Students are best served by learning how to read, not by being politically indoctrinated.
Students are best served by learning how to read, not by being politically indoctrinated.
T he director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project for Columbia University, Lucy Calkins, has long been an influential figure in education. Almost a third of U.S. elementary teachers use her curriculum, hundreds of thousands of educators have received her training, and her philosophy of reading instruction has influenced countless more. Hopefully, due to a recent New York Times article eviscerating her products, her name will become equally infamous in the average household.
Calkins bases her popular curriculum, Units of Study, around the practice of the reader/writer workshop model — wherein students choose their own books and writing projects — and balanced literacy, which is an approach to reading that rejects phonics. Reading experts pan both for their lack of science-backed reading and writing instruction. In response to rising pressure, Calkins has created new curricula, which include a “20-page guide for teachers summarizing 50 years of cognitive research on reading.”
It’s a welcome change, but that we’ve allowed someone who has heretofore had little understanding of the science of reading to determine reading instruction for millions of students over the course of decades is an indictment of both teacher training and selection of school curriculum. This isn’t just a matter of making a mistake; it’s a scandal.
According to the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, which evaluated approximately 100,000 reading studies published since 1966, the best approach to reading instruction requires phonics, an element that has been brief in or missing from Units of Instruction. Literacy expert Timothy Shanahan has confirmed that there’s no research supporting the methods championed by Calkins.
In light of this, one must ask: How did a “literacy expert” in charge of developing one of the most popular reading curricula in the country, until this point, overlook this research?
The answer, as with many things, is ideological. Historically, the educational establishment associated “phonics instruction,” which is structured, sequenced, and teacher-led, with conservative politics. The “balanced literacy” of the Calkins model instead stresses the need for students to explore their own interests, a romanticized vision for education. All of that scripted curricula and content-worth-knowing is outdated — or so runs the argument.
Forty years ago, before cognitive science had advanced enough to inform education, theorists groped in the dark for whatever practice fit their ideology. Like early forays into psychology and sociology, there was bluster, but little in the way of scientific research or comparative studies to validate competing theories. Since then, advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience proved Calkins’s ideas outdated. Even so, a progressive vision for education made theorists unable to accept the superiority of a structured, teacher-led approach to reading instruction.
She may have reversed course on phonics, but Calkins has only doubled down on ideology. Filling in for the absence of phonics, the Units of Study centers on contemporary social issues and progressive fads.
One example of Units of Study curricula, “Critical Literacy: Unlocking Contemporary Fiction,” explicitly names as influence fringe philosophies such as Critical Theory and radical theorists such as Angela Davis or Kimberlé Crenshaw. Students are to identify and break down the “hegemonic masculinity” and craft their own “identity lenses” through which they are to read — critical race theory being one such lens.
Though it is to be expected that the NYT’s article would remain agnostic on this issue, the focus on social justice throughout Units of Study comes at a cost to quality instruction. Calkins trades student literacy for her ideological project. In a dark turn of irony, the kids who suffer the most from inadequate reading instruction are poor and minority students, the very ones her advocacy seeks to help. Whatever one thinks of various social causes, it need be said: Students are best served by learning how to read, not through political indoctrination.
Despite the ongoing rancor in education debates, there are practical education reforms, such as universal phonics instruction, that have been found to be very effective. When California moved away from phonics in the ’90s, students’ scores took a plunge. Conversely, when Mississippi implemented universal phonics just recently, it jumped from one of the worst to one of the highest-performing states in reading.
Educational institutions in America should “follow the science” for once to inform instructional practices and curricula in our schools. That we haven’t done so is just another example of the ideological capture of our educational institutions.
Daniel Buck is a teacher and a senior visiting fellow at the Fordham Institute. His writing can be found at National Review Online, City Journal, and Quillette.
James Furey is a high-school English teacher from Wisconsin. He is a regular contributor to Chalkboard Review and has been published in City Journal. You can find him opining on all things education on Twitter @JamesAFurey. (James Furey is his pen name.)