US - Emily Hanford 'Hard Words: Why Aren't Our Kids Being Taught to Read?' Relevant Internationally!
Posted: Mon Sep 10, 2018 10:08 pm
This audio documentary is being circulated by Alex Baumhardt and others via Twitter and various networks:
Emily's documentary from 2017:
I’m a producer at APM Reports, the documentary and investigative journalism group at American Public Media. Each year we produce a season of hourlong audio documentaries about education that are broadcast on public radio stations across the country and are available on our podcast Educate.
I’m writing to you because we just released a documentary called Hard Words: Why Aren't Our Kids Being Taught to Read? and I think it may be relevant to your work. Our correspondent, Emily Hanford, began her reporting on this topic back in 2017 with a documentary about why so many students with dyslexia have a hard time getting the help they need in school. She discovered that the kind of reading instruction students with dyslexia need is the same kind of instruction all kids need. But many kids are not getting this kind of instruction in school. Emily has come to think of kids with dyslexia as canaries in a coal mine, a warning sign that something is wrong with the way reading is being taught. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers. According to Emily’s reporting, a big part of the problem is that many educators don’t know the science on how children learn to read, and they are not using approaches to reading instruction backed up by that science.
You can subscribe to our podcast here to get Hard Words and all of our documentaries (you can also find them wherever you get your podcasts). If you give it a listen, please let me know what you think, join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook, and share with colleagues and others who might be interested in this program. We hope it will help spark a productive dialogue about the need to improve reading instruction in our schools.
Thanks.
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Alex Baumhardt
Associate Producer
APM Reports, Educate Podcast
American Public Media
abaumhardt@apmreports.org
Office: 651-228-4991
Cell: 612-801-7809
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/0 ... ht-to-readHard Words
Why aren't kids being taught to read?
Emily's documentary from 2017:
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2017/0 ... rd-to-readHard to Read
How American schools fail kids with dyslexia