The best part about writing an essay on the TV series Young Sheldon was that it gave me the excuse to say “I’m working!” whenever anyone walked into the family room. It’s a dream assignment for an academic who is also a huge pop-culture junkie. “Bazinga” indeed!

However, the worst part was that the show ran for seven seasons and 141 episodes when the finale aired on May 16, a longevity of which I was blissfully unaware when accepting the invitation. That made for a lot of streaming over the past couple months, about 65 hours’ worth. (To prove I watched them all: Roadhouse, “He has a learner’s permit and his own phone line,” Joy of Painting, “Wow, this 27-inch TV is huge,” 90210). Our Young Sheldon would never have made such a miscalculation.

The Boy Genius

The main character is Sheldon Cooper, a character first introduced during the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–19). As an adult, Sheldon is a theoretical physicist at Caltech. The actor Jim Parsons plays Sheldon on TBBT and narrates Young Sheldon (often unreliably). Iain Armitage plays the younger Sheldon.

As an adult, Sheldon often mockingly jokes about his family’s (and everyone else’s) lack of intellect. But TBBT ends with him expressing genuine appreciation for his family and friends’ support. Young Sheldon attempts to present how that appreciation developed.

The show takes us back to his childhood in the small town of Medford in East Texas, a few hours outside of Dallas. Sheldon lives with his dad, George, a high school football coach; his mom, Mary, a homemaker who initially works part-time at her church; Georgie, Sheldon’s older brother; and Missy, Sheldon’s twin sister. Sheldon’s maternal grandmother, Meemaw (played masterfully by Annie Potts), lives a couple houses down the street.

As the series opens in 1989, Sheldon is starting high school as a nine-year-old, which is awkward for Georgie, who is also starting 9th grade. Over the course of the series, Sheldon graduates early from high school, graduates early from a local university, and by the end is about to depart for graduate school at the age of 14.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the popularity of both shows, which were among the 10 highest-rated programs for most of their combined 19 seasons. It’s not hard to see why: sharp writing, good character development, first-rate acting, and clever use of celebrity cameos and featured players all make for a fun viewing experience. The major themes are also highly relatable, ranging from family dynamics and friendships to the tensions between science and religion and between academics and athletics.

I had not been a regular viewer of Young Sheldon or The Big Bang Theory. I enjoyed TBBT but only dipped in and out during its last seasons. I surely missed lots of inside jokes that regular viewers of both shows appreciated. And although I have pages and pages of notes, I will stick to my assigned task: exploring whether Young Sheldon accurately portrays the issues faced by advanced students and their families.

What the Show Gets Right

Young Sheldon captures many of the characteristics and experiences of highly advanced children. Sheldon has very high expectations for his academic performance and struggles with failure (getting a “poor grade,” a spectacularly unsuccessful college project, ignoring sage advice from his professors on applying to summer programs). He tends to be full of himself and doesn’t react well to perceived slights. He abhors group work (as do his college classmates!), and he goes out of his way to avoid boredom. He is more than a little obsessive-compulsive. Sheldon loves his family, if often struggling to show it. His frenemy Paige, another young genius, rebels against the high expectations of others, struggles with her parents’ divorce, and admits to pretending not to be smart in order to be more popular. These are not atypical traits of many smart people—among both children and adults!

I loved that the writers resisted pathologizing Sheldon’s weirdness. Other shows with genius characters tend to succumb to the temptation to depict them as being on the spectrum or having debilitating personality disorders. But that is not Sheldon Lee Cooper. Sure, he is odd and different, but how could someone highly intelligent not appear weird to most other people? I’m reminded of a reception at an academic conference where I noticed a friend standing off by himself. I asked if he was OK. He replied that he was doing great, noting with a sweep of his hand, “It’s great to be in a room where I’m not the quirkiest person.”

A good example of how the writers treat his weirdness is an exchange with Mr. Lundy, the drama teacher. Sheldon declares a passion for acting, despite never having attempted it. The teacher says, “Well, I like that confidence,” to which Sheldon replies, “Thanks, most people find it off-putting.”

That exchange takes on added importance when it becomes clear that Sheldon actually is a good singer and dancer, requiring little practice. But as he prepares to star in the school musical, his anxiety prevents him from taking the stage. That doesn’t make him a freak; it makes him human. He knows what he’s like and how people view him. He just doesn’t care most of the time. Mr. Lundy observes, “You’re an odd little boy, but you make it work” (S1, Ep16). It’s worth noting that Sheldon reacts by nodding in appreciation.

Over time Sheldon becomes humbler in different contexts and gradually more self-aware. He’s helped along by his family, like when Meemaw notes, “It’s great to have knowledge, but you don’t have to show it off all the time” (S4, Ep2). In those situations, Sheldon is mildly taken aback but tends to learn from them. Especially in later seasons, he is often shown to be adaptable, shivering in revulsion during—but tolerating—situations that would have made him flee screaming (literally!) at the beginning of the series. The older Sheldon cares more and adjusts to each person’s expectations—not always successfully, but he makes the effort.

One of my favorite scenes in the series is when he asks one of his professors, the perpetually annoyed Dr. Linkletter, to help him understand sarcasm (S6, Ep15). It plays like a modern version of “Who’s on first?”, with Sheldon struggling to figure out which comments are sincere and which are sarcastic. (Everything Dr. Linkletter says is dripping with sarcasm.) Sheldon gets that sarcasm exists, he knows he struggles to pick up on it, and he tries to learn how to be sarcastic. He’s just not good at it. And that’s OK! We all have our struggles, and I enjoyed seeing the portrayal of a super-smart child that resists making him into either a superhero or super-weirdo.

