Education journalist Emily Hanford, whose reporting helped spark dozens of state reading laws, is turning her attention from how children are taught to read to how teachers are taught to teach. The second season of her podcast Sold a Story examines a classroom approach known as Direct Instruction, a method that most American schools do not use.
Hanford's reporting since 2017 has been credited with prompting dozens of state reading laws. At least 26 states have changed their reading policies since the fall of 2022, and Mississippi and Alabama are frequently cited for measurable gains in reading performance. Hanford has argued, however, that laws alone are not enough. The quality of instruction in the classroom matters as well, and that is the question the new season takes up.
The focus is Direct Instruction, a program developed in the 1960s by Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann, a former marketing executive who designed it for struggling learners. Most American schools instead rely on inquiry-based, student-led approaches. Direct Instruction is built around choral response, in which the whole class answers together, along with cold-calling on individual students, scripted lessons, immediate correction of errors, and repetition until skills are mastered. Critics object most strongly to the scripted lessons, which they see as limiting teachers' independence.
The method has a substantial research record. Project Follow Through, a federal study that followed about 350,000 students across 22 programs, ranked Direct Instruction best on average in a 1977 analysis. A later meta-analysis by Jean Stockard found that the method worked across different types of students, a finding that has kept the approach in front of researchers and policymakers for decades. Some teachers say it also reduces the burden of lesson planning, since the scripts give them a ready structure for each session rather than requiring them to build every lesson from scratch.
That practical appeal sits alongside a question the research has not settled. Mastery grouping, a common feature of Direct Instruction, places students by demonstrated skill level and moves them through material at a pace set by their progress. Whether that arrangement serves high-performing students as well as it serves those who are struggling remains an open question, and it is one that the podcast raises without fully answering.
Season One of Sold a Story drew criticism, and some critics later changed their minds, a sign of how divisive reading reform has become. Support for phonics has nonetheless crossed political lines, with advocates on both the left and the right, though the policy changes have been strongest in some Southern states. The new season tests whether the same evidence-driven scrutiny that reshaped reading policy can now reach the daily practice of teaching itself, and whether the case for a method that most schools have never adopted can hold up under the kind of examination that changed the reading debate.