Emily Hanford introduces the first episode of her new podcast, Sold a Story.

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

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Producer DJ Cashmere spent seven years teaching Black and brown students at a Noble Street charter high school in Chicago. At the time, Noble followed a popular model called "no excuses." Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college. After DJ left the classroom to become a journalist, Noble disavowed its own policies — calling them "assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist, and anti-black." In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.

Camille Leihulu Slagle is Native Hawaiian. She always knew she wanted to go away for college. Education would help her afford to stay in her homeland. Life in the islands is expensive. Camille wants to give back to her people through science, studying the volcanoes central to Hawaiʻi's landscape and culture.

Audio documentary: Standing in Two Worlds

Native American students are just a tiny fraction of all the college students in the United States. They come with different histories, confronting an education system once used to erase their languages and cultures. In this project, three Indigenous college students tell how they are using higher education to strengthen ties to their Native roots and support their people.

Photos: See portraits of the students in this documentary

Even before the pandemic, campus counselling services were reporting a marked uptick in the number of students with anxiety, clinical depression and other serious psychiatric problems. What is a college’s responsibility for helping students navigate mental health challenges, and how well are colleges rising to the task?

Read more: Inside the college mental health crisis

Colleges and universities in the United States attract more than a million international students a year. Higher education is one of America’s top service exports, generating $42 billion in revenue. But the money spigot is closing. The pandemic, visa restrictions, rising tuition and a perception of poor safety in America have driven new international student enrollment down by a jaw-dropping 72 percent.

Read more: The U.S. may never regain its dominance as a destination for international students. Here's why that matters.

Many schools around the country are struggling to find enough teachers. Large numbers of teachers quit after a short time on the job, so schools are constantly struggling to replace them. The problem is particularly acute at rural schools and urban schools. The most common level of experience of teachers in the United States now is one year on the job.

At the same time, enrollment in teacher training programs at colleges and universities is plummeting, and schools are looking to other sources to fill classrooms.

In Nevada, a desperate need for teachers this year led to allowing people with just a high school diploma to fill in as substitutes. Oklahoma recently changed its law to allow people with a bachelor’s degree — in anything — to teach indefinitely on emergency teaching certificates. Schools in Texas are increasingly turning to for-profit teacher training programs.

Data we obtained shows that nearly one in four of the teachers hired in Texas last year came through a single for-profit online program — one that’s now making its way into other states. We’ll look at the implications of these changes, both for children and for the teaching force.

Today, more Black and Hispanic teachers enter the classroom through alternative pathways than through traditional teacher degree programs. The number of teachers of color in the United States has more than doubled since the 1980s in large part due to the growing number of preparation and certification pathways and recruitment efforts from the federal level down. But there's a catch: Many of these teachers won’t stay for long, further undermining efforts to get diversity in the teacher labor force to reflect the diversity of students in the United States.

Learn more: Who wants to be a teacher?

Critics of the rise in alternative and for-profit programs will claim teacher quality, and student learning, suffers when people are fast-tracked into the classroom without comprehensive training. But it’s hard to know for certain whether that’s true. The problem is, despite decades of trying, we haven’t agreed on how to measure teacher quality. There’s a lot of research that shows having a good teacher makes a huge difference in the outcomes of students, but it’s much less clear what makes a teacher good.

Learn more: Who wants to be a teacher?

Beginning in the early 1980s, a lot of states began to open up the pathways to becoming a teacher. People who already had a bachelor’s degree in something else didn’t need to go back to college to get trained in teaching. Policymakers hoped this would solve teacher shortages by getting more people into the profession, but it’s also opened up a whole new business model in educator preparation: Online for-profit teacher training programs have proliferated, and they’re growing fast. One program in Texas has become the single largest educator preparation program in the United States by enrollment, and it’s expanding into other states.

Learn more: Who wants to be a teacher?