A state literacy specialist once told our host, point blank, that nobody at the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education could verify what grade level a paragraph was written at. That same department is about to assign public A-through-F letter grades to every school in Missouri.

This episode traces the actual mechanics behind those letter grades — how the test questions deciding them get written, who writes them, and how "rigorous" got redefined along the way. Governor Kehoe gets a fair hearing for his actual reasoning. The math doesn't get one.

Full sourcing and links at youreadthatwrite.com.

The Pedagouge is hosted by Jami Hunt-Williams — a secondary English teacher with 19 years in the classroom, and founder of You READ That WRITE Curriculum Architecture, where real classroom research meets what's coming next in reading recovery. More at youreadthatwrite.com.

If this hit home, leave a review — it's the fastest way to help another teacher find the show.

Since 2000, the research has been clear: teach sounds with letters, and reading outcomes nearly double. Teach the same sounds without them, and they don't. So how did a program built the wrong way end up in 70% of U.S. school districts?

Drawing on investigative reporting from Karen Vaites' Curriculum Insight Project, this episode traces how it happened — and asks what it means for the secondary students nobody was even watching.

Full sourcing at youreadthatwrite.com.

The Pedagouge is hosted by Jami Hunt-Williams — a secondary English teacher with 19 years in the classroom, and founder of You READ That WRITE Curriculum Architecture, where real classroom research meets what's coming next in reading recovery. More at youreadthatwrite.com.

If this hit home, leave a review — it's the fastest way to help another teacher find the show.