from THE EDUCATE PODCAST
Experts say widely used reading curriculum is failing kids
A first of its kind review finds Lucy Calkins' materials don't align with the science of reading. -- January 27, 2020 | by Emily Hanford
Lucy Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University, has created one of the nation's most widely used reading instruction programs, and, according to a groundbreaking new report, the program is deeply flawed.
the report concluded. "Children who arrive at school already reading or primed to read ... may integrate seamlessly… However, children who need additional practice opportunities in a specific area of reading or language development likely would not."
The report was released by the nonprofit educational consulting group Student Achievement Partners (SAP). The group asked prominent reading researchers to review Calkins' Units of Study, more commonly known as "reading workshop." It appears to be the first time a group of reading researchers has reviewed a curriculum and determined whether the lessons reflect more than 40 years of scientific research on how reading skill develops.
...as APM Reports has shown, the Units of Study lessons and materials frequently assert an idea about how people read that has been proven wrong by cognitive scientists. The idea, known as three cueing, encourages children to look at pictures and use contextual clues to identify words as they are reading. Scientific research shows that skilled readers do not use cues to read words and that instructing children to use these cues teaches them the habits of struggling readers.
In 2018, Calkins developed a Units of Study for teaching phonics. Before that, her instructional materials had largely ignored phonics.
Research shows that beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships increase activity in the area of the brain best wired for reading and that phonics instruction improves children's reading success.
Decoding. Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers. No one has to teach them to talk.
But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it.
Guidance from the National Reading Panel The National Reading Panel's analysis made it clear that the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, systematic phonics instruction, methods to improve fluency, and ways to enhance comprehension.
In 1997, congress asked the NICHD, along with the U.S. Department of Education, to form the National Reading Panel to review research on how children learn to read and determine which methods of teaching reading are most effective based on the research evidence.
There are 5 Big Ideas in Beginning Reading:
- Phonemic Awareness words are broken into sounds
- Alphabetic Principle phonics
- Fluency with Text
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
Problems With Lucy Calkins’ Curriculum Go Beyond Reading—To Writing
Calkins’ curriculum expects kids to write essays and even "books" before they’ve learned to construct sentences, and they’re left to figure out the intricacies of writing largely on their own. We have had 30 Years of Calkins.
In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat
Recently, an organization called EdReports, which rates curricula for their alignment to Common Core or similar standards, gave both the Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell’s curriculum its lowest ratings. And in January 2020, an organization called Student Achievement Partners (SAP) issued a report finding that Calkins’ approach to phonics was “in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research.”
So after decades of resistance, Professor Calkins has made a major retreat. A rewrite of her reading curriculum, from kindergarten to second grade, includes, for the first time, daily structured phonics lessons to be used with the whole class.
“All of us are imperfect,” she said in an interview at her office, perched above Columbia’s campus. “The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.”
Margaret Goldberg, a Bay Area literacy coach and leader in the science of reading movement, said Professor Calkins’s changes cannot repair the harm done to generations of students. Even before the pandemic widened educational inequality, only one-third of American fourth and eighth graders were reading on grade level. Black, Hispanic and low-income children have struggled most.
A review of school contracts across the country showed that much of Professor Calkins’s work outside New York City was funneled through her businesses. That structure, she said, allowed her to pay competitive salaries to her 75-person staff. She and her co-authors also earn royalties for her books, published by Heinemann, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The stakes are high, said Tracy White Weeden, president of the Neuhaus Education Center, a nonprofit that trains educators in reading strategies.
“We have schools,” she said, “that have not benefited from understanding how to do the most important thing we do — ensure students leave literate.”
It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading
In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”
In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.
The 2022 Florida Standards Assessment showed that 25% of kids ending 3rd grade could not read.
Truespel Phonetics is the Answer.
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