The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well. 

According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.

This week on Reveal, reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk. 

Dig Deeper

Listen: Sold a Story (APM Reports)

Read: The Outlier (APM Reports)

Read: When schools buy new reading programs, they look to EdReports. But some of its reviews don’t line up with science (APM Reports)

Watch: How Steubenville did it (APM Reports via Instagram)

Credits

Reporters: Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak | Additional reporting: Olivia Chilkoti, Kate Martin, and Carmela Guaglianone | Editor: Curtis Gilbert | Fact checker: Betsy Towner Levine | Legal review: Mark Anfinson | Production assistance: Nadia Hamdan | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Chris Julin, Jim Briggs, and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

Sold a Story is supported by the Hollyhock Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Ibis Group, the Esther A. & Joseph Klingenstein Fund, and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation.

Support for Reveal is provided by listeners like you, and the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
 Close to 70% of fourth graders in the US are not proficient readers.  
Speaker 2:Senator Freeman, the floor is yours.  
Senator Freeman:Mr. Chairman, thank you.  
Al Letson:And from state capitals-  
Speaker 3:My bill requires the science of reading.  
Speaker 4:We need to improve reading in Wisconsin.  
Al Letson:… to school districts-  
Speaker 5:We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.  
Al Letson:… there’s been a big push over the last couple years to rethink the way schools teach kids to read. 25 states have passed new laws. One of the reasons for that push is a podcast.  
Speaker 6:Emily Hanford had a podcast that dropped last week.  
Speaker 7:Emily Hanford’s recent podcast that has taken the nation by storm.  
Speaker 8:There’s a podcast out there I’d recommend people potentially listen to called Sold a Story.  
Speaker 9:The Sold a Story podcast.  
Speaker 10:Sold a Story.  
Speaker 11:It’s called Sold a Story.  
Al Letson:In 2023, we partnered with Sold a Story and education reporter Emily Hanford to bring you an episode investigating how reading is taught in American schools.  
Speaker 12:It didn’t seem like they were really teaching them to read. It seemed like they were teaching them to sound like they could read.  
Speaker 13:And I said to my son’s teacher, I was like, “This isn’t how we learned how to read,” meaning me and her. “This isn’t how we did it, right?” This can’t be right, right?  
Speaker 14:There’s kids sinking everywhere and they’re looking for help, and it’s on us.  
Al Letson:Sold a Story showed how educators had been sold an idea about how kids learned to read, and that idea was wrong. Now schools across the country are getting rid of materials and methods based on outdated ideas that the podcast exposed, and Emily and the team at APM Reports are still on the story. They’ve been putting out incredible episodes about where we go from here because it’s one thing to get rid of things that don’t work, but it’s a different challenge to come up with something that does. So Emily’s back with us and she’s going to start by telling us about a rare school district in America, a school district where nearly every child is a good reader.  
Emily Hanford:A few years before the Sold a Story podcast first came out, I met Karin Chenoweth at a conference.  
Karin Chenoweth:You and I sat next to each other at lunch. We didn’t know each other.  
Emily Hanford:We hit it off immediately. We were both education reporters and we were both kind of obsessed with reading instruction.  
Karin Chenoweth:I think I asked you what you were working on and you started telling me, and I was very excited.  
Emily Hanford:I knew more about Karin 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.  
Karin Chenoweth:I had never been there. I had never heard of it.  
Emily Hanford:When she got there, she could immediately see that it was a city in rough shape.  
Karin Chenoweth:It was one of the saddest places I’ve ever been to.  
Emily Hanford:Steubenville’s an old steel town. The mills had shut down. Jobs had vanished.  
Karin Chenoweth: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.  
Emily Hanford:In the heart of the depressed downtown was the elementary school Karin was there to see, a school where the majority of kids were from low-income families.  
Karin Chenoweth:It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was.  
Emily Hanford:All the third-graders at this school were passing the state reading test, every single one.  
Karin Chenoweth:You would’ve 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, this was an amazing school.  
Emily Hanford: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. Karin often thought about that amazing little school, wondered how things were going in Steubenville. And then one day in 2016, Karin 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.  
Karin Chenoweth:My eye was immediately drawn to this little dot on the upper left corner.  