One Thing That Didn’t Work . . . and One that Hit Close to Home

One unrealistic development was the school district’s willingness to accelerate Sheldon from elementary school to high school, then to let him graduate early to enter college. Such grade skipping is a radical, if sometimes necessary, intervention. I liked how the decisions at various points reflected reasonable parent concerns (Is he emotionally ready for this? Are we?). But let’s be frank: How many districts are willing to entertain such big steps and to openly facilitate them? Very few, in my experience.

The show actually reinforces this point throughout its run. In each season, there is at least one situation in which Sheldon’s parents wrestle with a major decision about their son’s future. The entire first season is about whether Sheldon can adjust to high school as a nine-year-old, with Mary especially concerned about him making friends and being safe. The family struggles with the decision to graduate high school early, start college early, and go overseas for a summer physics program. In real life, the lack of public-school or low-cost services for advanced students forces families to make difficult decisions with little preparation and few resources. If Sheldon’s K–12 educators had not been so oddly willing to radically accelerate him, the family’s education struggles would have been even more severe. Why do we make advanced education so hard for American families?

An aspect of Sheldon’s schooling that feels very accurate is the reaction of his high school teachers to both his presence and early departure for college. The teachers’ feelings are exaggerated and played for laughs—and Sheldon’s behavior toward them is highly offensive—but those scenes didn’t sit well with me. When I was an elementary school teacher, we had a couple extremely smart students, and the comments in the teachers’ lounge about them were often mocking and lacking in empathy. The students were not that weird; compared to Sheldon and Paige, they were quite normal! But they were just different enough—and just smart enough—that sometimes they were treated like aliens. The exasperated attitude of Sheldon’s teachers (both in high school and at college!) was a sharp reminder that most educators have little to no training in advanced education or the needs of advanced students. This lack of preparation often leads to confusion and miscommunication among educators, students, and parents. Why do we make advanced education so hard for American educators?

Hot Take: The Show Should Be Called The Cooper Family

In full disclosure, I didn’t like the show initially. Working through the first few episodes, the repetitive plots and stereotypical characters felt like caricatures. A lot of the “insights” in those early episodes started to feel like “laugh at the nerd” or “pity the awkward genius” tropes that make it hard for me to sit through other shows with very smart characters.

But something changes in the middle of that first season. The focus shifts from the travails of an annoying genius to the adventures of a family with lots of quirky members, one of whom happens to be quite smart. That’s when the series starts to click and become both multidimensional and more entertaining.

Parenting a highly precocious child is rarely easy, and the show does a good job noting the many frustrations faced by the children themselves, their parents, their siblings, their educators, and even members of their community (like Pastor Jeff). Sibling jealousy! Protecting your child from being exploited! The sacrifices a family makes for the benefit of one child! These are all common concerns in families with advanced students.

With the shift to family dynamics, fully realized by the middle of season four, the standard sitcom formula (this thing happens, and here’s how people react) becomes more complex. Scenarios still occasionally center on Sheldon, but plot lines increasingly address how Sheldon reacts to the problems of others. That is, it becomes a fuller portrait of how families actually work. Missy’s teenage struggles bother Sheldon, and he and the other family members struggle to be supportive. His parents’ relationship issues bug him and his siblings, but they can’t figure out how to react, or if they should react at all. Sheldon’s superior intelligence does not give him special insights into these common problems because he has never experienced them before. That feels accurate to me, too.

Not that Sheldon’s parents always get it right. They often hold him to lower standards than he holds for himself. An early attempt to send him to a boarding school for advanced students falls apart far too soon, yet he shows that he can handle attending college. He has opportunities to attend Caltech and other top-tier universities on free rides, yet his parents prefer that he study at the fictional East Texas Tech. In part because they don’t understand his abilities, and in part because they overestimate his social and emotional fragility, they make several important decisions that are rather ill-advised. As a parent of bright children, this resonates. The academic in me always advises people to “let them fly!” while the parent in me is thinking, “but not too far, too fast!” This essential tension is depicted with compassion throughout the series.

In the End, It’s All about Wisdom

Much of the show can be summarized by this comment about Sheldon in Season 2: “How can he be so smart and so clueless at the same time?” This is a common observation about highly talented children, and it reflects the difference between intelligence and wisdom. A child may be intellectually brilliant, but their lack of experience often slaps them on the head as they barrel through life.

From a psychological perspective, this is to be expected. Parents have decades of hard-earned wisdom that children simply do not have. As the series progresses, Sheldon’s family, friends, and mentors help him gain the context and experiences that gradually make one wise. They also do it for Georgie and Missy—and Meemaw often does it for George and Mary—which makes sense.

I am going to miss the Cooper family, and not just because I spent nearly every day with them over the past two months. Young Sheldon provides an accurate depiction of the struggles of a bright child and the family dynamics that impact and are impacted by that child. It also reminds us that a key goal of parenting and families is to help each other become wiser about interacting with the world. It’s hard to imagine a television show that depicts this more accurately, and with such heart.

Jonathan Plucker is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and a past-president of the National Association for Gifted Children. He appreciates the feedback of Amalia Pompe, Kathleen Plucker, and the editors on an earlier version of this essay.

Reporters love to tell “how I got that story” stories about landing an exclusive interview or being in the right place when news happens. American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, though, is hard-pressed to identify a specific moment or event that set in motion her project of the last several years—a high-profile series of radio documentaries and reports on how America’s public schools teach kids to read. Collectively, these efforts amount to the most significant body of work produced by an education journalist in the last few decades. The effects of Hanford’s reporting are undeniable: shifts in classroom practice, countless school-district curriculum adoptions, and legislation in nearly every state in the country aimed at advancing instruction grounded in “the science of reading.”

Hanford’s job afforded her an opportunity rare among education journalists: hours of time to spend in schools observing teachers and students. “I spent a whole lot of years in a lot of classrooms,” she recalls. “I would just put a microphone on a kid or a teacher and follow them throughout the day. When you make documentaries, you put in all these hours of just trying to see something unfold in search of a scene or a moment that illustrates a point.”

