The Decadeslong Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Kids’ Schools

Call it the end of an era for fantasy-fueled reading instruction. In a move that has parents like me cheering, Columbia University’s Teachers College announced last month that it is shuttering its once famous—in some circles, now-infamous—reading organization founded by education guru and entrepreneur Lucy Calkins.

For decades, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project was a behemoth in American education. As many as 1 in 4 U.S. elementary schools used Calkins’ signature curriculum. But that number is dwindling as a growing chorus of cognitive scientists, learning experts, and parents—many amplified by education journalist Emily Hanford via her 2022 podcast Sold a Story—argue that the Calkins approach to reading is ineffective at best, actively harmful at worst, and a large part of why more than half of our country’s fourth graders aren’t demonstrating proficiency on reading exams.

It’s common knowledge that never learning to read well damages children’s self-esteem, their life prospects, and our country’s future workforce. What’s less talked about is how, when schools fail to teach reading, it harms the public’s trust in schools. An unspoken contract between public schools and parents is that schools will teach their children to read. In many places, that contract was broken when schools adopted Calkins’ methods, kids didn’t learn to read, and responsibility for teaching reading transferred onto parents and guardians.

That’s what happened to me. I live in New York City, home to the nation’s largest school district and ground zero of the Calkins approach to reading. Mayor Michael Bloomberg brought Calkins’ curriculum to our schools some 20 years ago, and her methods have remained entrenched here ever since. Often called “balanced literacy,” this approach treats reading not as a taught skill, but as something innate that emerges under the right conditions. It rests on the fuzzy fantasy that drenching young children in a literacy-rich environment is what gets most kids reading.

This notion contains a subtle but unmistakable streak of classism and parent-blaming—if kids are struggling to learn, chances are something is missing at home, or so the logic goes. Back in the 1970s, this general line of thinking may even have fueled a Supreme Court decision justifying discriminatory funding of schools, with the idea being that more money to poor districts would not help students because families—not schools—were the key ingredient in student success.

To its credit, balanced literacy aspired to correct for potential deficiencies in the home environment by creating literacy-rich classrooms. At the Brooklyn elementary school that my kids attended, the signs of it were everywhere: in the goofy glasses teachers wore for group reading time to make the written word less intimidating; in the assurances to parents that the best way to help children read was to read out loud to them to instill a love of language and literature; in the artfully arranged reading nooks stocked with cushions, mats, and an appealing array of books; in the hours that teachers instructed young children to sit in those nooks with books of their choosing.

In first grade, these “independent reading” hours were torture for my kids, who, I would eventually learn, were among the roughly half of all children who, research shows, will likely never read well without explicit instruction in sounding out words^⁠. My kids’ reactions to being expected to sit quietly each day pretending to read ran along stereotypical gender lines. My daughter silently berated herself for not being able to read; my son acted out, once attempting to push over a bookshelf.

My son’s teacher took a “wait and see” approach to the many flailing readers in that class, but my son’s disruptive behavior worried her, and she urged my husband and me to have him evaluated. We did. A neuropsychologist who charged a small fortune suspected dyslexia. She thought his classroom outbursts were fueled in part by frustration over reading; he knew he should be reading, he didn’t know how, and that was making him hate everything, including himself. She urged us to get him systematic tutoring in how to sound out words, and to do so immediately, while his young brain still had ample “plasticity” to receive it. (Research shows that reading interventions carried out after second grade are far less effective.)

A diagnosis with a clear course of action is a turning point for many families whose kids are struggling, and it was for us too. But it also marked the beginning of an absurd time when our family rearranged our few free hours together, after work, school, and after-school programs, around reading instruction.

I began reading the research on how kids learn to read and versed myself in the various evidence-based reading interventions. I searched for tutors trained to deliver those interventions (usually starting at about $100 a session). Once we found a tutor, my husband and I took turns overseeing my son’s reading homework, assigned by the tutor, after his regular homework—a routine that often led to full-on meltdowns. When it became clear that my daughter was also among the roughly half of all kids who will not read fluidly without explicit phonics instruction, I left my job, in part to help. I also embarked on a doomed crusade to persuade our school’s administration that—never mind what their graduate education programs had told them—they needed to start teaching phonics in the early grades, and now.

