"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, rather than decoding the word.
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.
The New Yorker has described Calkins’s approach as “literacy by vibes,” and in an editorial, the New York Post described her initiative as “a disaster” that had been “imposed on generations of American children.” When the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker shared an article about Calkins on X, he bemoaned “the scandal of ed schools that promote reading quackery.”
Calkins isn't solely responsible for the reading crisis, writes Natalie Wexler on Minding the Gap. But she's been able to cloak bad ideas with "idealistic rhetoric."
Adding more phonics doesn't solve the problems with balanced literacy, writes Wexler. "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," she writes. Cognitive science has found that reading comprehension is more reliant on knowledge about the text than abstract skills.
Again, children raised in well-educated, knowledge-rich families may do fine without explicit teaching at school, but their less advantaged classmates will learn knowledge and vocabulary from their teachers or not at all.
Calkins' writing curriculum used to tell teachers to let children "free write" about their personal experiences, and now includes some expository and opinion writing, Wexler writes. But she still "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."
That's not how it works in real life, Wexler writes.
Calkins talks about children experiencing the joy of reading, she writes. But her 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."
That's "hard work," writes Wexler. "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."
As the teacher reads, children build knowledge, enjoy a story and get a sense that reading is fun, she writes. "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."
Teacher education programs have been slow to adapt to research on how children learn to read, reports Sarah Schwartz in Education Week. In Tennessee, a district-university partnership network, the Lead in Literacy Network, is trying improve teachers' preparation for science-of-reading classrooms.
Philadelphia has launched a new, more structured curriculum that focuses on "word knowledge" and "world knowledge," writes Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo, a Drexel professor of literacy studies, on The Conversation. "The district believes the new and more structured curriculum is better aligned with the science of reading and will help standardize instruction across classrooms and schools."