Emily Hanford:The dots in the upper left were the poor school districts where the kids were doing well and the dot Karin was looking at was out there all alone doing far better than the others.  
Karin Chenoweth:And that was Steubenville.  
Emily Hanford:So I decided to go to Steubenville to find out how they did it.  
Automated Voice:Destination is on your right, East Garfield Elementary School.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Automated Voice:Arrived.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 17:Morning, girls.  
Speaker 18:Oh, morning.  
Nancy Beattie:Casey, will you help me for a minute?  
Speaker 17:Have a good day.  
Emily Hanford:When I arrive, teachers, staff and a couple of local police officers are greeting students at the door.  
Speaker 19:Are you a policeman?  
Speaker 20:Of course I am, my friend.  
Emily Hanford:Just inside the school entrance, there’s a girl standing in the hallway looking unhappy.  
Nancy Beattie:What’s wrong, girl? Come here.  
Emily Hanford: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?  
Nancy Beattie:Yes, at all. She doesn’t get it done at home. She says mom doesn’t have time, so we make time.  
Emily Hanford:This is Nancy Beattie, a teacher at the school. Ms. Beattie 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.  
Jennifer Blackb…:We also have shoes, socks and stuff in here.  
Emily Hanford:This is Jennifer Blackburn. She’s an instructional coach at East and the keeper of the clothes closet.  
Jennifer Blackb…:Oh, winter boots.  
Nancy Beattie:Yeah, winter boots, sneakers.  
Jennifer Blackb…:Sneakers. Backpacks.  
Nancy Beattie:I just went and bought sneakers and socks. I stuck them in here.  
Emily Hanford:How often do you have to give kids clothing?  
Jennifer Blackb…:Every day. Every day.  
Nancy Beattie:We have one-parent homes, no-parent homes, kids that are coming from the homeless shelters.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Jennifer Blackb…:You ready?  
Emily Hanford:My tour guide is Jen Blackburn, the instructional coach and keeper of the clothes closet. She takes me first to preschool.  
Speaker 26:Let me make sure my friends are sitting nice. Crisscross applesauce, hands in their laps.  
Emily Hanford:The preschoolers are on the rug, looking up at their teacher eagerly. She’s assigning jobs for the day.  
Speaker 26:I pulled Dierre. So Dierre, you’re my cool kid today.  
Emily Hanford:Dierre is beaming.  
Dierre:[inaudible 00:08:33] go today.  
Speaker 26:Yeah, you’re going to be my cool kid today. So what does my cool kid do, friends?  
Dierre:I’ll be the line leader.  
Speaker 26:You’re going to be the line leader. You’re right. All right, let me-  
Emily Hanford:Line leader is clearly the best job, but there are other jobs.  
Speaker 26:Ryan, do you want to be at the door holder, the electrician, teacher’s assistant, or caboose?  
Ryan:The teacher.  
Speaker 26:Oh, remember, put in sentence. I…  
Ryan:I want to be the teacher’s assistant.  
Speaker 26:Thank you. Very nice sentence.  
Emily Hanford:These preschoolers are constantly being reminded to speak in full sentences.  
Speaker 26:Oh, put it in a sentence.  
Speaker 28:I’d like to be the door holder.  
Speaker 26:Thank you. She said, “I would like to be the door holder.”  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Lynnett Gorman:The early childhood program is really the foundation for successful readers.  
Emily Hanford:This is Lynnett Gorman. She’s the principal of West Elementary in Steubenville.  
Lynnett Gorman:A lot of oral language in those early preschool years.  
Emily Hanford: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 a hundred dollars a month. You heard that right. Just a hundred dollars a month for all-day preschool.  
 Okay, so where are we going now?  
Jennifer Blackb…:Ramsey, Kindergarten.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 30:All right, let’s make the sounds that they make.  
Emily Hanford:The teacher is holding up cards with letters on them.  
Speaker 30:Ready, go.  
Students:Ah, ah.  
Emily Hanford:And the kids are saying the sounds of the letters.  
Students:D. D.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Singer:A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K-  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Amy Crowe:I even had my parents kind of question it.  
Emily Hanford:Amy Crowe teaches kindergarten in Steubenville.  