Hanford describes many of her early efforts as “low-impact,” but over time those hours of following kids and teachers around prompted her to reflect on what they were actually accomplishing. “I feel like I went to school from 2008 to 2018, and in the back of my mind I was always thinking, ‘What are the kids really learning here?’”

A report on remedial education in college brought her in contact with students who, by their own admission, couldn’t read or write very well, which made Hanford curious how it was possible to get so far in school lacking in such basic skills. “It’s not as if they didn’t deserve to be there,” she explains. “It was pretty clear to me from talking to them and their instructors that they were bright people.” If there was an aha moment that launched her investigation into reading, it was interviewing one such student who told Hanford about her dyslexia. Subsequent conversations with researchers and advocates in the dyslexia community opened Hanford’s eyes to “a huge body of cognitive-science research on reading and how it works. It helped me understand that those kids’ troubles were connected to something larger that was affecting all kids,” she recalls. Dyslexic kids “are the most screwed when there’s not good instruction, but a whole lot of kids get screwed.”

In 2018, Hanford traveled to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to report on a school district that seemed to have cracked the code on reading instruction. From 2015 to 2018, the percentage of kindergarteners at or above the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) benchmark reading score soared to 84 percent from 47 percent. The explanation? Bethlehem Area School District administrators had begun training teachers to teach reading in a completely different, research-backed way. The report and podcast that came of this, Hard Words, made waves around the education world and beyond, winning the Education Writers Association’s inaugural Public Service Award. Since then, Hanford has continued her crusade, finding school after school where kids have been harmed by poor curriculum and instruction and fundamental misunderstandings about reading and how to teach it.

Hanford is a rarity in education reporting, in that her work focuses almost exclusively on classroom practice rather than education policy, politics, or personality stories. With this specialty, she has struck a rich vein of ore and, perhaps unwittingly, written a playbook for other education journalists. At the very least, her methods and focus raise an intriguing question: are there similar stories waiting for enterprising education journalists to pick up and run with the way Emily Hanford has done with the science of reading?

Hiding in Plain Sight

In no way does it minimize Hanford’s effort or impact to observe that, from the perspective of reading researchers and literacy experts, her work wasn’t news per se. America’s “reading wars” have been waged longer than most of their current combatants have been alive. In 1955, Why Johnny Can’t Read–And What You Can Do About It by Rudolf Flesch brought attention to the insufficient “look-say” method of “Dick and Jane” readers. A Nation at Risk reported in 1983 that “some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.” More recently, the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report “Teaching Children to Read” martialed explicit evidence that systematic phonics instruction is more effective at teaching kids to read than instruction that does not include phonics.

Nor was every education journalist asleep at the switch. In 2007, Education Next published Barbara Feinberg’s withering assessment of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and its founding guru, Lucy Calkins (see “The Lucy Calkins Project,” features,  Summer 2007). Ten years ago, Alexander Nazaryan, a former teacher, penned a New York Times op-ed titled “The Fallacy of ‘Balanced Literacy.’” Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute wrote dozens of articles and op-eds as far back as 1997 criticizing unsound literacy instruction in New York City schools and championing the work of E. D. Hirsch Jr. In 2014, Tim Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Illinois Chicago, wrote an authoritative takedown of leveled reading, pointing out that there was virtually no evidence supporting it. “I don’t believe that these experts have intentionally misled teachers,” he wrote, “but that they were so sure they were right that they misled themselves.” Hanford says she read all of these “hugely helpful” articles while developing her work; another inspiration she cites is the 2017 book Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg, retired professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Hanford’s achievement, then, was not in discovering the weaknesses in popular approaches to teaching reading but in making their flaws accessible to lay readers and listeners—getting them invested by humanizing the story, quantifying the cost to students of subpar instruction, and explaining in vivid detail the intersecting impulses and interests that made it possible for reading instruction to go so wrong for so long. But even this doesn’t fully account for the galvanizing effect of her podcasts Hard Words (2018) and Sold a Story (2022). When studying schools from afar, it’s easy to view bad reading scores as the fault of bad teachers. If you increase spending on teacher training, and the improvement is still not there, then there’s even more blame to unload on them. Decades of education reform and associated media coverage largely accepted this judgment. But Hanford’s reporting flipped this assumption on its head, creating a permission structure for teachers to be seen (and, critically, to see themselves) as unwitting victims of poor training and inadequate curricula—not the indifferent, incompetent, or union-protected layabouts of common caricature, reluctant to change and unmoved by low reading levels or achievement gaps between groups of students. This flipped perspective helped catapult Hanford into the limelight. Sold a Story was the second-most shared show on Apple podcasts in 2023. It earned an Edward R. Murrow award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia award,  and a nomination for the Peabody, among the oldest and most prestigious awards in broadcasting.

Indeed, the contrast between Hanford’s framing and major-media coverage of education over the past two decades helps explain how her work broke through where earlier, similar efforts failed. Recall that in 2008, TIME magazine put Michelle Rhee on its cover holding a broom, symbolizing her intention to “sweep” bad teachers out of classrooms in Washington, D.C., the school district she ran as chancellor. Rival magazine Newsweek was even less nuanced. Its 2010 cover story blithely asserted that the key to saving American education was simply (and simplistically) “we must fire bad teachers.” These high-profile pieces of education journalism tacitly assumed that teachers knew what to do and that poor results represented incompetence or failures of will.

