The (Lucy Calkins) empire strikes back

From The Atlantic : “How Lucy Calkins Became the Face of America’s Reading Crisis,” in which Helen Lewis wonders how Calkins can reclaim her good name. A recent e-mail from the magazine refers to Calkins as “the scapegoat” for the reading crisis.

I see so much self-mystification and evasion of fact in Calkins’s response to her fall from favor. Just one example: Emily Hanford, who produced the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, noted a passage in Calkins’s The Art of Teaching Writing (1994) that assumes a world of privilege:

They [student writers] will ask about the monogram letters on their bath towels and the words on their sweatshirts.

Now Lewis reports that Calkins had a “financially comfortable but psychologically tough” childhood:

That is why, Calkins told me, “nothing that Emily Hanford has said grates on me more than the damn monogrammed towels.” But she knows that the charge of being privileged and out of touch has stuck.

Privileged? Well, yes. Affluence and parental cruelty can of course go together. (Lewis notes that Calkins’s parents were both doctors.) And who was it who mentioned monogrammed towels to begin with? Not Emily Hanford.

If you’d like to read more of my thoughts about the crisis in reading, this post would be the one to read: To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell, with the text of an e-mail that I wrote to Calkins and two other prominient promulgators of “balanced literacy” and guessing at words — I mean “hypothesizing.”

Helen Lewis’s article makes really strange reading coming after a recent Atlantic article by Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”

Related posts
All OCA Lucy Calkins posts and Sold a Story posts

The states of reading

“Dozens of cities and states across America are overhauling the way their schools teach reading — attempting to close gaps exacerbated by the pandemic”: Axios surveys states’ approaches to reading.

On striking detail: Mississippi, next to last in fourth-grade reading proficiency in 2013, rose to twenty-first in 2022: “State legislators and educators tried a number of strategies, including screening kids for literacy, hiring literacy coaches for teachers, and emphasizing phonics.” Hmm, phonics.

Here in Illinois, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that in spring 2023, nearly 35% of third through eleventh graders were reading at grade level. “This is a great sign for the state of Illinois that we are really back on track,” the state's superintendent of education said. He wasn’t joking: in 2021 and 2022, 30% of students were reading at grade level. Maybe it’s time for phonics.

In Berkeley, California, where only 26% of Black students are proficient in reading, schools are still using Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study  (EdSource ).

Thanks, Joe, for pointing me to the Axios article.

Related reading
All OCA posts about teaching reading (Pinboard)

A mother looks at “balanced literacy”

“RIP Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. You helped turn learning to read into a rich family’s game”: Kendra Hurley, the mother of two reading-challenged students, writes about the rise and fall of “balanced literacy” (Slate ).

Hurley makes an especially interesting suggestion about why those on the hard right are so enaamored of phonics — because they seek any opportunity to undermine faith in public schools. There is of course nothing inherently conservative about teaching the sounds that letters make, no more so than there is about teaching the alphabet itself.

Just one related post
To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell (My take on “balanced literacy”)

Gothamist hears from Lucy Calkins

WNYC’s Gothamist reports on the dissolution of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. And Lucy Calkins responds:

“I stand by what I have said often: In every corner of the city, some of the highest achieving schools are those using the Units of Study and have been partnering with the Reading and Writing Project,” she said.

Indeed, high-achieving schools are using the Calkins curriculum. Those schools represent the world that the Calkins curriculum was designed for, where kids have grown up reading the monograms on their bath towels. What Calkins fails to mention is that low-achieving schools use that same curriculum.

From the Gothamist report:

[New York City Schools Chancellor David] Banks often invokes city students’ poor reading test scores as proof that the previous approach was not working. Citywide, he says, just over half of students are not reading at grade level, including 64% of Black students and 63% of Latino students.

“Our teachers have been criticized … but I think we gave them the wrong playbook for how to teach children to read,” Banks said.

Calkins warns that the city is about to implement what she calls “a one-size-fits-all basal reading program.” But if phonics is one-size-fits-all, then so is the alphabet. And so what?

Basal sounds as if it too is meant as an insult. But there’s nothing wrong with laying a foundation.

A related post
TCRWP LC? LLC! (Close-reading the Teachers College statement about the dissolution of TCRWP)

TCRWP LC? LLC!

Teachers College, Columbia University is dissolving the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project:

Moving forward, TC wants to foster more conversations and collaboration among different evidence-based approaches to literacy, and ensure our programs are aligned with the needs of teachers and school districts looking to partner.

To support this objective, the work of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) and its staff will transition to an Advancing Literacy unit within TC’s Continuing Professional Studies (CPS) division for the 2023-2024 year, a return to its original professional development roots. The entity TCRWP, founded in 1981, will be dissolved as part of this shift. TC is working to align the work of TC staff with the needs of school districts and changes in reading curriculum locally and nationwide.

For many years, TCRWP’s founding director Lucy Calkins led efforts to support teachers as they develop students as readers and writers. Dr. Calkins has stepped down as Director of the Reading and Writing Project. She is Robinson Professor in Children's Literature at Teachers College, a tenured faculty member in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching, on sabbatical during the 2023-2024 academic year.

“Many teachers credit TCRWP for creating communities of practice where teachers gain valuable resources and support,” says KerryAnn O’Meara, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Provost and Dean of the College. “TC is grateful to Dr. Calkins for her service.”

Dr. Calkins shares her expertise as a consultant through her own LLC. Teachers College is not involved in the operations or provision of services provided by Dr. Calkins in her LLC.