Amy Crowe:They were like, “Why are you teaching them… Don’t they have to know what the letter’s 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. 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 and my school, and this is what works.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Al Letson:It’s one thing to agree that reading instruction has to include sounding out letters, also called phonics. It’s another to ask, how are you teaching phonics? Emily says Steubenville stands out because they are paying attention to how kids learn. And the alphabet is just the beginning.  
Speaker 34:When I tell some of my other colleagues that may be at other schools that this is what I do, they would say, “You kidding me?”  
Al Letson:That’s next on Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. 40% of fourth graders in the United States can’t read, even on a basic level. But in Steubenville, Ohio, virtually all the kids are learning to read well. Reporter Emily Hanford and her colleagues from the APM Reports podcast Sold a Story, took a close look at Steubenville to see what they’re doing right.  
Speaker 35:Think about what happened on page two, and I want you two to come up with a nice retell.  
Al Letson:Here’s Emily.  
Emily Hanford:We’re back at East Garfield Elementary in a first grade classroom.  
Speaker 36:On page two, he-  
Speaker 37:The mom and the dad were driving to work.  
Emily Hanford:Notice how the kids are speaking in full sentences.  
Speaker 36:On page two, Eric drawed his house.  
Emily Hanford:They haven’t mastered perfect grammar yet.  
Speaker 36:He drawed his car.  
Emily Hanford:And they still need reminders about what to do when they come to a word they don’t know.  
Speaker 35:Sound it out.  
Emily Hanford: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?  
Speaker 37:Sipping did not help Scott.  
Emily Hanford: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?  
Speaker 38:It was missing water, so he erase the did and write water.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 39:Orangutans spend most of their lives in the treetops, swinging from branch to branch.  
Emily Hanford:I was walking around the classroom and as I approached one group, a girl was giving her classmate some instructions.  
Speaker 40:So what I want you to do is we’re going to reread the sentence because you were just kind of reading like a robot and we want it to have perfect fluency.  
Emily Hanford:It’s kind of a blunt critique, but the boy seems unfazed, gives it another shot.  
Speaker 41:All right. Bats are common in the rainforest. They are not birds, but the world’s only flying mammals.  
Speaker 40:Good.  
Speaker 41:Many bats hunt insects-  
Emily Hanford: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 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.  
Speaker 42:My turn. What can we learn?  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 43:Relatives.  
Speaker 42:Relatives. And this is because-  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 43:What? Local zoos.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Josh Meyer:Okay.  
Emily Hanford:Even this guy.  
Josh Meyer:Get out your collection of readings.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Josh Meyer:All right, here we go. Follow along as Mr. Meyer reads Biggest Apes. Gorillas are the biggest apes… When I tell some of my other colleagues may be at other schools that this is what I do in the morning, they would say, “You kidding me?”  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Jen Blackburn:We turned closets into classrooms so that we can teach anywhere we can teach in this building.  
Emily Hanford:This is Jen Blackburn again, my tour guide.  
Jen Blackburn:At one time, this was my office, we changed it into a classroom.  
Emily Hanford: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 9:00 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. 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.  
Jen Blackburn:I’m just going to show you around the data tool that our teachers use.  
Emily Hanford:Jen Blackburn pulls up a window on a computer screen.  
Jen Blackburn:You can click on an individual student. These are first-graders.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Jen Blackburn:So I can look at this student right here.  
Emily Hanford: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 going to do? So this kid is currently behind, not way behind, but a little behind.  
Jen Blackburn:Yeah. He’s pretty behind in comparison to his peers. So he is placed in a very-  
Emily Hanford: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 ask Jen Blackburn how much tutoring the boy we’ve been talking about could end up getting.  
Jen Blackburn:Probably 25, sometimes 40 minutes, sometimes twice a day, four days a week.  
Emily Hanford: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 of minutes?  
Speaker 44:Do you want to read this page for her?  
Emily Hanford:A high school student is tutoring a first-grader at a small table tucked into the corner of a hallway.  
Speaker 45:All the men who came to help-  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 44:Yeah, same books.  
Emily Hanford: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 going to get that instruction if they’re not in school. So Steubenville puts a lot of effort into making sure kids show up.  
Dr. Suzanne All…:I am Dr. Allen.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Dr. Suzanne All…: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.  
Emily Hanford:The idea is rapid response.  
Dr. Suzanne All…:I’m just calling to check on your son.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Dr. Suzanne All…:This is a homeless child.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Dr. Suzanne All…:I have attendance contests. It’s called Stay in the Game.  