Those assumptions were also baked into test-based accountability policies and largely unquestioned in the media reports and documentaries like Waiting For Superman that marked the No Child Left Behind era: show me bad student outcomes and I’ll show you bad teaching. In Hanford’s telling, teachers are less the sinners than those sinned against—literally “sold a story” by schools of education, commercial publishers, and a rogues’ gallery of self-interested gurus including Calkins, Marie Clay, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, among others. The Bethlehem school district adopted the motto “When we know better, we do better” as an acknowledgement of past mistakes and a commitment to future students. Hanford showed that teachers cannot be held solely accountable for decades’ worth of false and largely unquestioned premises embedded in so-called best practices and functionally enshrined in education policy. Vindication for the misplaced blame was evident in teachers’ responses to Sold a Story—Ariela Young, a teacher from Florida, wrote to Hanford and said, “As I was listening, I kept saying—oh my goodness, this is me! I am angry! I am frustrated! I hope to pass on the knowledge I have gained to my fellow teachers and to keep looking forward.” The contrast with two decades of finger-wagging at teachers for poor performance can hardly be overstated.

If the measure of education journalism is its influence on classroom practice and public policy—and other journalists—Hanford’s impact is unmatched. As improbable as it may sound, the minutiae of reading instruction have become national news. In August of 2022, TIME published Belinda Luscombe’s “Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read.” A couple of weeks later, The New Yorker weighed in with “The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy,” effectively mocking the ineffective “cueing” strategies at the heart of the failed instructional practices that had supplanted phonics-based lessons in elementary schools. In April 2023, after Sold a Story was released to critical praise, the New York Times chimed in with a piece called “‘Kids Can’t Read’: The Revolt That Is Taking On the Education Establishment.” Other prominent outlets to cover the issue include PBS (“Why More U.S. Schools Are Embracing a New ‘Science of Reading’”); New York Magazine (“Did New York City Forget How to Teach Children to Read?”); and Slate (“The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Kids’ Schools”).

The impact on public policy has been even more pronounced. In July 2023, the Shanker Institute published a report titled “Reading Reform Across America,” which tracked evidence-based and science-of-reading-based legislation from 2019 to 2022, overlaying neatly on the years in which media coverage of the science of reading reached its zenith. The report found 272 bills containing the word “phonics,” 146 containing the word “evidence,” and 40 containing the phrase “science of reading.” Legislation aimed at changing classroom practice spanned 45 states and the District of Columbia—all in the years following Hanford’s Hard Words. Shanahan describes a “Hanford effect,” which has transformed the way we talk about reading. “I looked up the term ‘science of reading’ in LexisNexis over a period of years,” he said. “In a typical year during the 2000s it came up about 4 times a year. Then Emily posted her first documentary that used the term and voila, it was showing up about 150 times!”

Finding the Next Sold a Story

The impact of Hanford’s exploration of reading instruction invites a thought exercise: if the weaknesses of common literacy curriculum and instruction have been known for decades to education researchers, dyslexia advocates, and some number of practitioners—and if those weaknesses have been waiting for effective public-service journalism to break through and galvanize a public-policy response and drive changes in classroom practice—are there other facets of classroom practice ripe for the same treatment?

Let’s consider the conditions and characteristics that enabled Hanford to devote the time and energy necessary to produce her body of work. Again, her job as a documentary journalist means producing “long lead” work with many hours of unstructured observation time in K–12 classrooms—an advantage few daily print or broadcast reporters can match in the face of daily deadlines. “I have the kind of job where I can read like crazy and dig into research,” Hanford adds. “And I tend to be a pretty fast reader.”

Education reporters rarely enjoy that kind of unfettered access to classrooms, and even when they do, they often lack the experience to be shrewd judges of teaching and learning. This almost certainly explains why so much education reporting tends to focus on policy, politics, and out-of-school issues, which can be produced with little or no classroom time or experience. A review of the Education Writers Association’s annual Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting gives an idea of the type of reporting currently in favor and most likely to garner attention. The most recent winner, “The Price Kids Pay” by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards of ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune, was a series of pieces on Illinois police ticketing students for classroom misbehavior. Other recent winners include “How Missouri became a safe haven for faith-based boarding schools” by Laura Bauer and Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star, and “Racism at the Virginia Military Institute” by the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira. Jacques Steinberg’s New York Times series on 3rd-grade reading, titled “Room 3-223,” was the most recent Hechinger prize–winning piece covering curriculum and instruction. It was published in 1997. The relative glamour and accessibility of political hot topics and policy fights in education has taken center stage, while the arguably more consequential business of curriculum and instruction remains under-covered and largely undiscussed. Hanford’s work revealed the scope and scale of these types of issues when they go ignored for decades. For reporters inclined to dig further into them, the door is wide open.

If hiding-in-plain-sight pedagogical issues spark the interest of ed journalists, then those journalists will need the kind of support that Hanford received, particularly in time and funding. Fellowships offered by universities and foundations can afford journalists the resources required for high-impact investigative reporting like Hanford’s—but, like recent Hechinger Prize winners, many of these fellowships are more likely to invest in politics and policy controversies than in-depth coverage of classroom practice. Though the Spencer Foundation’s “large” research fellowships in education reporting purport to “span a wide range of topics and disciplines,” five of the seven most recent awardees are centered on identity or inequality. Only two of the eleven recipients in the Education Writers Association’s 17th class of reporting fellowships focused on curriculum adequacy. Sparking change in instructional practice requires deep engagement and thorough attention to research. The success of Sold a Story should lead fellowship judges and philanthropists to support education journalism that seeks the classroom access Hanford enjoyed and the discerning eye she developed.

Reporters looking to follow this playbook must also be prepared to defend their work against sometimes strident criticism from “experts.” Critics have complained that Hanford’s reporting, and the burgeoning interest in the science of reading it helped trigger, risk creating the perception that phonics instruction alone is the key to raising strong readers. Her reports “do not provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of a reading program,” observed Tim Shanahan, “but I don’t think we should expect them to do so, and I don’t accept that her identification of this problem prevents anyone from teaching other essential aspects of reading.”

