Is Lucy Calkins a "Scapegoat" for America's Reading Crisis?

The latest commentary on Lucy Calkins might only add to the confusion over debates on reading instruction.

Photo by Krzysztof Kowalik on Unsplash

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Careful readers of a recent article in The Atlantic, titled “How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis,” may have noticed a quote from me. But blink and you miss it—and the quote doesn’t add much.

Far be it from me to join the ranks of interviewees who complain that they spent lots of time talking to a journalist who then turned around and wrote something that didn’t reflect what they said. No doubt some interviewees have felt that way about me. Journalists have far more interview material than they can include in an article—even a long magazine feature, or for that matter, a book—and they have to make decisions about what to leave out. Their choices won’t always coincide with those their interviewees would have made, especially (needless to say) the interviewees whose golden words end up on the cutting room floor.

My problem with the article is not that the author—Helen Lewis—didn’t quote me at greater length, although I do wish she’d included something relating to what I told her. (I don’t remember exactly what I told her, since the interview took place over six months ago, but I’m sure I said a lot more than that balanced literacy was supposed to be a “peace treaty” between whole language and phonics.)

Basically, the article is just kind of all over the place, reflecting what Lewis seems to admit is her confusion about what’s actually going on with Calkins and reading, and it omits some crucial information. Readers are likely to end up feeling no wiser about the issue than they were when they started, and possibly—like Lewis—more confused.

I sympathize with Lewis’s confusion. She talked to some experts who praised Calkins and others who condemned her—and some who were in between. She got conflicting dense research studies that she had to try to reconcile. Some educators she encountered worshiped “Lucy” while others saw her as a dangerous fraud.

When I started writing about these issues a decade or so ago, I was confused too. It took me years to figure things out, and I’m still learning. I don’t claim to have all the answers. But here are some important aspects of the situation, in my view, that Lewis’s article overlooks.

The “Reading Crisis” Isn’t Just About Phonics

Like almost all coverage of the debate over reading, Lewis reduces it to a fight over phonics—and in large part it has been. But that view is far too narrow, and adopting it is likely to jeopardize the progress that has been made in that area.

Lewis pins the blame for the “scapegoating” of Lucy Calkins primarily on the work of audio journalist Emily Hanford, who created the wildly popular “Sold a Story” podcast. And there’s no denying that Hanford is largely responsible for toppling Calkins from her throne.

But Hanford focused only on problems with Calkins’ approach to phonics instruction, which she said was too unsystematic to align with scientific evidence. Lewis follows suit—and notes that Calkins revised that aspect of her curriculum, possibly even before the podcast came out. The implication is that criticism of Calkins’ curriculum is therefore unfair.

I’m not in a position to judge whether Calkins’ phonics-related changes are sufficient to bring her curriculum in line with the evidence. But even if they are, there are other serious problems with her “Units of Study,” which focus far more on reading comprehension and writing than on teaching kids how to decode written words. Lewis mentions nothing about these problems—even though, I can’t resist saying, I’m sure I told her about them—except to briefly allude to an article in a right-leaning publication alleging that the way Calkins’ curriculum teaches students to analyze texts “amounts to little more than radical proselytization through literature.”

That’s not one of the problems I’m talking about. I’ve written about those problems at length elsewhere, including in my book The Knowledge Gap (and in The Atlantic itself). I’ll just say here that like most literacy curricula, Calkins approaches reading comprehension as though it were a set of free-floating skills, like “making inferences,” that can be mastered through practice and applied generally to any text.

Ample evidence from cognitive science indicates that’s not the way reading comprehension works. It has to do far more with knowledge relating to the text than with abstract skill. Lewis writes that pro-Calkins educators worry that the clamor for more phonics “might come at the expense of teachers’ attention to fluency and comprehension,” but she doesn’t mention possible flaws with Calkins’ approach to either of those things.

While Hanford hasn’t focused on Calkins’ lack of attention to building knowledge, Lewis should be aware that some other commentators (in addition to myself) have. In her article, she cites a pre-Hanford report that was critical of Calkins’ Units of Study not only for failing to teach phonics effectively but also for failing to build the knowledge and vocabulary that children need to become proficient readers. But Lewis quotes only a general statement that the curriculum is “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

What About Writing?

Then there’s writing—which is where Calkins cut her teeth as a literacy guru, urging teachers to just have children “free write” narratives based on their personal experience. Under pressure from more rigorous state writing standards, she’s revised her curriculum to include expository and opinion writing.

But she hasn’t revised her basic approach, which assumes that writing skills—like reading comprehension skills—are entirely transferable, and that kids will just pick up grammar and the conventions of written language if they read and write enough. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, neither of those assumptions comports with evidence from cognitive science or (as many educators and prospective employers can attest) with reality.

It's not just that Calkins’ approach leaves most students unable to write coherently, although that’s bad enough. If writing is taught in a manageable way—explicitly, beginning at the sentence level, and embedded in curriculum content—it can provide a huge boost to reading comprehension and learning in general. But most curricula treat reading and writing as entirely separate processes. Calkins is no exception: she has Units of Study for Reading and Units of Study for Writing, and apparently never the twain shall meet.

And why do I say that a narrow focus on phonics reform will jeopardize progress in that area? If we don’t build kids’ academic knowledge and vocabulary beginning in the early grades—along with their knowledge of complex syntax, which is best built through explicit sentence-level writing instruction—here’s what’s likely to happen: kids will get to higher grade levels able to decode complex text but unable to understand it.