Emily Hanford:Homerooms compete against each other for the best attendance.  
Dr. Suzanne All…:Good morning staff and students.  
Emily Hanford:Every morning, Dr. Allen gets on the intercom to announce the homerooms that had perfect attendance the previous day.  
Dr. Suzanne All…:We had kindergarten, Ms. Blackburn. We had second grade, Mrs. D’Angelo.  
Emily Hanford:The homerooms with the best attendance win prizes.  
Dr. Suzanne All…:They can choose from a frosty, they can choose from ice cream sandwich, extra recess, or just a little extra time on the computer.  
Emily Hanford:My first reaction to the attendance contest was, isn’t getting little kids to school more of a parent thing? Don’t you need to motivate the parents more than the students? Not necessarily.  
Julie Battistel:A lot of our kids live right here.  
Emily Hanford:They live in the housing projects next to the school. And this first grade teacher, Julie Battistel, says a lot of kids are responsible for getting themselves to school and their younger siblings too.  
Julie Battistel: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.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 45:After a while, he thought he could make out the shape of the mountains through the haze.  
Emily Hanford:This is a fifth grade English class. Middle school starts in fifth grade here.  
Speaker 46:He could see there was nothing ahead of him, nothing but emptiness.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 46:There wasn’t any water. It was a mirage. What is it called?  
Speaker 45:Mirage.  
Speaker 46:Mirage.  
Emily Hanford: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.  
Speaker 47:No.  
Emily Hanford:You have not faced a kid where you were like, I don’t know what to do?  
Speaker 47:No, I’ve never felt that way. I do feel very equipped, prepared, and felt that I could get that job done.  
Al Letson:In Steubenville, they’ve been successfully teaching kids to read for more than two decades. With that kind of success, you’d think the state of Ohio would be trying to get other districts to be more like Steubenville. Instead, last year the state told Steubenville it was going to have to adopt a new approach.  
Speaker 48:Why get rid of something that is proven to work?  
Al Letson:That’s next on Reveal.  
Al Letson:From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. In 1969, a young woman named Nancy Madden graduated from high school in Minnesota and went off to Portland, Oregon to attend Reed College.  
Nancy Madden:Reed’s a very odd place. I mean, it’s where you go to be very intellectual and very disruptive.  
Al Letson:She was a child of the ’60s, protested the Vietnam War, marched for civil rights, and what Nancy was most interested in disrupting was education. She wanted to figure out how to make schools better, especially for Black children.  
Nancy Madden:The disparities in opportunity for children were just so obvious at that time.  
Al Letson:In college, Nancy met a guy, a fellow student named Bob Slavin, and he was interested in the same thing.  
Nancy Madden:Our first date was to go on a walk to sort of talk about how do we improve education, what can we do?  
Al Letson:Nancy and Bob got married after college. They moved to Baltimore. They got PhDs. And by the 1980s, they were working together at a research center at Johns Hopkins University, studying how to teach kids in the most effective way possible.  
 And one day they were at Johns Hopkins eating lunch and a former member of the Baltimore City School Board joined them at their table. Nancy says they struck up a conversation.  
Nancy Madden:And so we’re talking about how would you change the schools?  
Al Letson:Things were not good in Baltimore schools.  
Nancy Madden:At the time, Baltimore City schools were failing half of their high school students. I mean, they were just dropping out. And he said, “This is wrong. This is not good enough.”  
Al Letson:And the school board member issued a challenge.  
Nancy Madden:“Here you are, Johns Hopkins University, you’re so smart, well, what would you do?”  
Al Letson:He wanted to know what Nancy and Bob would do if it was their job to fix a school system. That conversation inspired them to create a program called Success for All.  
Bob Slavin:One way to understand how Success for All came about and what it’s trying to achieve, [inaudible 00:02:09].  
Al Letson:We weren’t able to interview Bob. He died in April of 2021, but he talked about Success for All’s approach in this 2009 video.  
Bob Slavin:Consider an old story about a little town that decided to build a gorgeous playground on some land that it had. The problem however was that this beautiful land was at the edge of a cliff. And it occurred to the town fathers that there was a danger that children might fall off the cliff. So the local playground board had huge debates, “Should we build a fence at the top of the cliff or should we put an ambulance at the bottom?”  
