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

Sold a Story : responses

Here are two responses to the podcast Sold a Story : How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

From a letter signed by fifty-eight teachers, writers, and administrators. “A call for rejecting the newest reading wars”:

We’re dismayed that at this moment in our history, when all of us should be banding together to support literacy education, the podcast Sold a Story fans divisiveness, creating a false sense that there is a war going on between those who believe in phonics and those who do not.

From a reply to that letter signed by more than 650 current and former teachers, “For the students we wish we’d taught better”:

A central point of the Sold a Story podcast is that the research “wars” around foundational reading skills were already won and lost decades ago — and that few educators have ever heard of this research, because an entire industry of education publishers, coaches and curriculum writers have either ignored or actively resisted it, needlessly encumbering the efforts of thousands of teachers like us, our students, and their families along the way.

If you’re a regular reader of Orange Crate Art, you already know what I think about Sold a Story and reading instruction.

Sold a Story updates

I gave up waiting for follow-up episode(s) to the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong. And now I find out that two follow-up episodes appeared in May, “Your Words” and “The Impact.” You can find them via the link above.

Sold a Story might be the most important podcast series I’ve listened to. It explains so much.

Thanks, Rachel.

Related reading
A handful of Sold a Story posts

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.]

Sold a Story

Coming tomorrow, from American Public Media, a podcast series by Emily Hanford: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

In 2018 Hanford wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times: “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?”

Here’s a related article from the Times: “In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat.”

If you have any doubt that reading instruction has gone wrong, listen to the average, everyday college student read aloud in class. But that’ll be difficult to do, because many instructors have learned not to ask students to read aloud. It’s likely to be painful.

Related posts
Reading, really fast : A story from my literacy tutoring : W(h)ither grammar

[“Read aloud”: I don’t mean cold-calling on students to read. I mean, say, asking a student to read a passage that they’ve referenced in a discussion.]

Reading in NYC schools

Big news in The New York Times: reading instruction will be changing in New York City schools:

Hundreds of public schools have been teaching reading the wrong way for the last two decades, leaving an untold number of children struggling to acquire a crucial life skill, according to New York City’s schools chancellor.

Now, David C. Banks, the chancellor, wants to “sound the alarm” and is planning to force the nation’s largest school system to take a new approach.

On Tuesday, Mr. Banks will announce major changes to reading instruction in an aim to tackle a persistent problem: About half of city children in grades three through eight are not proficient in reading. Black, Latino and low-income children fare even worse.

In a recent interview, Mr. Banks said that the city’s approach had been “fundamentally flawed,” and had failed to follow the science of how students learn to read.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault,” Mr. Banks said. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.”

Over the next two years, the city’s 32 local school districts will adopt one of three curriculums selected by their superintendents. The curriculums use evidence-supported practices, including phonics — which teaches children how to decode letter sounds — and avoid strategies many reading experts say are flawed, like teaching children to use picture clues to guess words.

The recent podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong is a great introduction to the theory and practice of reading instruction in the United States. Though it’s not mentioned in the Times article, I think it must have something to do with the changes in New York City.

Related reading
A few OCA Sold a Story posts

[The Times link is a gift link. No subscription needed.]

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

Sold a Story again

The first two episodes of Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong became available yesterday. They’re revealing and infuriating. Now I understand what my children’s teachers meant when they said that they used “a balanced approach” — they meant nothing in particular, with only a smattering of phonics. Fortunately, our children learned to read before starting school, as Elaine and I did.

Here’s an example (not from the podcast) of the wrongheadedness that can underlie opposition to instruction in phonics, from an educator who learned to read before starting school. He writes that he

can’t really ever think of “sound it out” as a strategy for me when I encountered words I didn’t know. Asking other people is my go-to strategy even today, as I wander into my 60s.

And how, you may wonder, did those other people figure out how to pronounce those words — if indeed they’re pronouncing those words correctly.

Only last night did it occur to me to wonder: when college instructors outline the textbook in class and give out “study sheets” (i.e., questions and answers) for exams, are they merely slacking off, or are they compensating, consciously or not, for their students’ reading deficiencies?

[And quick, someone get that educator a dictionary.]

Lear, window treatments, pie

I was teaching King Lear and running into difficulty trying to find the play in a Complete Works. So I went off on a tangent about the importance of looking up unfamilar words. I had given the students a paragraph about dorp, and almost no one had looked up the word. “Dorp is a plant,” I said. The point of the assignment was to look up dorp, because without knowing what the word means, you couldn’t understand the paragraph.

We had already run ten minutes over, and I now tried to figure out act and scene numbers to assign the next chunk of Lear. But I couldn’t.