Notice some of the language of this statement:

~ “Evidence-based approaches”: that sounds, no pun intended, like phonics.

~ “Aligned with the needs of teachers and school districts”: because so many have dropped Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study curriculum.

~ “The needs of school districts and changes in reading curriculum locally and nationwide”: the New York City school system is one of many that have abandoned Calkins’s Units of Study curriculum.

~ “‘TC is grateful to Dr. Calkins for her service’”: my, that’s perfunctory. Yes, thank you for your service. I think we’re done here.

And what is Lucy Calkins doing on sabbatical? She’s doubling down and striking back against what she calls “fake reading wars” with an LLC, Rebalancing Literacy. In one of the videos on her website, she claims that podcasts and newspaper articles are scaring the public into thinking that teachers aren’t teaching children “their ABCs.” That’s not an accurate claim. Of course it’s not the alphabet that’s missing; it’s phonics.

One has to wonder why Calkins has created an LLC to do this work. Might she developing a new curriculum to market?

The best way to learn about what’s at stake in the so-called reading wars: listen to Emily Hanford’s podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong (American Public Media). It’s the most consequential podcast I’ve ever heard.

Last year I wrote an e-mail to Lucy Calkins and two other prominent advocates of so-called “balanced literacy,” sharing my thoughts after listening to Sold a Story. No replies, of course.

Related reading
A handful of OCA Sold a Story posts (Pinboard)

[The post title: TCRWP is no more. What’s Lucy Calkins going to do? Create an LLC.]

Reading as a civil-rights issue

From The New York Times: “Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for ‘the science of reading.‘ Can they get results?” With news about a new documentary, The Right to Read. From the trailer: “This is a civil-rights issue.” LeVar Burton is the executive producer. We’ve asked a newly elected member of our school board to request a screening.

The shot already heard round the world: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, a podcast series by Emily Hanford (American Public Media).

Related posts
Education and freedom : Learning to read : To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell

To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell

I’m up to episode five in Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong. The podcast remains utterly infuriating — so much wrongheaded thinking about the teaching of reading, so many children damaged as a result. And so much money made from curriculum materials that teach children to read the way poor readers read — by guessing at words, or as those who promulgate these methods now say, “hypothesizing.”

I ended up writing an e-mail to Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, three prime movers behind reading instruction whose work is examined in the podcast. Here’s what I sent:

I’m moved to write to you after listening to the podcast Sold a Story. Not a flattering title from your perspective, to be sure.

I write as a retired professor of English with thirty years of teaching at a regional state school. I came to reading at a young age, well before kindergarten. We were a family of modest means, but I had a dad who read to me every night, a shelf or two of books in the house, The New York Times every day, and a public library. I was one of the lucky kids who catch on to reading without explicit instruction in phonics.

It wasn’t until I volunteered as a literacy tutor working with non-reading adults that I realized how important explicit instruction in phonics is. The program I volunteered with was big on sight words: MEN, WOMEN, EXIT, and so on. I asked at one meeting what students were supposed to do when encountering a word they’d never seen before. There was no answer. I somehow got hold of a phonics curriculum and worked for several years with a man in his fifties who learned to read well enough to read a Rules of the Road handbook and pass the written test for his driver’s license.

So I understand the value of phonics. But it wasn’t until I listened to Sold a Story that I began to realize the extent to which the deficits in many of the students I taught as a college professor must have been related to a lack of instruction in phonics. Something I learned early on: not to ask students to read aloud in class. It can be painful. I don’t mean cold-calling on students; I mean just asking a student to read, say, a sentence or two from a text to support a statement about that text. Things are different, I’m sure, with students at elite institutions. But many a college student, in my experience, cannot read aloud with any fluency. It’s. Word. By. Word. When I realized that I had to feed students words here and there, I knew that it was time to give up on reading aloud.

And now after listening to Sold a Story I better understand why students so often would guess at the meanings of unfamiliar words when reading, instead of using a dictionary. They had been taught to guess about words by using so-called context clues. I would explain, again and again, that often the most important context for understanding the meaning of a word is the word itself, something that you can find only by using a dictionary. In other words, there’s no need to guess. And if you do guess, there’s no way to know if you’re right.

I wonder in retrospect about so many elements of college life. I wonder about the extent to which the dreary professorial practice of outlining the textbook on “the board” is not merely a matter of professorial laziness but a way to compensate, consciously or unconsciously, for students’ weaknesses as readers. And I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.

Your curriculum and others like it have done, I believe, great damage to the cause of reading. When so few elementary-school students (even pre-pandemic) can read at grade level, when so many high-school and college students profess to “hate reading,” it’s clear that something has gone wrong.

Sincerely, &c.

My e-mail to Professor Calkins added that though my family had books and The New York Times in the house, we had no monogrammed towels. From Calkins’s The Art of Teaching Writing (1994): “They [student writers] will ask about the monogram letters on their bath towels and the words on their sweatshirts.” Is it privilege yet?

*

In Education Week, Calkins has responded to Sold a Story (without mentioning it by name) by mischaracterizing advocates of instruction in phonics:

The message that has been pushed out by some phonics advocates, and that has trickled down to parents and even some educators, is an oversimplified one: If only teachers would teach phonics exclusively, then presto, all the reading problems in the world would vanish.

No one pushes out that message. No one would advocate teaching phonics exclusively or claim that phonics solves all reading difficulty. But phonics is a foundation. Without a foundation, you’re likely to be on shaky ground.

Related reading
A few OCA Sold a Story posts