The most obvious next act for education journalism is a deep-dive into reading comprehension, how it is taught and tested. Enterprising reporters will find a rich irony here: if decoding (phonics) is a skill that’s been insufficiently taught, reading comprehension isn’t a skill at all. Yet generations of educators have been trained to teach it like one, relying too heavily on instruction in reading strategies that ostensibly can be applied to any text. A walk-through of elementary school classrooms will often reveal posters encouraging children to make predictions and inferences, visualize what they’re reading, and employ tips and tricks like “determine the author’s purpose” or “make connections” by relating a text to their lives, other texts, or the world around them. Such displays hint at a mistaken belief that comprehension is a transferable skill like riding a bike: once you learn to pedal and balance, you can ride virtually any bike. Reading comprehension is much more complicated, heavily dependent on students’ vocabulary and background knowledge specific to a text—a reality that schools often neglect. (Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion 3.0, begins to scratch that reading-comprehension itch in his article “Why Are Books Disappearing from English and Reading Classrooms?” features, Summer 2024.)

The nature of reading comprehension implies the need for a school curriculum that is rich in vocabulary and that valorizes knowledge-building across a wide variety of subjects, using a wealth of challenging texts. If education journalists were to probe, they might find surprisingly little attention given to curriculum and a near-reckless indifference to ensuring a student experience that is coherent and cumulative—an experience that builds knowledge and skills within and between grades. Contrary to popular belief that public school curriculum is top-down and aggressively monitored, nearly all U.S. teachers—99 percent of elementary teachers; 96 percent in secondary school—draw upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts. And unfortunately, these supplementary materials have been shown, more often than not, to be of questionable quality, low rigor, and unlikely to build content knowledge.

Reporters who view education through a social-justice lens might find their base assumptions being challenged as they dig deeply into a topic such as reading comprehension. Fashionable thought and practice dictate that school curriculum should reflect students’ cultures and prior experiences. However, this well-intended impulse might do more harm than good if it limits access to the language, contexts, and background knowledge that literate speakers and writers assume their readers possess: historical and literary allusions, cultural references, and idiomatic language. As E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued, “public education has no more right to continue to foster segregated knowledge than it has to foster segregated schools.”

Doug Lemov is currently at work on a book on “the science of reading post-phonics.” He cites “the overwhelming importance of fluency” as a subject that deserves closer scrutiny. When students are not fluent readers, they read less, and when they do read, their working memory is devoted mainly to figuring out what the words say, not what they mean. Lemov, who has visited thousands of classrooms in his career, also cites the role of attention in reading and learning as a topic that’s ripe for investigation. “Reading is an act of managing your own attention and sustaining a state of concentration,” he said. Quiet is essential to thinking and learning, “but we almost build schools to be distraction machines,” he observed. “It’s almost like we’re oblivious to the research.”

The greatest lesson from Hanford’s reporting, and the thing that made Hard Words and Sold a Story at once gripping storytelling and impactful journalism, is more subtle yet more easily replicable by education journalists across all media. To put it bluntly, the critical theme was the failure of experts. Indeed, the “villains” of Hanford’s exposés were the experts. Lucy Calkins was a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Irene Fountas is on the faculty of Lesley University. Gay Su Pinnell is an emerita professor at Ohio State. For reporters, skepticism is a virtue. When it comes to covering the classroom, it’s essential. But effective investigative reporting will require journalists to cultivate a wider network of sources, including parents, advocates, and researchers—particularly cognitive scientists and others who study learning—rather than reflexively deferring to credentialed experts in education whose thumbprints are all over failed pedagogies and curriculum.

Emily Hanford’s stellar work has made it clear that uncovering misconceptions embedded in common classroom practices is fertile ground for education reporters to work, but it’s unlikely reporters can mount such an effort on their own. News outlets must see this kind of work as valuable and support it accordingly. Philanthropists and support organizations must recognize that journalistic probes of what happens in the classroom have greater impact than the personality and politics stories that the media currently tends to favor. And above all, education reporters need to make it their business to study the ins and outs of teaching and learning and go deeper than covering school board meetings and budgets. There is so much for children to gain through the sustained and enterprising efforts of journalists.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of How the Other Half Learns (Avery, 2019). Riley Fletcher is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R., and Fletcher, R. (2024). How to Be the Next Emily Hanford: Journalism has driven a generational shift in how reading is taught. Similar stories are waiting to be told. Education Next, 24(3), 14-21.

Folks in education policy and practice often obsess over whether pop-culture depictions of school life are accurate. But they aren’t, even when they try to be. How plausible is it, for example, that “Prez,” the hot-headed and impulsive rookie cop in HBO’s gritty drama The Wire, accidentally kills a fellow police officer during a botched undercover operation yet somehow still gets hired and finds redemption as a compassionate and dedicated Baltimore public school teacher?

Worse, when the favorite reforms and policy plays of education reformers are skewered by the entertainment-industrial complex, we react as though the takedown carries the weight of an executive order. When John Oliver did an anti-charter school exposé on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, it was as if he were not a comedian but the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow himself, who famously denounced Joe McCarthy on See It Now. When I asked one high-profile ed reformer why she was treating a comedy show as an existential threat to her work, she sternly replied, “This is where people get their news!” Well, then, people are fools.

This brings us to the latest pop culture artifact to inspire sturm und drang over the policy ramifications of its setting, characters, story arc, and political point of view. Abbott Elementary is a television sitcom created by Quinta Brunson, who also plays the lead as teacher Janine Teagues. The show, which premiered on ABC in December 2021, revolves around the daily lives of the teachers and staff of a fictitious public school in Philadelphia. It has been widely praised for its witty portrayal of life in an urban school, attracted millions of viewers, and won three Emmy awards.

