Calkins Redux

In light of the Dec 2024 article in the Atlantic about Lucy Calkins, I am reposting this piece of mine from a few years ago. Calkins is not the "scapegoat" for America's failure to adequately teach reading. As the author of a popular but deeply flawed curriculum and a "thought leader" who cultivated a large, uncritical following, she contributed to those failures. She wasn't alone, but she was enormously influential and an obstacle to change.

According to the Atlantic article Calkins now "concedes" that some of the problems mentioned in Sold a Story were real. The "problems" were not small ones. As I pointed out in the earlier post, they included teaching children to guess words in context rather than teaching them how print represents sound and meaning. The Calkins curriculum might be adequate for children who had already gained basic skills, having been taught at home, in preK, or by a tutor. For such children, any curriculum that didn't extinguish their interest in reading would suffice. The Calkins approach was completely inadequate for everyone else, including the many children for whom basic skills instruction in the classroom is essential because there isn't a person in the home who speaks the language or the dialect of the school, who is literate, who has the time and ability to teach reading skills or has the resources hire someone to do it for them. 

Post: This is why we don't have better readers: Response to Lucy Calkins.   PDF here