 I think if you think about what that story is telling you, you’ll realize that to put an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff is the way we do so much ordinarily in schools. Part of the idea of Success for All is to try to make sure that children don’t fall off the cliff in the first place.  
Al Letson:The Success for All program is more than just a reading curriculum. It’s what’s called a whole-school reform model. And all the things we’ve heard about in this episode that are getting such impressive results in Steubenville, Ohio, 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, they’re all part of Success for All.  
 And there are lots of studies that show it’s effective when it comes to getting kids to be good readers. So it was a shock to folks in Steubenville when Ohio made a list of approved reading programs last year and the Success for All program wasn’t on it. And ironically, the reason Ohio decided to make that list in the first place was Sold a Story. The podcast from APM Reports, the host of that podcast, Emily Hanford, has the story of how it all happened.  
Emily Hanford:I’ve gotten a lot of emails from listeners since Sold a Story first came out. I have a fat file folder full of actual letters too sent in the mail.  
 One of these letters came from Matt Huffman. At the time he was president of the Ohio State Senate. The letter is three handwritten pages. Huffman said he was, quote, “invigorated” after listening to the podcast. He could see there was a problem with how reading was taught and he wanted to fix it. He wasn’t the only one.  
Christopher Peak:Ohio had a lot of people who listened to our podcast.  
Emily Hanford:This is my co-reporter, Christopher Peak.  
Christopher Peak:I got a call just a couple months after Sold a Story came out from one of the top education officials saying all the executives in the department were listening to Sold a Story and they want to do something about it.  
Emily Hanford:A few weeks after Chris got that call, the governor gave his State of the State address.  
Speaker 49:I’m calling for a renewed focus on literacy.  
Christopher Peak:He’s saying a big proposal is coming, we’re going to make changes to how reading is taught in Ohio.  
Emily Hanford:Two weeks later, legislators introduced a bill.  
Christopher Peak:And this bill says the department has to come up with a list of programs that are aligned with the Science of Reading.  
Emily Hanford:The bill passed in June. The governor signed it into law on the 4th of July. Now it was up to the Ohio Department of Education to make a list of approved reading programs.  
Melissa Weber-M…:My name is Dr. Melissa Weber-Mayrer.  
Emily Hanford:And it’s this person’s job to figure out how to do that.  
Melissa Weber-M…:I work for the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.  
Emily Hanford:She and her colleagues have to come up with this list quickly.  
Melissa Weber-M…:We had a very short window to get things in place.  
Emily Hanford:The law said schools in Ohio must be using a program aligned with the Science of Reading by the end of the following school year. But Melissa Weber-Mayrer and her team decided it wasn’t feasible for them to do their own analysis of whether programs were grounded in research.  
Melissa Weber-M…:We actually did not review efficacy studies. We looked at what our other state colleagues who already had similar laws had done.  
Emily Hanford:They looked at other state lists. A program could make a case to get approved in Ohio if it had already been approved by another state. At least nine states have recently created new Science of Reading lists, and there was another way to make it onto Ohio’s list.  
Melissa Weber-M…:Have you been reviewed by EdReports?  
Emily Hanford:EdReports, it’s an organization that Ohio and other states have been looking to for help when figuring out what programs count as the Science of Reading. My co-reporter, Christopher Peak, has been digging into EdReports.  
Christopher Peak:It’s a non-profit and it’s only 10 years old and it’s already built up a lot of clout by billing itself as kind of consumer reports for curriculum.  
Emily Hanford:So what exactly does EdReports do?  
Christopher Peak:They review curriculum. Teams of teachers actually do the reviews. They review not just reading curriculum, but math and science curriculum too, and they rate it. It’s a red, yellow, and green system. So if you’re a publisher, you want an all-green rating from EdReports.  
 Nearly 2,000 school districts have used its reviews to make their purchasing decisions, and the organization says 40 publishers have actually adjusted their products in response to EdReports review.  
 This is bigger than just the new state list. EdReports was having a big influence on the publishing industry before Sold a Story and the current conversation about the Science of Reading.  
Emily Hanford:And it turns out there’s a bit of a disconnect here, right? EdReports wasn’t set up with the Science of Reading in mind.  
Christopher Peak:No. It was set up with something else in mind. Something called the Common Core State Standards.  
