How Lucy Calkins Became The Face Of America S Reading Crisis The Atlan

Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name? Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write.

Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.” Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for.

A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years... (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.) In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and... Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations. But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated.

The result was a reading crisis in America. November 20, 2024 @ 7:43 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and education Helen Lewis, "How one woman became the scapegoat for America's reading crisis", The Atlantic 11/13/2024: Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name?

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name.

They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.” But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years... (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.) "Balanced literacy" guru Lucy Calkins has become the "scapegoat for America's reading crisis," suggests Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Calkins' early reading curriculum, Units of Study, was once wildly popular.

Now it's seen as ineffective, especially for students whose parents aren't able to teach them phonics at home or hire literacy tutors. Emily Hanford's 2022 Sold a Story changed the conversation on early reading instruction. Ignoring what researchers have learned about how children learn to read, "balanced" programs such as Units of Study encouraged students to guess at a word's meaning from the context, sentence structure or a picture,... In recent years, half the states have passed laws to "change reading instruction, requiring it to align with cognitive science research about how children learn to read," writes Christopher Peak for APM Reports. Other states are considering similar efforts. Reading gains in Mississippi -- the "Mississippi Miracle," -- also have inspired a shift to the "science of reading," which calls for teaching decoding explicitly and systematically, while building students' vocabulary and knowledge.

New York City, which once mandated "teaching Lucy," has rejected Units of Study. In September 2023, Columbia University's Teachers College dissolved Calkins' reading-and-writing education center, writes Lewis. A Network Connecting School Leaders From Around The Globe Summary: Is Lucy Calkins a "Scapegoat" for America's Reading Crisis? By Natalie Wexler, November 17, 2024 Lucy Calkins, a prominent figure in literacy education, has become a focal point in the debate over America’s reading crisis.

Helen Lewis's article in The Atlantic, titled “How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis,” examines whether Calkins deserves the criticism she faces. Natalie Wexler critiques this article, highlighting overlooked complexities in Calkins’ curriculum and broader systemic issues in literacy education. The national reading crisis is often framed as a failure to teach phonics systematically, with critics like Emily Hanford focusing on Calkins' inadequate phonics instruction. Calkins has since revised her curriculum to address these concerns. However, Wexler argues the issue extends beyond phonics. Problems in Calkins’ curriculum also include a flawed approach to reading comprehension and writing instruction, which Lewis’s article fails to adequately address.

Calkins emphasizes reading comprehension as a set of transferable skills, such as “making inferences,” but cognitive science shows comprehension heavily depends on knowledge and vocabulary related to the text. Without foundational content knowledge, students struggle to understand complex texts even if they can decode words proficiently. Wexler stresses that focusing solely on phonics risks neglecting the broader knowledge-building students need for success. Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write.

Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.” But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years...

(The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.) In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and... Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations. But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated. The result was a reading crisis in America.

The podcast said that “a company and four of its top authors” had sold this “wrong idea” to teachers and politicians. The company was the educational publisher Heinemann, and the authors included the New Zealander Marie Clay, the American duo Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, and Calkins. The podcast devoted an entire episode, “The Superstar,” to Calkins. In it, Hanford wondered if Calkins was wedded to a “romantic” notion of literacy, where children would fall in love with books and would then somehow, magically, learn to read. Calkins could not see that her system failed poorer children, Hanford argued, because she was “influenced by privilege”; she had written, for instance, that children might learn about the alphabet by picking out letters... In Hanford’s view, it was no surprise if Calkins’s method worked fine for wealthier kids, many of whom arrive at school already starting to read.

If they struggled, they could always turn to private tutors, who might give the phonics lessons that their schools were neglecting to provide. But kids without access to private tutors needed to be drilled in phonics, Hanford argued. She backed up her claims by referencing neurological research into how children learn to read—gesturing to a body of evidence known as “the science of reading.” That research demonstrated the importance of regular, explicit... I’m a huge fan of The Atlantic. But the profile of Lucy Calkins by Helen Lewis in the December issue, "How one woman became the scapegoat for America’s reading crisis,” dismayed me. The profile portrayed Calkins not only as a scapegoat, but also a tragic, largely unrepentant victim, mortified (“it was a little bit like 9/11,” Calkins told Lewis) and mystified by the vilification she has...

Possibly a martyr, too, scrambling to salvage or reclaim some vestige of a legacy. “I came to see her downfall as part of a larger story about the competing currents in American education,” Lewis wrote. Each of those characterizations could be argued for or against; ultimately, they’re just judgments and don’t really matter to the future of reading education. Yes, the reading wars got caught up in the culture wars. Moms for Liberty were only too happy to catch a convenient wave of changing public sentiment to swamp the woke professor and her lot. And to be sure, there is the larger story about “competing currents in American education,” as Lewis put it.

There is always a larger story that can subsume arguments over educating the young at least as far back as Socrates, an actual martyr. Readers respond to our December 2024 issue and more. In the December 2024 issue, Helen Lewis wrote about how one woman became the scapegoat for America’s literacy crisis. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. A heartfelt thank-you to Helen Lewis for her reporting on Lucy Calkins and the most recent phase of the “reading wars.” As a career English teacher whose mother was also a career English teacher,... Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast was particularly frustrating to me for its oversimplification of Calkins’s reading workshop and its all-too-typical sidelining of teachers’ voices.

Wise educators have known for a very long time that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to reading instruction; effective teachers combine phonics with other strategies that help develop a student’s identity as a reader. It is shocking to none of us that the solution is “both, and” and not “either/or.” Lewis’s article was a breath of fresh air. Calkins is by no means flawless, but her Units of Study remain some of the most comprehensive and useful language-arts curricula out there in a sea of flashy, colorful nonsense. Helen Lewis’s interesting article on Lucy Calkins sadly missed some of the substance behind the “phonics”–versus–“whole language” debate. Beginning-reading teachers immediately encounter a reality Lewis doesn’t mention: Although many other languages are highly phonetic, English is not, so an approach that relies mostly on teaching the sounds of letters can leave children...

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