, like, shoes, socks, and stuff in here.

This is Jennifer Blackburn. She's an instructional coach at East and the keeper of the clothes closet. Oh, winter boots. Yeah, winter boots. Sneakers. Backpacks. I just went and bought sneakers and socks. I stuck them in here.

How often do you have to give kids clothing? Every day. Every day. We have one parent homes, no parent homes, kids that are coming from the homeless shelters. The staff and teachers at this school know that they have to meet kids' basic needs first, that children need to be fed and clothed and cared for in order to learn. And the staff and teachers here clearly care deeply about their students and take the time

to do the little things that matter, like fixing a girl's hair or giving her socks. This is true in many high-poverty schools I visit. The kids have a lot of basic needs, and the staff does a lot to try to meet those needs. But in a lot of those schools, a lot of the kids aren't learning how to read very well. In Steubenville, they are. Ready? My tour guide is Jen Blackburn, the instructional coach and keeper of the clothes closet. She takes me first to preschool.

Let me make sure my friends are sitting nice, crisscross applesauce, hands in their lap. The preschoolers are on the rug, looking up at their teacher, eagerly. She's assigning jobs for the day. I pulled De'Air, so De'Air, you're my cool kid today. De'Air is beaming. Yeah, I'm going to go today. Yeah, you're going to be my cool kid today. D'Air is beaming. Yeah you're gonna be my cool kid today so what does my cool kid do friends? You're gonna be the line leader you're right. Line leader is clearly the best job but there are other jobs. Ryan do you want to be at the door holder, the electrician, teacher's assistant, or caboose? The teacher.

Oh, remember, put it in a sentence. I want to be the teacher. Thank you. Very nice sentence. These preschoolers are constantly being reminded to speak in full sentences. Oh, put it in a sentence. I want to be the door holder. Thank you. She said, I would like to be the door holder. In preschool, you want to to be the door-holder.

In preschool, you want to get kids really good at talking. Because that's going to be a huge help when they start learning how to read. Knowing lots of words, how to pronounce them, what they mean, is essential. And teaching kids to speak in full sentences helps them learn grammar and syntax, how words and phrases

are arranged in the English language. This also helps with reading and with writing, too. The early childhood program is really the foundation for successful readers. This is Lynette Gorman. She's the principal of West Elementary in Steubenville. A lot of oral language in those early preschool years. There's a preschool program at all of Steubenville's elementary schools. That's not unusual to find a preschool inside an elementary school.

What's unusual is how many kids here go to preschool. Across the country, fewer than half of children attend a preschool program. In Steubenville, it's nearly 80%. Children can start when they're three years old, and it's free for the poorest families. Everyone else pays $100 a month. You heard that right. Just $100 a month for all-day preschool. So where are we going now?

Ramsey. Kindergarten. I'm back with Jen Blackburn on our tour of reading instruction in Steubenville. Kindergarten is where formal reading instruction begins. And there's something kind of unusual going on here, too, with how kids are taught the letters of the alphabet. All right, let's make the sounds that they make. The teacher is holding up cards with letters on them.

Ready, go. And the kids are saying the sounds of the letters. Do, do, do. But they're not saying the names of the letters. This is a particular way of teaching letters. It's sometimes referred to as the sounds-first approach. And it's not the way letters are typically taught in American schools. Typically, kids are taught the names of letters first,

the alphabet song. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. I remember learning the alphabet song. I still sing it in my head when I need to remember the order of letters, like when I'm alphabetizing books. You need to know the names of letters and the order of the alphabet to be a literate person.

But what do you need to know to learn how to read? To learn how to read, you don't need to know the names of the letters. In fact, the letter names can be confusing. For example, the most common sound of the letter E in English is not E, it's E as in bed and fed. And the most common sound of the letter I is not I, it's I as in sit and pin. The idea in a sounds-first approach is to focus children's attention on the sounds of letters. So when they're trying to read a word, the sounds are what immediately come to mind. There's no interference, no confusion with the names

of the letters. Like I said, it's unusual. I even had my parents kind of question it. Amy Crow teaches kindergarten in Steubenville. They were like, why are you teaching them? Don't they have to know what the letter is called? And I said, actually, to read the word, it's more important for them to know the sound first. So my son was 20 months old, and he was naming letters, like ah, buh.

