Why Johnny Can't Read

Until yesterday I had never heard of Lucy Calkins. This means that I am not especially well apprised of the goings-on in the world of child pedagogy.

According to Kendra Hurley, writing on Slate.com, Calkins has been more responsible than many for the fact that Johnny and Janey can’t read. True enough, there are other reasons why American schoolchildren are world class laggards, but the Calkins method of teaching reading counts among the culprits.

Of course, teachers’ unions bear a considerable amount of responsibility. Closing schools for two years damaged children’s minds, perhaps irreparable. And yet, when it comes to reading, the Calkins method has contributed mightily to the stupidification of American children.

Hurley explains how pervasive and influential the Calkins method has been:

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.

How important is learning to read? Very, very, very important:

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.

Effectively, the Calkins method did not teach children how to read. It surrounded children with “literacy-rich classrooms,” had teachers read out loud to them and expected this atmosphere to activate their reading skills, without anyone showing them how to do it.

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.

Note well, small children were allowed to discover how to read on their own, without the exercise of teacherly authority. In truth, the basis for the Calkins method is a rejection of authority. Children are assumed to be able to learn how to read by being exposed to books.

... 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.

What do children need? They need “explicit instruction” in phonics, among other things. If you leave them on their own, they reject the task and rebel.

Parents of children who are not learning how to read in school will either need to hire special tutors or to homeschool their children.

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.)

Note the point, this process ought to take place when children’s brains are capable of receiving them. As I have suggested in the context of school closings, children’s brains are age sensitive. At a specific age they are capable of a certain type of learning. Once they pass that age, the process becomes far more difficult.

Obviously, when school cannot teach reading, the burden falls on parents, or on private schools. Many parents, especially mothers,  compensate by taking time off from work to teach their children, but this is largely limited to wealthy parents. The true victims of the Calkins method are poor children.

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.

And also,

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.

To be fair, there are other reasons why Johnny cannot read. The Calkins method stands with the presence of large numbers of migrant children who have been placed in classrooms, but who do not speak English. And, of course, the school shutdowns that occurred during the pandemic have damaged many children, hopefully not irreparably.

The good news is that teachers' colleges have figured it out and have retired the Calkins method.