I stopped in the department office on my way back to my office, and a colleague handed me a pink while-you-were-out message. A local group of progressives had called, wanting to talk to my son. I explained to my colleague that my son had said that he didn’t want to be paraded around as a model student.

I walked to my office, which I was sharing with a colleague. I said hello, and she replied from her side of a partition. She had a rolling desk chair, which she had bought or requisitioned after attending a faculty orientation about office furniture. “Now I know what kind of chair I need,” she said.

In the hallway, someone walked by and asked where window treatments could be found. I suggested walking to the end of the hallway. “You’re headed in the right direction,” I said. “And now I know that procrastination is a bad habit,” my colleague added from her side of the partition.

I knew I should prepare for my next class, also on Lear, but instead I went out to a basement hallway with a low ceiling to offer apple pie or Nesselrode pie to new faculty. This activity would count as “service.” “Can I talk to you for a minute about one of your colleagues?” the dean asked. She sounded worried.

This is the twenty-fifth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: Thinking and talking about the podcast series Sold a Story: phonics, meaning, and so-called context clues. Talking about the Atlantic article “The Writing Revolution,” about changes in curriculum at Staten Island’s New Dorp High School. Waiting at a light next to a truck with an enormous window strapped to its side. One of the titles in the Complete Works: Ever Wherever.]

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

My proof that I never knew phonics

I learned to read before kindergarten, picking it up at home. I was one of the fortunate kids who learn to read without formal instruction. In the Brooklyn school of my childhood, we had Dick and Jane books and were taught reading by way of the look-say or whole-word method. But how do I know that I was never taught phonics?

Here’s how. When we moved to a New Jersey suburb at the start of my sixth-grade year, my class had, as a regular feature, an exercise with words and sentences projected on a screen for rapid reading. It must have been an exercise in pronunciation, because I remember frequent references to the schwa. Schwa this. Schwa that. I never knew what schwa meant, and my guess is that I must have felt too embarrassed to ask, “What’s a schwa?” That would’ve been just one more way to look like an outlier. I did, however, know how to pronounce the words we were reading.

These days I understand the importance of phonics in reading instruction. See the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

Reading in Massachusetts

“Lost in a world of words” is the first in a series of articles about the state of reading instruction in the state of Massachusetts (The Boston Globe ). An excerpt:

Before the pandemic, only about half of public school third-graders had adequate reading skills. Post-pandemic, the story is even worse.

Scores for all third-graders have slipped below the 50 percent mark, and the most vulnerable kids are in serious trouble; 75 percent of low-income third-graders could not pass the reading comprehension test on last spring’s MCAS [Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System] exam. Roughly 70 percent of Black third-graders, 80 percent of Latino students, and 85 percent of children with disabilities couldn’t understand grade-level reading passages well enough to answer questions about them accurately.

It bears repeating: The vast majority of Black and Latino children and kids with disabilities are being sent off to the fourth grade — where students start reading to learn instead of learning to read — hobbled by this major deficit, which has cascading effects on spelling and writing as well. Some can’t sound out words on the page. Others can’t understand what they’re reading. Many never catch up; they drop out of high school or fail to finish college. The social and economic rifts in our society widen.

Just wait for Skippy the Frog.

The podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong is a great introduction to what’s at stake.

A last 2¢ about phonics

Imagine trying to learn a new language — Greek, say, in any of its varieties. It would be impossible to figure out words and their pronunciation without knowing the sounds that the letters make.

Now imagine being four or five or six and learning to read in your own first language. It would be impossible to figure out words and their pronunciation without knowing the sounds that the letters make.

I think that’s the clearest case that can be made for the importance of phonics.

[I thought of this brief bit on my own before realizing that there’s something like it in the podcast Sold a Story, about college students who are taught to read a few words in Korean with or without learning the Korean alphabet. The students who hadn’t learned the alphabet were, of course, lost when looking at unfamiliar words.]

“The End of the English Major”

In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes about “The End of the English Major.” Here’s Amanda Claybaugh, a Harvard professor, speaking:

“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

Which reminds me of something I wrote after listening to the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong :

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.

Just one factor among many, but a factor.

[One aside: An English department is at odds with itself if its students get tote bags that say (or brag?) “CURRENTLY READING” but its professors think the department “should do more with TV.”]

Investing in reading

“A new study found that California schools got positive results from a targeted investment in the science of reading — even with the challenges of pandemic recovery”: “What Costs $1,000 Per Student and Might Help Children Learn to Read?” (The New York Times, gift link).

But — sigh — my daughter Rachel points out that the photograph accompanying the article shows the “whole language” approach to reading instruction in practice — the opposite of what “the science of reading” is all about.

The best place to begin learning about the work of teaching children to read: the podcast series Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.

Related reading
All OCA literacy posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, I e-mailed the Times.]