And my dad was frustrated by it. And he was like, no, it's not. It's called A. And I'm like, no, dad, I did this for a reason. And this is what I do in my school, and this is what works. There's actually some disagreement among cognitive scientists about whether it's better to start with the letter names or the letter sounds. The bottom line is that kids need to learn both.

And it's not that kids in Steubenville aren't taught the names of letters. They are. It's just that there's an emphasis on letter sounds to try to reduce clutter, to minimize the chances that a child will be confused. In other words, there's an emphasis on how children learn, and what might be difficult for a beginner. This is one of the things that stood out to me in Steubenville. There's a focus here not just on what kids learn,

but on how they learn. I think how kids learn is sometimes missing in the conversation about the science of reading these days. It's one thing for everyone to agree that reading instruction must include phonics, for example. It's another to ask, how are you teaching phonics? Does your approach take into account how children learn?

Steubenville stands out because they are paying attention to learning. And the alphabet is just the beginning. More after a break. Think about what happened on page two, and I want you two to come up with a nice retell. We're in a first grade classroom now. What happened on page two? On page two, the mom and the dad was driving to work. Notice how the kids are speaking in full sentences.

On page two, Eric drew his house. They haven't mastered perfect grammar yet and they still need reminders about what to do when they come to a word they don't know. But by first grade these kids are putting it all together. They're reading and writing. I saw a lot of writing built into the reading instruction in Steubenville. What does your sentence say? Can you read it? Sipping did not help Scott.

The students just read a story about a boy who's trying to get rid of his hiccups. Now they're writing about it. Each student has a partner whose job is to provide feedback on their sentences. And what are you pointing out, Aria? Aria thinks her partner's sentence should include what Scott was sipping. Scott was sipping water.

Do you see what she's telling you about what is missing? You're missing water, so we waste the dip and white water. The boy erases his sentence and writes, sipping water did not help Scott. Aria gives him a high five. There's a lot of this in Steubenville. Kids working together in pairs and small groups, actually teaching each other. One moment that stood out to me was in a third grade class.

The kids were taking turns reading a book about rainforests. Orangutans spend most of their lives in the treetops, swinging from branch to branch. I was walking around the classroom, and as I approached one group, a girl was giving her classmate some instructions. So what I want you to do is we're going to reread the sentence because you're just kind of reading like a robot,

and we want it to have perfect fluency. It's kind of a blunt critique, but the boy seems unfazed, gives it another shot. All right. Bats are common in the rainforest. They are not birds, but the world's only flying mammals. Good. Many bats hunt insects.

This teamwork thing, kids working together and actually teaching each other, it's a central component of how Steubenville teaches reading. They call it cooperative learning. And I was kind of skeptical at first. When you look at the research on effective reading instruction, what you see over and over are references to the importance of direct instruction. That's when a teacher explicitly teaches students how to do something, like how to sound out a word. Putting kids

together in small groups and having them teach each other is kind of the opposite of that. But in my tour through Steubenville schools, I did see teachers provide direct instruction, quite a bit of it, even in preschool. But there's always this cooperative learning time built in, too. My turn. What can we learn? What I realized is that cooperative learning provides something really important, something kids need to become good readers. It provides a lot of time for practice.

What? Relatives. Relatives and this and because. One of the concerns I hear about schools trying to do the science of reading is that sometimes there's not enough time for practice, that schools may now be providing too much instruction and not giving kids enough time to actually read.

What? Local? Local Zoo. Good job, you guys. So here are my observations so far on reading instruction in Steubenville. The district has preschool and most children go. There's a big focus on spoken language skills. There's phonics instruction.

There's a lot of writing, not just reading. And there's direct instruction. But there's also cooperative learning. And that provides a lot of time for practice. And perhaps one of the most unusual things about how Steubenville approaches reading instruction is that every teacher teaches reading. Okay.

Like even this guy. Get out your collection of readings. This is Josh Meyer. He's wearing shorts and a hoodie with the sleeves cut off. He looks like a football coach, and he is. He's also the gym teacher at one of the elementary schools. But in the mornings, he's not in the gym. He's teaching a second-grade reading class.

All right, here we go. Follow along as Mr. Myer reads. Biggest apes. Gorillas are the biggest apes in the world. When I tell some of my other colleagues that may be at other schools that this is what I do, you know, in the morning, they would say, you kidding me?