Barack Obama:48 states have now joined a nationwide partnership to develop a common set of rigorous career-ready standards in reading in math.  
Christopher Peak:Common Core was a thing during the Obama administration. It was an effort to raise education standards across the country. The goal was to make sure students in different states were learning the same core skills. There was a need for new curriculum, and publishers put out lots of stuff that they said was aligned with the Common Core Standards.  
Emily Hanford:But there was no one really policing that.  
Christopher Peak:And that’s why EdReports was established, to review curriculum and say, “Yes, this curriculum really was designed with the Common Core Standards in mind.” Or, “No, this curriculum wasn’t. It’s not aligned with the new standards.”  
Emily Hanford:So EdReports released its first reviews in 2015, and it becomes very influential very fast, but then along comes the Science of Reading, and people are starting to ask a different question, not is your curriculum aligned with the Common Core, but is your curriculum aligned with the Science of Reading?  
Christopher Peak:Exactly. And what I found in my reporting is that EdReports has given high marks to some programs that include strategies for teaching reading that are antithetical to what the Science tells us about how kids become good readers.  
Emily Hanford:So say more about that. Do you have an example?  
Christopher Peak:So I talked to Kari Kurto. She was a literacy specialist at the State Department of Education in Rhode Island, which is one of the first states to really try to push for better reading curriculum. Rhode Island had looked at EDReports to come up with a list of programs that districts should be using, and Kari had been in the job for just a couple of weeks when she had a jaw-dropping moment.  
Kari Kurto:I was in my cube on the, was it fourth floor of the Department of Ed? And I began to go through the materials on the approved list, and some of them had some great evidence-aligned instruction and others I started flipping through and said, “Uh-oh.”  
Christopher Peak:She was seeing programs that taught kids to use pictures and context clues to read unfamiliar words instead of just sounding out the letters. These queuing strategies, as they’re often called, are not just ineffective, research by cognitive scientists shows they teach kids bad habits that can be hard to break. But the queuing strategies were in some of the curriculum materials on the state list.  
Kari Kurto:They were on this list that said, “Go ahead and adopt these programs. This is what the Rhode Island Department of Education stands behind.”  
Emily Hanford:I think to understand how this happened, it helps to know a bit about what the Common Core Standards are.  
Christopher Peak:Yep. The Common Core Standards basically lay out what kids should know and be able to do at each grade level. I have a copy of the English Language Arts Standards right here, it’s 66 pages long, and here’s an example of one of the standards for first grade.  
 It says that a first-grader should be able to ask and answer questions about key details in a text, but the Common Core Standards don’t say anything about how to do that. They don’t say anything about how to teach, they just say what to teach.  
Emily Hanford:And you can see how this could be in conflict with the Science of Reading, because one of the big things the Science of Reading has revealed is that how you teach kids matters. But EdReports was basically agnostic on how things were taught. What EDReports essentially wanted to see was that a curriculum was covering everything in that 66-page standards document you’ve got there.  
Christopher Peak:Right. Even some of the people who were once supporters of EDReports are recognizing this conflict now between the Science of Reading and the Common Core Standards. I talked to David Liben. He’s an educator with more than 50 years of experience.  
David Liben:I’ve been involved in education since shortly after the Civil War.  
Christopher Peak:As you can tell, he likes to joke around a bit too. David Liben worked with EdReports when it was first set up. He thought the organization was needed because that problem we mentioned earlier, publishers slapping Common Core stickers on their products and no one checking to see is this program really living up to that label? But David Liben now says EdReport’s methodology is flawed.  
David Liben:Success is dependent upon how we align with standards as opposed to how we align with Science of Reading.  
Christopher Peak:He says one of the biggest problems with EdReports is that some programs that are backed by rigorous research are not getting those coveted all-green ratings. They’ve got good studies that show they’re effective, but EDReports doesn’t factor studies into their ratings. That’s not part of the review process.  
Emily Hanford:So EdReports was designed to look at does your program cover all of the standards, not does your program deliver on the Science of Reading?  
Christopher Peak:Right. And I should note too that David Liben and Keri Kurto, the woman from Rhode Island, they’re both now associated with other organizations that do their own curriculum reviews.  
Emily Hanford:I want to ask about Success for All, the program they use in Steubenville. Success for All has never been reviewed by EdReports. Why not?  