The show is set in Abbott Elementary School, located in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia and beset by the standard litany of features associated in the public imagination with struggling inner-city schools: lack of funding, outdated equipment, and a staff that is overworked and underpaid. Despite these obstacles, the teachers and staff are (naturally) dedicated to making a difference in the lives of their students.

Brunson herself is aware of the limitations of her creation and seems almost embarrassed by the attention it’s received among educators. “I know it sounds bad, but a lot of people are like, ‘Wow, you did this thing to show how under-appreciated teachers are, to change the world,’” she said at a TV industry panel discussion last year. “Not really. I really just wanted to make a good workplace comedy.”

So, does Abbott Elementary get the details right?

No, of course not! Am I mumbling? It’s not an ethnography of an inner-city school; it’s a network sitcom, for Pete’s sake! Are you serious?! When the script requires teachers to talk to one another, which they do constantly, they don’t think twice about leaving their classrooms unattended. For all their complaining about never having time to prepare lessons, they spend an awful lot of time hanging out in the faculty lounge and chatting in the hallway. The main characters teach a range of grade levels, from kindergarten to the upper grades, yet somehow, they all seem to have the same lunch period. On staff development days, the room is filled with extras, suggesting the school has a large faculty. Yet when a charter school peels away some 3rd-grade students, Abbott’s 2nd grade teacher is forced to teach both grades in a single classroom. Children are little more than set dressing on Abbott Elementary and they only rarely speak (yeah, right). In my Bronx 5th grade classroom, I had students as old as 12 and 13, but some of the upper-grade Abbott kids look old enough to drive.

The show’s idea of a “disruptive student” is a child who calls out off-topic references to a TV show in class while his classmates are sitting in rapt attention to the teacher’s science lesson (on TV, teachers are still the “sage on the stage,” not the “guide on the side”). It’s the kind of mild misbehavior that calls for “planned ignoring” at best and likely wouldn’t even merit a teacher’s attention in an actual classroom, let alone become fodder for a storyline. The child is sent to the office of the principal, a vain, self-absorbed, and ineffective figure who commands little respect from her staff. When she sends the child back to class with a toy, the rest of the class erupts. That’s his punishment? Now they, too, want to be sent to the principal’s office.

OK, so that part is realistic. Nailed it.

A major plotline in the second season of Abbott Elementary involves a charter school that opens nearby. Naturally, this sent the commentariat into overdrive for an inevitable round of plumbing light entertainment for important political messages. The New Yorker devoted several pages in a March issue to a discussion of how Brunson’s “superb sitcom became an unabashed polemic against the privatization of a public good.”

Must we? Really? Very well, if we are going to take our public-policy cues from a network sitcom and fact-check the script, let the record show that charter schools are public schools, not private; they do not hand-pick high-performing kids, nor can they kick them out for struggling academically. The Abbott crew mistakenly receives a box of textbooks meant for Addington, the gleaming new charter down the block run by Legendary Charter Schools. When they deliver the books to snoop on the upstart school, they run into a former Abbott teacher who was let go for kicking a student. “I don’t do that anymore. Anger management,” the charter-school teacher chirps brightly, then adds in a conspiratorial stage whisper, “At a charter school there’s a lot less oversight in the hiring process. So, it’s been pretty sweet.”

Abbott Elementary does drop the occasional hint that traditional public education, too, is something less than an unalloyed civic good. When Brunson’s earnest and adorable main character, Janine, wants to paint her classroom to match the look and feel of Addington, the principal stops her because that would run afoul of the rules laid down by “the Philadelphia Department of Education, Animal Shelters, and Traffic.” A veteran teacher tells a young colleague to take down a schedule he created to ensure the school’s new curriculum gets taught. “Being a teacher is being asked to do the impossible, year after year,” she tells him, “and our only solution is to show up every day and try our best.” It’s meant to be maternal advice, but it could just as easily land as low expectations. On Reddit, real-life teachers have expressed disapproval at the sins the show commits against the science of reading: the three-cueing method of instruction debunked in Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast lives on at Abbott Elementary.

The most unrealistic touch of all is Abbott itself. If neighborhood public schools were filled with the funny, likable, and dedicated teachers of Abbott Elementary, there would be no charter schools. Addington is filled with new books, French classes, a new computer lab, and more—in contrast to Abbott, which (you know how this sentence is going to end) is “underfunded,” not badly managed. Still, if charter advocates are looking for retribution for the sins committed against their sector by Abbott Elementary, they can start and finish with the Philadelphia public school system, where only a third of students in grades 3 to 8 met reading standards in the 2021–22 school year. And that was robust compared to math, where just 17 percent were up to snuff. According to data released in May by the district, three out of four Philly schools met between zero and 33 percent of their academic targets for the school year, which is no laughing matter.

Abbott Elementary plays to the conventional notions of those outside the edusphere and mines for laughs many of the standard myths and homilies of teaching. The city predicts the prison population based on reading performance. Barbara, a wise veteran, tells her young and earnest colleagues, “Your students can either fear you or respect you.” Sending a kid to the principal’s office makes a young white teacher, an awkward and clueless newbie whom savvy viewers will recognize as a Teach For America tintype, feel like “the mayor of White Guiltsylvania.”

But don’t blame the lack of sophistication on Brunson and company. They’re actors, writers, and comedians, not ed policy people. They’ve created a slight but amusing enough workplace comedy whose major faults lie not in its portrayal of an urban elementary school, but in the irritating tics TV viewers have come to associate with other workplace comedies, such as The Office, on which it’s modeled: the “mockumentary” style of rapid shifts and zooms, and characters breaking the fourth wall and shooting knowing glances at the camera to land weak jokes that even the writers seem to know merit more smirks than belly laughs.