The city, I soon discovered, was crawling with parents like me, who were knee-deep in trying to learn how kids read and teach their children to do it. On the playground, we swapped emails of tutors like baseball cards and marveled at the fact that many of our children’s peers—the ones in the other half—had somehow started reading without all this effort. Some parents paid for tutoring by taking out loans. Others dipped into savings. To have time and energy for the lessons, many of us cut out extras, like music lessons or sports, or never began them in the first place.

About two-fifths of U.S. children in special education are there for reading issues, and many of our kids became part of that cohort. But even these special-ed classes continued to draw from those same fantasy-fueled reading methods, which included having kids guess at words using context clues like illustrations, a discredited method that some research suggests may ultimately be damaging. Chapter books don’t have pictures, after all.

A number of parents I know eventually joined the more than 4,000 families a year who hire lawyers to sue New York City’s education department in hopes that their children will get the instruction they need at a specialized private school. And those parents without the money, time, and energy to devote to reading instruction? Many of their kids fell further behind.

When COVID hit and parents nationwide lamented the collateral damage of becoming their children’s de facto teachers, I immediately saw the parallels. As with remote learning, when schools use reading programs that don’t work for large swaths of kids, parents—often mothers—are left to pick up the slack. This strains relations with schools, employers, children, and co-parents. It spurs parents with means to abandon public schools. And it inevitably deepens the achievement gap between privileged and poor kids.

But with COVID, I could cut schools endless slack. Even the medical experts couldn’t agree on how to keep communities safe. With reading? Cognitive scientists had settled the question of how kids learn to read back in the 1990s. For lots of kids, direct instruction in linking letters and letter combinations to sound matters, and a lot.

Teacher training programs, like the one Calkins founded, ignored that memo. Instead, they doubled down on that old belief in the social sciences that families and environment determine whether or not children learn. Schools adopting their methods excelled at creating enticing reading environments. But they stopped providing the instruction that many kids need to read.

My son was fortunate. For him, learning how the sounds of letters combine to form syllables and words was revelatory. With tutoring and nightly reading homework, he fairly quickly became a full-on reader. My daughter’s progress has been slower, perhaps because her tutoring took place online. Balanced literacy die-hards claim that too much phonics turns kids off reading. This was not the case for mine, who continue to love stories and books.

But our family still lives with the aftermath of those frantic years consumed with learning to read. I continue to work freelance, despite knowing that the longer I do, the harder it may be to return to a staff position. I have a perhaps unhealthy fixation with the organizations and people who profited off balanced literacy. Recently, many states have begun requiring school districts to replace disproven methods with evidence-based curricula. That’s wonderful. But like so many parents who’ve been through this, I still hunger for someone to take responsibility for the many for whom it’s too late, those lifelong floundering readers whom Jack Fletcher, a psychology professor at the University of Houston, calls “instructional casualties,” who did not receive the “needed instruction early in development.”

More generally, the uncomplicated relationship my family once had with our children’s school is gone. It’s no accident that Moms for Liberty, that extremist right-wing parents’-rights organization born out of outrage over mask mandates during the pandemic, has embraced the “science of reading” movement as part of its freewheeling quest to undermine trust in public schools. I hate that, like those angry, red-faced book banners, when it comes to classroom instruction, I too feel compelled to stay vigilant.

Now, whenever a teacher or school service provider makes a suggestion that sounds unusual—that being able to write legibly by hand, for instance, no longer really matters—it sends me on a research deep dive to confirm or disprove what I’m hearing. I remain hyperaware that we all—kids, parents, teachers, and school administrators—can be victims of lovely but bogus ideas when they’re nicely packaged by trusted institutions.

Last year, reporting a story on babies and libraries, I came across a heavily referenced research paper on early literacy in which I glimpsed the rotten roots of the literacy mess our country is in. Dated 1990, it appeared in a journal published by the National Council of Teachers of English and was co-authored by three professors, all of whom taught or would go on to teach at graduate education programs.

In the authoritative tone of Those Who Know Best, those authors assert: “When a child is born, parents expect him or her to learn to talk and to walk. Expectations are very subtle messages that we give learners about their probability of success. If we expect children to learn to read and write, they can accomplish these literacy skills with the same ease that they learned to talk.”

This idea that parents—rather than instruction—determine whether or not children become readers was not true at the time that paper was published more than 30 years ago. Nor was it true when Calkins, a few years later, honed the reading methodologies that Bloomberg would make the word of law in New York schools. But by embracing the notion that homes bear the bulk of responsibility for whether or not children can read, education specialists like Calkins made it true for far too many.

RIP Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. You helped turn learning to read into a rich family’s game.