But it's part of the deal when you teach in a Steubenville Elementary School. Gym teachers, music teachers, science teachers, they all teach a reading class. And here's why. If you have a lot of teachers to teach reading, the reading classes can be really small. I was in one that had only six kids.

We turned closets into classrooms so that we can teach anywhere we can teach in this building. This is Jen Blackburn again, my tour guide. At one time this was my office. We changed it into a classroom. And it's not just that every teacher teaches reading. It's that every student in the school has reading class at the same time. Every morning from 9 to 10.30. That's the reading block. Having all the kids in a school in reading instruction

at the same time means students can be assigned to a reading class based on their skill level, regardless of what grade they're in. So if a second grader is still reading on a first grade level, she goes to a first grade class during the reading block. And if a first grader is reading on a second grade level, she goes to a second grade class during the reading block. And if a first grader is reading on a second grade level, she goes to a second grade class. This way of grouping kids is rare in American schools.

In fact, it's controversial. Standard practice is for all kids to get instruction at their grade level. The idea is to prevent kids from getting stuck behind. But Steubenville has a system to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm just going to show you around the data tool that our teachers use. Jen Blackburn pulls up a window on a computer screen. You can click on an individual student. These are first graders. It shows every child at her school and where they are in reading. And not just what grade level they're on, but more detailed information

about the specific skills they've mastered and what they still need to learn. So I can look at this student right here. She clicks on a first grader who's behind. It's about two months into the school year, and he's still working on reading skills from the end of kindergarten. So during the school's reading block, he goes to a class with other kids who are still working on the end-of-year kindergarten skills. The underlying philosophy here is,

moving a child ahead before he's mastered the basics is like trying to build a house without finishing the foundation. And so what are you gonna do so this kid is currently behind, not way behind, but a little behind? Yeah, he's pretty behind in comparison to his peers. So he is placed in a very...

There's a plan to get this child reading on grade level. He's in a small reading class so he can get plenty of attention from a teacher, and he gets tutoring during the school day. In fact, every first grader at this school gets a reading tutor until they've mastered all the first grade material. And as kids reach mastery and their tutors are freed up, the first graders who are still behind get even more tutoring. I asked Jen Blackburn how much tutoring the boy we've been talking about could end up

getting. Probably 25, sometimes 40 minutes, sometimes twice a day, four days a week. That's a lot of tutoring. But that's what it could take to get this kid up to grade level. Where does Steubenville find all these tutors? Some are paid staff, others are community volunteers, and a lot of them are students, college students from a local university, and students from Steubenville High School. Can I listen in for a couple minutes?

You want to read this page for her? A high school student is tutoring a first grader at a small table tucked into the corner of a hallway. All the men have to come to help. All the tutors get training, so kids get consistent instruction. But this high school tutor was already familiar with how Steubenville teaches reading. It's the way she was taught when she was a little kid in Steubenville schools.

Yeah, same books. Steubenville has been teaching kids to read the same way for 25 years. I think consistency may be one of the secrets of their success. Something else that's critical for success? Attendance. Attendance is huge. A school can offer fantastic reading instruction,

but kids aren't gonna get that instruction if they're not in school. So Steubenville puts a lot of effort into making sure kids show up. I am Dr. Allen. Suzanne Allen is the Dean of Students at East. She's in charge of attendance. If a kid is absent, it's her job to find out why right away. So when I receive the attendance cards from the teachers, if a parent hasn't called, I

make sure that I give them a call. Hi, this is Dr. Allen. The idea is rapid response. I'm just calling to check on your son. She's calling about a kindergartner. He wasn't feeling well on Monday, but now it's Friday. He's been absent four days, no word from his mom. Dr. Allen gets voicemail every time she calls.

She's worried about this kid. This is a homeless child. If he doesn't show up on Monday, she says she'll drive to the homeless shelter and find out what's going on. She does this a lot, knocks on doors, brings kids to school if she has to. She does other things to get them there too.

I have attendance contests. It's called Stay in the Game. Home rooms compete against each other for the best attendance. Good morning, you staff and students. Every morning, Dr. Allen gets on the intercom to announce the home rooms that had perfect attendance the previous day.