Christopher Peak:Well, Success for All is not just a reading curriculum. It’s a whole-school reform program, and EdReports doesn’t review whole-school reform programs. A spokesperson told me that reviewing just the reading curriculum wouldn’t have provided a complete picture of Success for All, so EdReports didn’t review it.  
Emily Hanford:And without a review from EdReports, Success for All wasn’t getting on most state lists.  
 When the superintendent in Steubenville first heard about Ohio’s new Science of Reading law, she wasn’t worried.  
Melinda Young:Oh, no big deal. SFA is the Science of Reading.  
Emily Hanford:This is Melinda Young.  
Melinda Young:As naive as I guess I was, I really just never gave it a second thought.  
Emily Hanford:When I first visited Steubenville, the news was still kind of sinking in. They were hopeful that Success for All might eventually make the list. State officials said a second review process would be coming, but they were already looking at new reading programs.  
Tricia Saccocci…:We are proactive here.  
Emily Hanford:This is Tricia Saccoccia, the principal of East Elementary.  
Tricia Saccocci…:We’re not just sitting here waiting. We’re getting ready just to be prepared.  
Emily Hanford:They were looking at the programs on the state’s initial list.  
Lynnett Gorman:And there are a lot of school districts who are using approved curriculum already.  
Emily Hanford:That’s Lynnett Gorman, another principal in Steubenville. She and her colleagues were looking up test scores in the school districts that were using an approved program.  
 Close to a third of districts in Ohio were already using something on the state’s initial list, but only one of those districts was doing better in reading than Steubenville. It’s a tiny district with a very low poverty rate. The teachers in Steubenville were having a hard time understanding why they might have to stop using Success for All.  
Speaker 50:I don’t want a new program.  
Speaker 51:Why get rid of something that is proven to work?  
Speaker 50:I would be upset about it.  
Emily Hanford:They were upset, but they weren’t panicking.  
Speaker 51:Either way, we’ll be fine. We’re a strong district. We’ll get through it if we have to.  
Emily Hanford:And in the end, Steubenville didn’t have to find a new program. Because the State of Ohio updated its list, in January 2025, a year after the initial list was published, the Ohio Department of Education added Success for All and some other programs too.  
 I emailed the education official you heard earlier to find out what happened. She said programs that failed in the first round were allowed to reapply. This time, the state didn’t rely on EdReports. They did their own review of Success for All, and the program was approved.  
Melinda Young:As soon as I got the news, I sent it out to all of the principals.  
Emily Hanford:This is Melinda Young, the Steubenville superintendent.  
Melinda Young:It was on a Friday evening, and it was crazy because they all responded back within, I would say, five minutes. It was like relief. Yes, relief.  
Emily Hanford:Ohio’s list was updated in time to save Success for All in Steubenville, but we know of at least two schools in Ohio that had already decided to drop Success for All before the state approved it. And as hundreds of school districts in the state were looking for new reading programs over the past year, not a single one reached out to the Success for All organization about adopting their program.  
Christopher Peak:The decisions schools and districts are making now will affect how reading is taught for the next five, 10 years, maybe more.  
Emily Hanford:This is my co-reporter, Christopher Peak, again.  
Christopher Peak:And a lot of money is being spent. Ohio gave out more than $50 million to help districts pay for new reading programs, and most of that money is going to programs that got good ratings from EDReports.  
 So can you just start off by introducing yourself?  
Eric Hirsch:Sure. I’m Eric Hirsch and I’m the chief executive officer of EdReports.  
Christopher Peak:Eric Hirsch started off our interview by talking about the history of the organization.  
Eric Hirsch:It’ll be our decade anniversary in March, and it’s been fairly amazing.  
Christopher Peak:But he hesitated a bit when I asked him about the influence his organization is having right now.  
 I’ve seen EDReports come up a lot in state regulations or state laws about you should be looking to EDReports to figure out is this a good program or not? And I was wondering what you make of that? Is that a good thing to have EDReports in state regulations? How do you feel about that personally?  
Eric Hirsch:We say EdReports is a place to start.  
Christopher Peak:He repeated this several times in our interview.  
Eric Hirsch:EdReports is a place to start. EdReports is a place to start. We believe curriculum is a place to start, right? And EdReports is a place to start.  
