The Calkins Legacy
Maryellen MacDonald and I wrote this letter in response to the article by Helen Lewis about Lucy Calkins in the December 2024 issue of the Atlantic. This post can be downloaded as a PDF here.
The December 2024 article does a good job of characterizing Lucy Calkins’ complex legacy, but she is not the “scapegoat” for America’s failure to adequately teach reading. As the author of an enormously popular but deeply flawed curriculum and a “thought leader” who cultivated a large, fervid following, Calkins contributed to those failures. She wasn’t alone, but she was enormously influential and an obstacle to change. Calkins became a lightning rod because she represented the sheer intransigence of educators in the face of evidence that their methods for teaching reading were ineffective and ill-conceived.
Calkins has now conceded that problems with her approach discussed in Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story were real. The problems were not small ones. Calkins grossly underestimated the extent to which beginning readers need instruction about how print represents sound and meaning. She instead encouraged the strategy of guessing words from context, a slow, error-prone process often employed by poor readers. Calkins erred in taking this as the path to becoming a skilled reader, which made the task more difficult. Her approach was also wholly inadequate in addressing the needs of children who struggle to read because of dyslexia or other conditions that interfere with learning.
The Calkins curriculum could nonetheless be sufficient for some children: those who were taught basic skills at home, in pre-K, or by a tutor. For such children, any curriculum that didn’t extinguish their interest in reading would suffice. Calkins’ approach was insufficient for the rest, who don't have the luxury of extra reading instruction outside of school. By failing to provide adequate instruction in school and outsourcing basic skills instruction to the home, the Calkins approach and other Whole Language/Balanced Literacy curricula magnified the impact of socioeconomic factors that underlie “achievement gaps”.
The “science of reading” laws passed in more than 40 states attempt to address the mishandling of basic skills instruction in the Calkins curriculum and similar materials. These approaches were so deeply entrenched in US education that it took legislation to reset the dial. Unfortunately, the demand for change has exceeded educators’ abilities to deliver curricula and practices closely tied to basic facts about how reading works and children learn. The laws address the need to provide basic skills instruction and accommodate dyslexia, but the specific provisions about instruction, curricula, and teacher education are not adequate. For example, barring use of the guessing approach doesn’t guarantee that what replaces it will be effective.
Calkins was able to succeed in part because teachers arrive at their positions without a clear understanding of what needs to be taught and why. Lacking adequate professional training from schools of education, they are dependent on charismatic self-appointed authorities such as Calkins to provide specific guidance but do not have the background to assess the validity of what’s recommended. As it has developed so far, the “science of reading” approach reflects the fact that these conditions have not changed. It too has been developed by educators with little background in cognitive science and marketed to other educators with even less. Scientific literacy is low in education as in the culture at large, yet the demand for guidance is high. These conditions have created an authoritarian environment that is the antithesis of science.
The goal of improving literacy outcomes by grounding curricula and practices in basic science is valid and can be achieved, but it will require more extensive changes in the culture of education, and greater participation from researchers themselves.
Mark Seidenberg and Maryellen MacDonald
Professors, emerit., University of Wisconsin-Madison