Opinion: ‘Sold a Story': 6 Takeaways from Deep Dive into Literacy in Steubenville, Ohio

Yahoo

20-03-2025

A version of this essay originally appeared on Robert Pondiscio's Substack.
I've made no secret of my admiration for Emily Hanford, who has done more to build demand for scientifically sound reading instruction than nearly anyone in the last decade — not just in journalism but in education at large. Her original 'Sold a Story' series was a seismic shift, grabbing public attention and spurring state legislation mandating curriculum and instruction rooted in the science of reading. Now, she's back with three fresh installments, as potent as ever. These tell the story of Steubenville, Ohio — a gritty steel town-turned-reading powerhouse thanks to a 25-year commitment to Success for All, a research-backed, whole-school reform model Nancy Madden and Bob Slavin began developing as reading researchers at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s. Like all of Hanford's work, the new episodes are deeply reported, well-informed, engaging and must-hear podcasts. I binge-listened to them twice on a long drive this week.
Here are my takeaways:
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In education, especially for schools serving disadvantaged kids, curriculum changes as often as losing baseball teams swap managers — new year, new playbook, same old slump. Not so in Steubenville, where sticking with Success for All for 25 years has been a game-changer. In fact, they haven't changed the game in a quarter-century. Minimal churn — low teacher turnover, a decade-long superintendent and 48% of staff are local grads — breeds a stability other schools and districts can only envy. Hanford gets baffled looks when she asks Steubenville teachers if they'd ever heard of Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell or even balanced literacy. 'Steubenville had no need to pursue the latest trend, to even know what the latest trend was,' she reports, 'because what they were doing was working. It's been working. For 25 years.'
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SFA is a standout, backed by a mountain of research that Hanford highlights. It's not just a reading curriculum, it's a whole-school overhaul — curriculum and instruction, professional development, leadership training, etc. — that's lifted Steubenville's poorest kids to nationally recognized heights, pushing reading scores two grade levels above peers'. Hanford cites research that shows eighth graders staying ahead in reading, with fewer held back or in special ed, cutting costs over time. Interestingly, SFA also shaped Success Academy's early days, as I chronicled in my book How the Other Half Learns. A New York hedge fund manager, John Petry, wrote a charter school application after he and his partner Joel Greenblatt persuaded and paid for a Queens, New York, public school to implement SFA to great effect. They hired Eva Moskowitz to lead it. About the same time, Steubenville was looking for a new reading program. 'Most people familiar with the reading research seemed to agree at the time that there were probably only two reading programs that had been tested and proven with scientific research,' Hanford reports: Success for All and Direct Instruction.
SFA and Direct Instruction both face a big — and, for some, insurmountable — hurdle: Both are scripted, and some teachers hate that. Teachers tend to valorize freedom over recipes, and that resistance keeps SFA and Direct Instruction niche, even with Steubenville's success and DI's decades of data. Could 'Sold a Story' change that misperception? We'll see. What has made Hanford's work so impactful is that she demonstrates how teachers have been misled about what is and is not effective practice; her work casts teachers not as sinners, but as sinned against by schools of education, publishing companies and instructional gurus. The same is true about instructional design and 'scripts.' In 'How to Be the Next Emily Hanford,' a piece I wrote for Education Next with my colleague Riley Fletcher last year, we encouraged education journalists to follow Hanford's lead and cast their gaze on classroom practice — teaching and learning — rather than the policy and politics that tend to dominate education reporting. If these new episodes bolster SFA and DI's reputations and discredit detractors, spotlighting evidence over perceptions of rigidity, it will be a big service.
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SFA isn't just a program — it's a pact, insisting that teachers vote to adopt it before it takes root. Steubenville conducted a secret ballot in which 100% of the staff agreed to adopt it — proof that the buy-in was real. That's no small thing. I've often rankled my fellow curriculum advocates by saying I'd rather my daughter's teacher be a Kool-Aid-swilling acolyte of a curriculum and pedagogy I dislike than have my preferred curriculum imposed on her and implemented begrudgingly. In How the Other Half Learns, I expected to write about curriculum and instruction at Success Academy but surprised myself by writing more about school culture: The X factor that makes those schools soar is every adult in a kid's life singing from the same hymnal. SFA gets that: Without teachers on board, even the best program flops. Steubenville's success hinges on that buy-in, a lesson too many reform efforts — and too many top-down technocratic reformers — miss or elide. Winning hearts and minds matters.
EdReports looms large in Hanford's latest episodes, a flawed gatekeeper in the science of reading push. In her Steubenville saga, it's a shadow player — SFA's evidence shines and Steubenville was implementing it long before EdReports emerged on the scene. But not long ago Ohio's initial 'approved' list of reading curriculum snubbed SFA because EdReports hadn't reviewed it, while green-lighting programs with weaker bona fides. How is that possible? EdReports was created to aid and abet Common Core implementation, not as a science of reading arbiter, yet states like Ohio leaned on it to approve curricula. That led to picks that often flunked the evidence test. Hanford shows EdReports' clout — 40 publishers tweaked products for its ratings, and nearly 2,000 districts followed suit — but also its flaws: It gave high marks to programs employing discredited techniques like 'three-cueing,' while SFA, as a 'whole-school' model, was beyond its scope. That disconnect nearly cost Steubenville its proven program. I've long put EdReports in the category of 'things I choose to love.' If you believe, as I do, that high-quality instructional materials are critical to student success, EdReports helped pushed curriculum to the center of reform conversations. But Hanford's reporting echoes a worry I've harbored: Standards alignment isn't enough. Built for Common Core, EdReports encourages a view of reading that is neutral to agnostic on quality. A 'standards-based' view of reading means you can teach Dickens or dreck. EdReports' ratings don't tell me if a program's texts are worth the time.
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I've written favorably about state efforts to center curriculum in reform, like Louisiana's push to 'make the best choice the easy choice' by curating top-tier options. But Hanford shows critical pitfalls: Ohio banned three-cueing and built 'science of reading' lists — bravo! — yet nearly axed SFA because EdReports didn't review it. Steubenville dodged a bullet, but the misstep echoes Reading First's chaos: good intent, shaky execution. Lists can guide, but when they lean on flawed tools over hard evidence, they're more clutter than clarity.
Steubenville proves schools can defy the odds with evidence, continuity and teacher buy-in — not just phonics. SFA and DI shine — I've been hyping DI this month and before — yet state lists and EdReports risk sidelining them for flashier flops. Education is cursed with too much innovation, not enough execution. These episodes scream it louder. Hanford's work remains a wake-up call, and these episodes raise the stakes: We've got the evidence, so why aren't we using it?