The Blog will resume next week.

We’ll begin with the special entry. It was done by Dana Palubiak and is used with permission;

‘She Gave Us a Way In’: A Teacher’s Defense of Lucy Calkins

We must adjust, not abandon, reading curricula

In 2021, my 4th grade students compared segregation in the children’s picture book The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson to their own playground. Lucy Calkins was already a villain in education headlines. Education researchers and curriculum-evaluation organizations criticized her popular Units of Study reading and writing curriculum for not aligning with the “science of reading.” They argued her materials lacked evidence-based research and didn’t emphasize phonics enough, especially for early readers. But in my classroom, Calkins’ curriculum was magic. In Room 13, she helped my students name things, hold things, and read material that mattered.

She wasn’t perfect, but she was crucial for my students.

With the aid of Calkins’ curriculum, my 4th graders were synthesizing across texts and making meaning across genres, time periods, and ideas. We read about the American Revolution, wrote cross-text research papers, compared authors’ perspectives, and learned how to hold more than one truth at a time.

Calkins’ curriculum uses a workshop-style model that prioritizes student choice and independent learning. I taught her reading and writing units in 3rd and 4th grade, and across my 30-year career, they were among the most meaningful tools I used, not because they were easy, but because they came alive when taught with intention. They opened things up.

Yet Lucy Calkins has become a lightning rod for literacy criticism in education.

Much of the criticism likely stems from low scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2019, only 34% of 4th graders in my state of Missouri and 26% in the nation performed at or above the “proficient” level in reading. And while critics point to low NAEP scores, I can tell you my students were deeply engaged with the content.

I saw my students write real literary essays about justice and identity. Many of them picked thought-provoking texts like The Other Side, which follows two children who live on opposite sides of a fence in a racially segregated town. My students were able to connect the picture book to their lived experiences in Brentwood, Mo., a district that called itself “Mayberry” after the quaint town on “The Andy Griffith Show.” In a place like that, seeing and naming exclusion mattered. When my student Malik wrote, “The fence in The Other Side isn’t just wood, it’s the way adults look away when someone gets excluded,” I knew the curriculum was working.

Calkins gave us teachers more than sentence frames. She gave us a way in and anchor texts that opened conversations about power and justice to young learners. Her American Revolution unit made kids ask hard questions about whose voices were centered in our country’s history. Her World War II unit included the picture book Rose Blanche, a haunting story about a young girl in Nazi Germany who discovers children being held in a nearby concentration camp. That book helped us talk about moral courage and what it means to act in the face of injustice. When my student Janne quietly connected Rose’s story to her own family’s silence about surviving World War II in Europe, I saw what happens when we trust kids with hard truths.

However, getting students to that point wasn’t easy. Was the curriculum perfect? No. I had critiques. I saw the reading gaps, the struggling 4th graders who needed more phonics, the English learners who craved more scaffolds. I adjusted things. That’s what good teachers do.

The real problem wasn’t Calkins. It was the state and district leaders who adopted her work with no scaffolding, no differentiation, and no investment in teacher growth.

Hanford labels Balanced Literacy practices as failed practices. If this is really the case, then how can she explain reports like this: https://goodmorningwilton.com/board-of-education-stories/

This blog outlines the pushback that Hruby and others have made on Hanford’s position:  https://doctorsam7.blog/2024/04/27/seeking-common-ground-using-common-sense-the-social-media-version-of-sor-myth-vs-reality-part-one-by-dr-sam-bommarito/

So I must concur with Dana’s defense of Calkins. Some things can and should be done to improve reading instruction. But the first step is to recognize that no side has all the answers. All sides must stop using strawman versions of the other sides. Instead, we need to examine each side’s best features. By doing that, we may find common ground and build a system on the best of what all sides offer.

Dare to Dream

Dr. Sam

The guy in the middle taking flak from all sides

PS: If you don’t already follow this blog, please use the information in the top right of this blog entry to do so. That way, you won’t miss any of these good things that are coming up!

About the New York Times article claiming the reading wars have been won. Questions and Ponderings by Dr. Sam Bommarito

Clarification about the article. It is from a TIME100 Next article. See screen capture above.