As a kid, I watched an ungodly amount of television. Columbo and The Streets of San Francisco made detective work look fascinating. And every Saturday night, Emergency! made working as a paramedic seem like one exciting adventure after the next. Welcome Back, Kotter, though, didn’t make me want to be a teacher. The “Sweathogs” in that sitcom’s remedial ed classroom reminded me a little too much of the tough kids who mocked and intimidated me in metal shop. The point is, a lot of us form our ideas about various occupations from television shows—and most of these impressions are far from realistic.

But television is meant for entertainment, not elucidation. And know—as always—that when those of us in the education arena argue over whether a TV show is true-to-life or not, accurate or mythologizing, it’s a telltale sign of motivated reasoning: “Abbott Elementary reminds me so much of the teachers I know!” (Read: pay us more). “That’s not what it’s like at all!” (Read: open more charter schools). It’s just a television show. If every district-run school in Philadelphia were like Abbott Elementary, you wouldn’t put your kid in a charter. Or teach in one.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of How the Other Half Learns (Avery, 2019).

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R. (2023). Does Abbott Elementary Get Teaching in an Inner-City Public School Right? Entertainment, not elucidation. Education Next, 23(4), 56-59.

A decade or two ago, those in the education-reform business used to lament that education didn’t get the attention it deserved. Their faith that a star turn would energize school improvement played a big role in explaining the huge fuss education reformers made about the niche film Waiting for Superman in 2010.

Well, since that time, education has finally gotten its turn in the spotlight. During the Common Core brouhaha, in fights over school closure and masking, and in clashes over critical race theory and gender identity, schools have gotten a raft of media attention—though not of the kind that those wonks imagined.

Indeed, in 2022, school masking received more media attention than Ron DeSantis or quarterbacking icon Tom Brady (who retired, un-retired, got divorced, and had his worst season of the millennium). Given a changing media landscape, profound shifts in education, and polarizing public debates, it seems useful to step back and examine the extent and focus of media coverage.

What gets covered? What doesn’t? Does the coverage seem proportionate? Such a look can serve as a useful reality check: Is one’s particular sense of the public debate broadly accurate, or could it be distorted by echo chambers and the funhouse mirror of social media?

This all seems especially relevant after the pandemic. The past few years have seen extraordinary attention to schooling—featuring ferocious debates about school closures, masking, critical race theory, gender identity, school choice, and more. How much attention did these various topics actually garner? And how did the attention to pandemic-era issues stack up against that devoted to other 21st-century education developments?

To answer these questions, we examined the prominence of various topics over the past 20 years. The numbers for 2022 were collected between January 1 and October 31 and then prorated to estimate a full-year number. We used the search engine LexisNexis (a database of news articles from national and international media outlets) to identify the number of articles each year that mentioned each topic.

For those interested in the details: We used Lexis Nexis’ academic search engine Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic), which offers access to 17,000 news, business, and legal sources. In all cases, we searched for articles in the LexisNexis category “Newspapers” and set the location as “United States-US.” Now, while such a search is comprehensive, it is not exhaustive. For example, blogs and some education-specific media (such as Edu­cation Week) are not included. These parameters give us confidence that the results are a pretty good gauge of attention across the broad sweep of journalistic coverage—rather than coverage in blogs or specialized outlets.

A few particular notes: To avoid jargon-induced confusion, we used full terms rather than acronyms (so we searched for “social and emotional learning” rather than “SEL” or “critical race theory” rather than “CRT”). To avoid confusing broader social debates with those more focused on schooling, we included the term “schools” when searching a non-education specific term like “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Covid-19 and Culture Clash

During the pandemic, which topics commanded the bulk of media attention? For starters, it can be striking to realize that topics which have been unavoidable during the pandemic and in its aftermath were wholly invisible just three years ago. Critical race theory, school masking, and remote learning combined received less than 500 media mentions in all of 2019. School masking alone received far more than that each week in 2022 (See Figure 1).

Starting in 2020, though, the cluster of issues around Covid-19 and our culture clashes catapulted into public view. In 2020, remote learning drew more than 20,000 media hits. School masking drew only a fraction of that attention, receiving almost 3,000 mentions. Meanwhile, attention to school vaccinations and critical race theory actually saw only modest increases. And then, in 2021, the culture clash took off, as the attention paid to diversity, equity, and inclusion tripled and that to critical race theory exploded more than tenfold.

By 2022, even though many states had dropped mask requirements in 2021 and most others did so in early 2022, masking drew 48,000 mentions—nearly four times as many as in 2021. It’s a figure that dwarfs every other topic. It’s not clear whether this was due to debates about dropping mask requirements or retrospective evaluations of the wisdom of masking.

Meanwhile, it can be surprising to note that other topics which have drawn much attention of late—including school-related vaccinations; issues related to transgender students; or diversity, equity, and inclusion—were already garnering substantial attention before 2020. The topic of transgender in schools received more than 5,000 mentions every year from 2015 to 2019. School vaccination received more than 1,000 mentions in 2019 and diversity, equity, and inclusion more than 2,000 that year.

Looking at 2019–2022, it’s as if America raced through four different eras in the span of 36 months: from a pre-Covid-19 order, to a world dominated by remote learning, to one focused on equal parts critical race theory and school masking, and finally to one dominated by school-masking and debates about gender identity.

School Choice

School choice has loomed large in the education conversation throughout the pandemic. Indeed, amidst public-school closures, the success of many private schools at staying open, the embrace of homeschooling, and the passage of a raft of state legislation, 2021 was dubbed “The Year of School Choice.” Given that school choice seemed omnipresent in the public discourse during the pandemic, we were curious to see whether the media coverage bore that impression out. Figure 2 shows the results.

The most pandemic-specific school-choice innovation was probably “learning pods”—clusters of families which arranged for teachers to work with their children. For those who inhabit the world of education policy, it might seem like learning pods were a widely discussed phenomenon in the first year of the pandemic. Yet it turns out that learning pods never gathered more than scant attention—peaking at similar numbers as school vaccinations did each year in the decade preceding Covid-19.