We had kindergarten, Ms. Blackburn. We had second grade, Mrs. D'Angelo. The home rooms with the best attendance win prizes. They can choose from a frosty, they can choose from ice cream sandwich, extra recess, or just a little extra time on the computer. My first reaction to the attendance contest was, isn't getting little kids to school more of a parent thing? Like don't you need to motivate the parents more than the students? Not necessarily.

A lot of our kids live right here. They live in the housing projects next to the school. And this first grade teacher, Julie Battistell, says a lot of kids are responsible for getting themselves to school and their younger siblings too. They are getting themselves up and getting themselves dressed and getting themselves to school. So I think what we're doing here is making them want to come, pushing them to be responsible, get out the door and get over here. Absenteeism is a big problem in many American schools, especially since COVID. In Ohio, more than a quarter of students were chronically absent last year. That means they missed close to a month of school, sometimes more. But Steubenville has one of the lowest absenteeism rates in the state.

They're getting kids to school and teaching them to read. Here's what it sounds like by the time students are in middle school. After a while, he thought he could make out the shape of the mountains through the haze. This is a fifth grade English class. Middle school starts in fifth grade here. He could see there was nothing ahead of him, nothing but emptiness. I told you that students in Steubenville are grouped for reading instruction based on their skill level.

What you're hearing now is the lowest level English class at the middle school, and they're all reading on grade level. There are no kids here who are behind. There wasn't any water. It was a mirage. What is it called? Mirage. Steubenville is a place full of confident readers and confident teachers. I asked teachers here if they ever feel unequipped to teach a child how to read. They looked at me funny,

like they didn't understand the question. No. You have not faced a kid where like, I don't know what to do. No, I've never felt that way. I do feel very equipped, prepared, and felt that I could get that job done. I asked another question that got me some baffled looks.

I asked if they'd heard of the authors we focused on in this podcast. Have you ever heard of Fountas and Pennell? No, I'm sorry. Have you ever heard of Lucy Calkins? No, I'm sorry. No. You've literally never heard of these people?

No. I also asked about the term balanced literacy, a term used to describe the Calkins and Fountas and Pennell approach, a term that had become ubiquitous in American education, or so I thought. Balanced literacy. Teachers in Steubenville had no idea what I was talking about. Is that what you said? Balanced literacy?

I do not know what that is, no. I mean, no. You've never, like, heard of it? I mean, not that I can... no, not really. Steubenville had no need to pursue the latest trend, to even know what the latest trend was, because what they were doing was working. It's been working for 25 years. And what Steubenville has been doing is not something they invented here. They didn't come up with this way of teaching reading.

Everything you heard, the focus on preschool and language development, the sounds first approach to teaching letters, the way they group kids, the gym teacher teaching reading, the direct instruction, the cooperative learning, the tutoring, the attendance, it's all part of a program. In our next episode, I'm going to tell you about this program, where it came from, and how it got caught up in that big federal effort to improve reading instruction more than two decades ago. The program known as Reading First is mismanaged, the auditors say, and full of conflicts of interest. He was so frustrated by the policy landscape here in the U.S. that he left. He left the

U.S. altogether. Yeah, it was horrendous. If you like this podcast, please follow us in your podcast app and leave a review. It's one of the best ways to help other people find the show. Reporter Karen Chenoweth wrote a couple of books that include Steubenville, and she has a podcast too. We'll have links in the show notes. There will also be a link to our website where you can find much more about this podcast and sign up for our newsletter.

Sold a Story is an APM Reports podcast produced by me, Emily Hanford. My co-reporter is Christopher Peek. Our data reporter is Kate Martin. Our editor is Curtis Gilbert. We had mixing and sound design by Chris Juhlin and reporting, production, and editing help from Olivia Cilcoti, Carmela Walle-Annone, Emily Havik, Emily Corwin, and Lindsay Sievert, and fact checking by Betsy Towner-Leveen. Andy Cruz is our digital editor. Final mastering of this episode was by Derek Ramirez. Our theme music was created by Wonderly.

Tom Schaek is the deputy Managing Editor of APM Reports, and our Executive Editor is Jane Helmke. Leadership support for Zoldastory comes from Hollyhock Foundation and Oak Foundation. Support also comes from IBIS Group, Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Kenneth Rainen Foundation, and the Listeners of American Public Media.