At that point phonics skeptics may say, as they have in the past: “You see? Phonics doesn’t work.” And the pendulum may swing away from phonics once again.

Phonics does work. It’s just not enough.

Killing the Joy of Reading

In addition to providing students with what they need to succeed, a focus on knowledge-building through oral language—read-alouds and discussion—could counter an objection from Lucy acolytes that Lewis alludes to: that the “science of reading,” interpreted to mean drills on phonics, will kill the joy of reading.

The best way to introduce beginning readers to the joy of reading is by having teachers read aloud to them from texts they can’t yet read easily themselves, whether those are texts about topics in history or science or engaging fiction or poetry. The Calkins approach has teachers do a brief read-aloud to model a skill and then have children who are not yet fluent readers go off to practice the skill on books they read on their own.

But if you’re struggling with decoding words or trying to figure out where the emphasis goes in a sentence, reading independently is not a joyful activity. It’s hard work. Listening to an expert do the reading is not only the most efficient way to build knowledge of a new topic, it’s also the most likely way for kids to learn that reading can be fun. At a time when only 14 percent of 13-year-olds say they regularly read for pleasure, we need to show children that’s a possibility.

Is Lucy a “Scapegoat”?

It’s pretty clear Lewis sees Calkins as a scapegoat for America’s reading problems, as the title of her article suggests. And she’s got a point. The focus on comprehension skills and the failure to teach writing explicitly are systemic problems, having to do with prevailing assumptions throughout the education world. They can’t be entirely laid at the door of any individual.

But even if Calkins isn’t solely responsible for the various wrong turns American education has taken on literacy, there’s a good reason reformers have targeted her. She is, for many educators, personally charismatic. Not that—as with some politicians—everyone who listens to her is charmed. Some are appalled. But she’s able to frame her approach as an idealistic quest to unleash children’s natural abilities as readers and writers—and even as human beings—and many educators respond to her rhetoric with passionate devotion.

That makes her disproportionately influential. Yes, there are other curricula out there that suffer from the same flaws as Calkins’ Units of Study—in fact, most do, and some are probably worse. But they don’t come cloaked in the same idealistic rhetoric.

That rhetoric, and the devotion it can inspire, makes it much harder to change hearts and minds. There are educators who see “teaching Lucy,” as Lewis puts it, almost as a religion. That doesn’t happen with other widely used reading programs like Open Court, Wonders, or Into Reading. Teachers may teach those curricula, if they’re told to, but they rarely love them.

So maybe it’s unfair to hold Calkins responsible for America’s reading crisis. But at the same time, it kind of makes sense to put her in the cross-hairs as an obstacle to change.

Skepticism About the Value of Curriculum, Period

Towards the end of the article, Lewis seems to throw up her hands at the very idea that any “off the shelf,” “commercial curriculum package” can address America’s reading problems. Appalled at the huge sums of money spent on curriculum, she implies that the very notion of a literacy curriculum is not only futile but venal.

It’s true that curriculum publishers often make big bucks. It’s also true that no curriculum is perfect. And even the best curriculum is unlikely to work unless teachers receive on-the-job training and support in how to deliver it effectively. They also need to be able to exercise their judgment about how to deliver a curriculum in a way that works best for their particular students.

But to jettison the very idea of a set, “scripted” curriculum is to buy into a pernicious notion that has been perpetuated by schools of education for generations. Prospective teachers are routinely told that “good” teachers don’t follow a curriculum. They create their own lesson plans from scratch.

That’s a recipe for teacher overload—not to mention for student failure. Surveys indicate that almost all teachers scour the internet to find lesson plans and other materials, and much of what is on offer is mediocre. Even if teachers do a good job of creating their own curriculum, students are likely to get an incoherent experience, encountering lessons for which they lack background knowledge—or, possibly, encountering the same lesson about the life cycle of the butterfly (or whatever) time and time again.

Lewis also fails to mention research on the power of an effective curriculum. Studies have shown that a good curriculum can boost student achievement the way a highly effective teacher can—and swapping out a bad curriculum for a good one is a lot easier and less expensive than the usual methods of improving teacher quality. The benefits of a high-quality curriculum are particularly strong for weaker teachers.

Most research on the effects of curriculum has been done with math, and it’s easier to see those effects because standardized math assessments are more likely to align with what has actually been taught than standardized reading assessments. Still, there’s some evidence that a knowledge-building literacy curriculum, including one that is available for free, can boost comprehension on standardized measures.

If a teacher is given a bad curriculum, it might make sense to pretend it’s not there. But if the curriculum is a good one, using it can have a transformative effect on both students and teachers. Combined with training and support grounded in the specifics of curriculum content, it’s probably the most reliable way to turn a mediocre teacher into a great one—especially if a content-rich curriculum is combined with explicit writing instruction embedded in that content. And providing students with rich, engaging content can enable them to exceed expectations, especially if they haven’t had an opportunity to acquire academic knowledge and vocabulary at home.

I’ve been in classrooms where I’ve seen that kind of transformation happening, and I’ve spoken to many teachers who have told me they’ve seen it too. Quite a few are recovering “Lucy” acolytes. Now that they realize what their students are capable of if the curriculum puts content in the foreground and builds knowledge and vocabulary, they’re guilt-stricken about the way they’ve taught in the past.

But of course, it’s not their fault. And as satisfying as it might be to blame Calkins, I’m not sure it’s her fault either. It’s hard—maybe impossible—to acknowledge that your life’s work, which you’ve seen as an idealistic endeavor on behalf of children, has actually prevented untold numbers of kids from realizing their true potential.