Surprisingly, the pandemic wasn’t an especially high-profile time for school choice. “School choice” saw no meaningful change in media coverage during the pandemic from pre-2020, with the number of mentions actually dipping in both 2020 and 2021 and then returning to roughly the pre-pandemic norm in 2022. The same pattern applied to school vouchers and tax credit scholarships, while homeschooling saw a noticeable (but relatively short-lived) 2020 bounce.

The Eddies of School Reform

How did the K–12 coverage during the pandemic experience compare to what we’ve seen before? The pandemic seemed to elevate some education issues to unprecedented visibility. If we broaden the lens, what changes might we see in the swirling eddies of “school reform”?

It turns out that the plight of 21st-century reform was impacted by the pandemic but less dramatically than we might have expected (See Figure 3). From 2020 to 2022, for instance, we saw topics of blended learning and social and emotional learning reaching new highs. However, those highs weren’t especially high. Blended learning reached 1,000 hits in 2012, topped 2,000 in 2019, peaked at nearly 3,000 in 2020, and then fell sharply to about 1,300 in 2022. Social and emotional learning exhibited a remarkably similar pattern. What explains the big declines in 2022, and whether those turn out to be blips or something more substantial, is a question worth exploring.

That ebb and flow of reform is a familiar pattern. If one examines Figure 3 as a whole, what leaps out is the rhythmic rise and fall of various reforms. The early years of the century saw a half-decade of steadily increasing attention to No Child Left Behind; as that started to recede, the twin Obama-era fascinations of Race to the Top and teacher evaluation came to the fore. And not long after that, the Common Core emerged as the dominant issue on the educational landscape.

Perhaps the one exception to the general pattern is school choice, which hasn’t had the clear rise and fall that characterizes most reforms. Rather, school choice consistently collected between 3,000 and 5,000 hits between 2005 and 2012 and between 5,000 and 10,000 between 2013 and 2020.

No Child Left Behind, Common Core, School Choice, and Critical Race Theory

Figure 4 offers a visual that may help to make sense of the often-messy ebbs and tides of early 21st-century school reform. It presents a handful of the most prominent school reforms, illustrating that it may make sense to think about the past few decades as defined by three (and a half) peaks.

The first of these, spanning roughly the length of the Bush administration, was the decade-long rise and fall of No Child Left Behind. The second was the more rapid ascendance of the Common Core, with its heated debates and swift decline. That was followed by a school choice half-peak, when a dearth of other high-profile reforms and the efforts of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos yielded several years when choice defined the landscape—albeit with about half the attention devoted to No Child Left Behind or the Common Core at their peaks. The third, during the pandemic, has been the explosive cultural clash about race-based curriculum and pedagogy, playing out under the banner of critical race theory.

This larger shift, from slow-moving policy debate to rapidly emerging cultural clashes seems to capture some fundamental dynamic at work in both education coverage and schools at large. It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary shift, brought on by social media and a polarized politics, or is something more permanent.

Ron DeSantis, Tom Brady, and School Masking

Finally, we really feel like we should show you the graphic we mentioned back at the start. We weren’t exaggerating when we noted that high-flying Florida governor Ron DeSantis and seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback Tom Brady got less coverage than school masking this year. And, if one were to sum up the attention devoted to masking, critical race theory, transgender students and schools, blended learning, and social and emotional learning, one could conclude that education, in total, receives substantial attention.

Now, there’s an important caveat here. For starters, those wishing for schools to get more media attention do well to note that the attention tends to focus on the dramatic and the controversial. In our experience, those urging more coverage tend to have in mind careful accounts of complex school-improvement strategies. A quick perusal here suggests that the things which grab media notice appear to be novel or controversial, which means that even extensive attention isn’t likely to yield much of that kind of coverage.

A larger point here may be that coverage is most likely when there’s a sense that the issues at stake have a direct impact on daily lives. Masking and vaccinations certainly fit that bill. Controversies over the Common Core or critical race theory raised real concerns among parents and educators, on both sides of the debate, that their students or their schools were going to be scarred by politically motivated adversaries.

Takeaways

Over the past decade, education has become a routine part of the public debate in a manner that once would have seemed difficult to imagine. Indeed, back in 2008, Brookings Institution scholars calculated that just 0.7 percent of national news coverage involved education. They lamented this state of affairs and argued that schools should get a lot more public attention. Well, when we contemplate the exhaustive coverage of school closures, Covid-19 interventions, and culture clashes, it’s a reminder to be careful what you wish for.

As we survey the results of this little analysis, at least three takeaways strike us.

The first is that coverage gravitates towards those things which have a real and immediate impact on families, communities, and educators. While this may seem blindingly obvious when written this way, it’s striking how frequently it’s been overlooked by education reformers intent on devising ways to promote more media coverage of esoteric initiatives or complex reform strategies.

A second is that it’s eye-opening to realize how some topics which have been ubiquitous during the pandemic were wholly invisible just three years ago. It’s a reminder of how rapidly a variety of high-profile reforms or issues have dominated and then departed the education landscape. That should be a caution for school leaders, funders, and advocates inclined to scramble to rethink their mission or vision in accord with the latest (but often short-lived) changed reality.

A third is that, outside of masking and school choice, there was pretty much an across-the-board decline in media attention to K–12 topics in 2022. As we look to 2023, with the pandemic behind us, attention ebbing with regard to things like blended learning and social and emotional learning, and a focus on some of the culture clashes appearing to have eased, we’ll see if the new year starts to look more like 2019—or if we’re off into a very different, post-pandemic era. Time will tell.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next. Ilana Ovental is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2012). The Newsroom’s View of Education Reform: Surprise! The press paints a distorted picture. Education Next, 12(3), 77-78,