Christopher Peak:He told me EdReports shouldn’t be the final say on what the best reading programs are.  
Eric Hirsch:EdReports provides information from the lens of our educator reviewers, and we believe it’s helpful to districts and states in understanding what’s in the materials. Before EdReports, there was not a lot out there, not much to go on.  
Emily Hanford:But the thing is, a lot of states and school districts have been treating EdReports as more than a starting point. They’ve been treating it as a gatekeeper, a place that can tell them which programs are compatible with the Science of Reading and which ones aren’t.  
Christopher Peak:And EdReports has been telling teachers its reviews were based on that science. I found a blog post they published in 2023, it said, “EdReports has always reviewed instructional materials for the Science of Reading.”  
Emily Hanford:But then critics started pointing to curriculum that was getting good reviews from EDReports, but include the queuing strategies that conflict with the Science of Reading, and curriculum that was not getting good reviews but have evidence that showed they’re effective.  
Christopher Peak:And recently, EdReports has made some changes. They now include a Science of Reading summary with the reviews that highlights how well programs teach foundational skills. And just a few months ago, they changed the review tool. Programs that teach the queuing strategies will now automatically fail.  
Emily Hanford:So is EdReports going to go back and re-review all the reading programs they’ve already rated?  
Christopher Peak:No, they’ve already released ratings for 86 reading programs, and they’re not going to go back and do those reviews again.  
Emily Hanford:So a lesson here seems to be that our reporting has put pressure on the system to try to do better, to do more to make sure that reading instruction lines up with research. And in the rush to do that, states are looking at an established organization for guidance, but that organization wasn’t designed with the Science of Reading in mind. Nancy Madden, the co-creator of Success for All, told me she doesn’t want her program to be rated by EDReports.  
Nancy Madden:I don’t want to validate that approach to reviewing what instruction should be. It’s the wrong approach. We need to judge what’s the outcome. We need to look at what is the evidence of effectiveness.  
Emily Hanford:And she’s worried that all the talk these days about the Science of Reading won’t result in better outcomes for kids, that we’ll look back in a few years and say, “That didn’t work.”  
Nancy Madden:We have to maintain the expectation that kids really can succeed. We have to remember that kids can learn. We can do better. There’s a way to do it. You could be Steubenville.  
Al Letson:If you haven’t heard the Sold a Story podcast from the team at APM Reports, I can’t recommend it enough. There are 13 episodes so far, and Emily and her team aren’t done.  
 One of the things they’ll be looking at next is how President Trump’s cuts to the Department of Education and other federal programs will affect reading research and reading instruction.  
 To find out more about their great podcast or to get in touch with the reporters behind it, visit soldastory.org.  
 Emily Hanford reported today’s episode, along with Christopher Peak. Additional reporting by Olivia Chilkoti, Kate Martin, and Carmela Guaglianone. Curtis Gilbert edited today’s show.  
 Sold a Story is supported by The Hollyhock Foundation and the Oak Foundation, with additional support from the Ibis Group, Esther A. & Joseph Klingenstein Fund, and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. Betsy Towner Levine fact-checked today’s show. Legal review by Mark Anfinson.  
 Reveal’s production manager, Zulema the Great Cobb. Score and sound design by Chris Julin with additional mixing and scoring by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning.  
 Support for Reveal is provided by The Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation.  
 Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.  

Nadia Hamdan (she/her) is a reporter and producer for Reveal. She’s worked on a wide range of investigative stories covering elections, immigration, health care, gun violence, and more. Most notably, she co-reported and produced the historical investigation “40 Acres and a Lie,” exploring a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains. The project was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize and the winner of an Edward R. Murrow Award, a duPont-Columbia Award and a National Magazine Award. Nadia also once conducted an entire interview while riding a mule. Reach her at nhamdan@cir.org or on Signal at nadiaCIR.42.

Nikki Frick is a copy editor for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and WashingtonPost.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

Steven Rascón is the production manager for Reveal. He has also produced the KQED podcast On Our Watch: New Folsom, a serial investigation into the death of two whistleblowers inside California’s most dangerous prison. Their reporting has aired on NPR stations such as Capital Public Radio, WHYY, and KCRW. He also helped produce the Peabody-nominated Reveal podcast series Mississippi Goddam. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.