Teaching method an open subject
Education expert takes new path with reading curriculum
For decades, Lucy Calkins has determined how millions of children learn to read. An education professor, she has been a preeminent leader of “balanced literacy,” a loosely defined teaching philosophy.
In a classic Calkins classroom, teachers read aloud from children’s literature; students then chose “just right” books, which fit their interests and ability. The focus was more on stories — theme, character, plot — and less on sounding out words.
Her curriculum, Units of Study, is built on a vision of children as natural readers, and it has been wildly popular and profitable. She estimates that one-quarter of the country’s 67,000 elementary schools use it. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, she and her team have trained hundreds of thousands of educators.
But in recent years, parents and educators who champion the “science of reading” have criticized Calkins and other supporters of balanced literacy. They cite a half-century of research that shows phonics — sound-it-out exercises that are purposefully sequenced — is the most effective way to teach reading, along with books that build vocabulary and depth.
With brain science adding to that evidence, there is a sense — at least for many in the education establishment — that the debate over early reading instruction may be ebbing. Phonics is ascendant.
More than a dozen states have passed laws pushing phonics, and the cities of Denver and Oakland, California,
have moved to drop Calkins’ program. In one of her largest markets, New York City, a dyslexic mayor and his schools chancellor are urging principals to select other curricula.
So after decades of resistance, Calkins has made a major retreat. A rewrite of her reading curriculum, from kindergarten to second grade, includes, for the first time, daily structured phonics lessons to be used with the whole class. There are special books and assessments to track students’ progress with decoding letters.
And it swaps light reading assignments for more rigorous texts: arctic exploration, female deep-sea divers in South Korea, and the architecture and culture of Islam.
The curriculum, which goes on sale this summer, also includes a 20-page guide for teachers summarizing 50 years of cognitive research on reading.
Margaret Goldberg, a San Francisco Bay Area literacy coach and leader in the science of reading movement, said Calkins’ changes cannot repair the harm done to generations of students. Even before the pandemic widened educational inequality, only one-third of American fourth and eighth graders were reading on grade level. Black, Hispanic and low-income children have struggled most.
“So many teachers like me have believed that a professor at Teachers College,
an Ivy League institution, should be up-to-date on the reading research,” she said. “The fact that she was disconnected from that research is evidence of the problem.”
Some children seem to turn magically into readers, without deliberate phonics coaching. That has helped fuel a mistaken belief that reading is as natural as speaking. In fact, functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain demonstrates that humans process written language letter by letter, sound by sound. Far from being automatic, reading requires a rewiring of the brain, which is primed by evolution to recognize faces, not words.
But that finding — by
cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists — is often disconnected from the work of training teachers and producing materials.
Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that although he found some of Calkins’ revisions “encouraging,” he was concerned that “objectionable” concepts remain.
There is little controlled research of her methods, and two recent studies come to conflicting conclusions: One, funded by Teachers College and Calkins’ publisher but conducted independently, found students in her network outperform others on reading tests. Another saw no statistically significant improvements.
When Calkins was asked what changed her mind about the science of reading, she cited, without defensiveness, several experts who have criticized her work: Seidenberg, author of the influential book “Language at the Speed of Sight,” and Emily Hanford, a journalist who has investigated the shortcomings of reading instruction.
Calkins said studying learning disabilities such as dyslexia also led her to accept that all children would benefit from more structured phonics.
Calkins has described the organization she founded in 1981, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, as a “not-for-profit think tank.” But the project is also a business, encompassing domestic and international companies. It provides training to about 700 schools across the United States and in countries including Japan.
According to a 2016 contract between New York City and Teachers College, schools paid up to $2,650 for a seven-hour visit from a consultant with Calkins’ group and were encouraged to purchase 20 visits a year.
In reality, Calkins said, most schools paid less. In total, the district paid $31 million between 2016 and 2022 for services from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.
The project has about 165 partner schools across the city, which may now be under pressure to reconsider the program.
“Lucy Calkins’ work, if you will, has not been as impactful as we had expected,” the schools chancellor, David Banks, said in March.
Teachers College would not detail its revenue from Calkins’ activities but said her contribution to its bottom line was “modest.”