Let’s begin with the key questions we must ask about the article and its topic. Is the LETRS program really the silver bullet that the article implies it is? The short answer is no. Here is why I say that:

• The LETRS program has been shown to improve students’ decoding scores and teachers’ knowledge of phonics. On its own, it has not been shown to raise comprehension scores. https://riveteducation.org/a-timely-reminder-there-are-no-silver-bullets-even-with-professional-learning/. Direct, explicit instruction in synthetic phonics raises students’ decoding scores. It also improves teachers’ phonics knowledge. But as analysts like Johnson and Thomas have pointed out in both their books and blogs on the subject, LETRS training improves students’ decoding scores, but does not significantly improve their comprehension scores. In addition, some supporters of LTRS and other programs focused on teaching synthetic phonics have made some misleading claims. Before readers accept claims about the “Mississippi Miracle” at face value, they should examine them carefully. At the end of the day, the “miracle ” applies mainly to gains in decoding scores, not comprehension scores. The programs in the “Miracle states” did much more than add synthetic phonics.  The net result is that researchers like Rachel Gabriel report districts are having buyer’s remorse about the choices they made LINK. Rachel cites the work of Rachel Canter LINK, which indicates that in her home state of Mississippi, “When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.” This shatters the belief that many seem to have that all you need to do to improve students’ reading test performance is to add synthetic phonics to the program. Other demographic factors do matter. The so-called Mississippi Miracle involved much more than simply adding LETRS.
• Within the SOR community, there is now an interest in a different form of analytic phonics. This form of phonics gets students to the “takeoff point” of teaching themselves phonics in months, not years. It also uses up less classroom instructional time, allowing more time for comprehension-related activities. For details, see my blog interview with Nora Chabazi from EBLI, the most cited source for this form of phonics: LINK.
• When LTRS was created, research on the brain as a problem-solving machine had not yet emerged. See my blog post outlining the results of that newest brain research LINK, and its implications for the “Great Debate”. The newest studies fundamentally challenge some assertions SOR advocates make about the brain’s role in the reading process LINK.
• The results of mandating analytic phonics in England gives us a peek at what we can expect in the United States. See Dr. Michael Rosen’s analysis of the effects of mandating phonics in England. You can find it on his Oct 2n Facebook post this year. The upshot: mandating phonics didn’t work, even after millions of dollars were spent.
• My overall position on the “Great Debate” is that treating this issue as a debate is counterproductive. My position is that we need to explore and use evidence from ALL sides and give all students access to both analytic and synthetic phonics.  LINK.

================================================================================

I’ll leave the reader with three additional things to ponder. One is what the NRP actually said about reading instruction. Here is the excerpt:

Add to that what Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson said about how scientists handle questions. They DON’T debate. They argue, exploring all sides of the issue. They treat the “truth” as being written in Xerox, not in stone. SCIENTISTS CHANGE THEIR MINDS WHEN NEW EVIDENCE COMES ALONG. The best we ever have is the “current consensus”. 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kDHD-zcwDPI

Duke and Cartwright, 2021: Active View of Reading model and added effect sizes for selected parts of the model.

============================================================================

ESPECIALLY NOTICE THE EFFECT SIZE FOR BRIDGING PROCESSES AS THEY APPEARED FROM THE SLIDE ABOVE

The effect size for the bridging processes is considerably larger than the effect size for word recognition. That means there could be a real advantage to adding programs like Rasinski’s Fluency Development Lesson Plan, which is based on decades of Rasinski’s research on the best ways to teach fluency.

============================================================================

Overall, I must respectfully disagree with Dr. Louisa Moats about whether the issues of how best to teach phonics are settled. I also must question her implication from the Times Article that the problems inherent in teaching LETRS would be solved with better implementation over time. In many districts, more than enough time has passed, and the promised results haven’t materialized.

Please remember, the NRP outlines five ways to teach phonics, not just one. Yet folks promoting Moat’s brand of SOR have outlawed all but one. Many of the approaches that involve analytic phonics (think problem-solving phonics) have a proven track record of improving BOTH decoding and comprehension. My disagreement with her position, and with the position of some of her supporters, in no way diminishes the importance of what she did by pointing out that many schools of education were not teaching synthetic phonics. Too many of them were totally focused on analytic phonics, and because of that, many children suffered. However, the solution to that should not be to do to the kids who thrive on analytic phonics what was done to the kids who needed synthetic phonics. Analytic phonics is NOT GUESSING; IT IS PROBLEM SOLVING. What she and her supporters are doing hurts the kids who thrive on analytic phonics.   I still believe that if we consider ideas from ALL SIDES, we can build ways to teach most kids most of the time. It’s time to explore the common ground already emerging from the current discussions LINK.

Dare to Dream!

Dr. Sam Bommarito, the guy in the middle, taking flak from all sides

If you are interested in seeing future posts, please subscribe to the blog (top right corner of this post)

Today, Dr. Sam is singing at the Village of Mom event. The main blog for this weekend will be postponed until tomorrow. This picture is from a previous event, I’ll be posting new pictures and hopefully doing a an interview about this years event. The VOM has expanded its purpose and reach since this event was done.