There has never been much peer-reviewed research to support Units of Study or other balanced-literacy curricula. Although an estimated sixty per cent of early readers in kindergarten through second grade in the United States are enrolled in schools that use programs aligned with balanced literacy, in the past two years, eighteen states have passed laws that mandate training for teachers in phonics-based instruction. These developments reflect a long-standing consensus among researchers that intensive phonics and vocabulary-building instruction-an approach often referred to, nowadays, as the “science of reading”-are essential. (Calkins’s Units of Study in Phonics supplement, which was first published in 2018, is excluded from the list of approved phonics curricula, according to a D.O.E. As of this school year, which starts on September 8th, the Department of Education (D.O.E.) will add a mandatory dyslexia screener for students in kindergarten through eighth grade and require elementary schools to include a phonics component in their reading-and-writing curricula at least through second grade. (Calkins declined my requests for an on-the-record interview.)Ĭhildren now entering kindergarten in New York City may be taught differently. “Lucy Calkins’ work, if you will, has not been as impactful as we had expected and thought and hoped that it would have been,” David Banks, the New York City schools chancellor, told reporters in the spring. But literacy rates remain dismal: as of 2019, only about forty-seven per cent of the city’s students in grades three through eight were considered proficient in reading, according to state exams, including just thirty-five per cent of Black students and less than thirty-seven per cent of Hispanic students. Calkins trained thousands of teachers in Units of Study, becoming so synonymous with the curriculum that educators often refer to it-and even to balanced literacy itself-by the shorthand “Teachers College” or simply “Lucy Calkins.” The curriculum has dominated New York City’s approach to early reading for nearly twenty years. Units of Study was developed by the education professor Lucy Calkins, the founding director of Columbia’s Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, which she started in 1981. To some extent, it had been taught to her. It seemed possible that my kid’s scattered, self-directed reading style wasn’t entirely a product of her age or her temperament. It seemed to me that, rather than learning to decode a word using phonics, by matching sounds to letters with close adult guidance, a reader following this method is conditioned to look away from the word, in favor of the surrounding words or the accompanying illustrations-to make a quasi-educated guess, perhaps all on her own. She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera. My daughter was taught to use “picture power”-guessing words based on the accompanying illustrations. They figure out unfamiliar words based on a “cueing” strategy: the reader asks herself if the word looks right, sounds right, and makes sense in context. Early readers are encouraged to choose books from an in-classroom library and read silently on their own. I looked online for help, and learned that our Brooklyn public school’s main reading-and-writing curriculum, Units of Study, is rooted in a method known as balanced literacy. There were ambulance sirens wailing outside, forever. (My kid wasn’t the only one bluffing.) She perhaps wasn’t ready to read. I ascribed our ongoing failure to any number of factors-I wasn’t a teacher, for starters. She would pick out a book, flip around, guess, bluff, and try to match words to pictures, while I plodded along behind her, grunting phonemes, until her patience frayed. Our subsequent reading workshops followed the same script. She seemed to find it frankly outrageous. She didn’t appear to be familiar with this approach. I coaxed her to look at how the letters worked together, to sound them out, starting by taking apart the first few phonemes: bh-uh-tih, butt. Her decoding skills, at that stage, were limited to the starting letter of each word, and all else was hurried guesswork-pointing at “butterfly,” she might ask, “Bird?” and start to turn the page. She had selected a beginner-level book about the alliterative habitués of a back-yard garden: birds and butterflies, cats and caterpillars. In the first spring of the pandemic, as families across the country were acclimating to remote learning and countless other upheavals, I sat down on the living-room sofa with my daughter, who was in kindergarten, to go over a daily item on her academic schedule called Reading Workshop.
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