If you look through my categories or just search ‘reading’ you’ll find a lot of passionate entries on the topic. But I’ve neglected that for some time and an article about a hit-job on a whole-language approach to reading inspired me to revisit the topic, in part because I see it spreading out into the politico-psychological arena I’ve been exploring. Note that in my Magnum Opus (yet to be published here), I eschew a psychological dimension. That does that mean the psychological dimension should ever be beyond our range.
Calkins became a star in the world of teaching reading in a classroom setting. Her star has been darkened considerably in recent years by an overt and personal attack on her. The sources of those attacks bare exploring but I will confine myself here to the actual issue of how children learn to read and therefore how they should be taught. Note the “shoulds”.
There’s a lot in this one article so pull up a chair and a cuppa, as the Brits say.
Rather than organize the article (a review written by Helen Lewis in the Atlantic) and my notes, I am going to go through the article from beginning to end and write out and flesh out my notes here. To start with, it is notable that these ‘reading wars’ parallel the ‘grammar wars’ in foreign language teaching, so I’ll be referring to elements of the latter ‘wars.’
We start with the word ‘best’ as in ‘children learn best when they….’ What are we looking for when we say best, i.e. how do we define success in learning and who is ‘we?’ Keep that in mind as we trundle on. In a similar vein we have “success for all.” Who is ‘all.’ Diving deeper, we might ask if we have ever reached ‘all’ in any education endeavor? And here it is: ‘so many American children struggle to read.’ A rich vein that: how many? Which ones? What do they puzzle over? Is it just us Americans? If not, what do other nations do? And, paramount, how was it before Calkins? Did she really bring down the pillars of a highly literate society?
Let me interject here that I think the reviewer of this hit piece on Calkin by Emily Hanford does a very foxy ‘fair and balanced’ job, giving both Calkins and Hanford their due and, in the process, looking at both sides of the reading wars aka language wars aka grammar wars, sides which stand apart glaring at each other while classroom teachers and students just keep trudging on. To Lewis’ credit, citing statistics showing gobs of American kids not reading at a basic level, she puts ‘basic’ in quotes, questioning, as I do, what ‘basic’ is. How, when, and why was that basic level set? Oh, and by who(m)?
Lewis uses Hanford’s evocative word ‘unscientific’ to label Calkins’ work. This assumes there is a science of reading and, lo and behold, it turns out there is, at least something labeled the science of reading, a label slapped hopefully on new textbooks being churned out by ever watchful textbook companies seeking to hop on the next gravy train. The sine qua non of getting any public notice for a critique like Hanford’s is to say it is a crisis. Now crises are usually punctuated, they come and they go. So again, we have an event, like COVID, that came and went. While COVID was going on we fondly remembered pre-COVID days; what about his reading crisis? Does anyone remember those halcyon days of total literacy? I don’t and I’m 83.
Behind this term ‘scientic’ lies many assumpions about human behavior, and perforce, the human brain. With science go mechanics, engineering principles, systems analysis, and so forth, all good dimensions for problem solving, but they are not all there is. Emotions, conditioning, damage, circuitry gone askew, in general what psychology covers. But some branches of psychology folow the dictum: what cannot be measured perforce does not exist, at least not in our calculations. A squirmy pack of kids in a classroom may evade some of the principles of science. The drive to mechanize every action so as to understand its functioning is admirable but no entirely adequate. This drive leads researchers into strange corners most teachers would not recognize. Frank Smith describes a laboratory device to fix a subject’s gaze on a line of text so that eye movements can be measured. Unless the students are issued one of those devices, results may vary.
Lewis describes how the field of reading education turned on Calkin. Now she knows how No Child Left Behind proponents feel; George Bush has many things to feel bad about but his pet project’s demise must be one of them. There are quotes from teachers, academics, specialists, politicians, and educators in general along with textbook publishers concerning the predictable swings from kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
This is a consequence of the many streams flowing into educating our children, something every society has done with care, but not if the children are other people’s children; and there is one of the problems in a diverse population run by a not-so-diverse set of rulers. The immaturity of the actors in going after the model du jour reveals the lack of decorum. Fistfights in the hallways of academce (although that happens among biologists, English professors, and scholars of acquisitions and mergers, too, so it is just a common side effect of asking uncomfortable questions and seeking inconvenient truths). You would think the American economy rested on reading ‘skills.’
I use the word ‘skills’ in quotes advisedly. Frank Smith, my personal reading guru, says reading is an ability, not a skill; a skill is physical, like a backhand in tennis. But therein lies a larger truth: any interest in teaching reading would be more fruitful if reading were a skill, something that can be conditioned, practiced and exercised (and tested like hell). On the other side of the reading wars from Smith is the ubiquitous and oft-published Steven Pinker, who labels Calkins’ work quackery. Far be it from me to criticize Pinker, a real force in cognitive psychology, but while his knowledge of brain function may be unmatched, I wonder how closely he has looked at the development of the ability to read, what is more broadly called literacy.
Literacy is highly complex, both cognitively and culturally. So is foreign language competence. The latter I am familiar with, it and all the issues and controversies surrounding foreign language teaching in general. The vast, I say vast, majority of people think foreign languages are learned in the classroom while in fact a mere handful of persons have managed that over the last eight to ten thousand years. Yet probably a majority of the world’s people speak more than one language, without ever entering a classroom, opening a textbook, or even being literate. This has to be obvious, yet the average person may visit France and come back raving about ‘their schools over there’ because all the kids speak French. That is a joke but something a bit sad was conveyed on a list serv, a Spanish teacher traveling to Mexico and raving about how even the hotel maids used the subjunctive! For the uninitiated, the subjunctive is a grammar form necessary to speak Spanish beyond the most basic but is, of course, mastered by age 5 by anyone growing up with Spanish as his native language.) So this teacher knew learning the grammar of a language as an intelectual exercise, not a natural product of growing up with a language.
But unlike acquiring one’s first language and even yet another language under normal circumstances, e.g. living in the other language’s country, reading does not come naturally. Or does it? I certainly entered school knowing how to read. My mother was terrified teachers would find out I had done so by reading comic books, back in the day equivalent to dosing your kid with cocaine. In families where reading material (I avidly devoured cereal boxes’ blurbs; imagine if I had had all those nutrition labels we have now; I might have become a doctor!) is available, children often are found spontaneously reading without instruction. But most children don’t read when they enter school and thus the need for an industry. That industry needs proof of efficacy and here enters the ‘science of reading.’
Allow me one foray into foreign language learning: the Jewish religion wants male adherents to learn to read the Bible in Hebrew, so Jewish children living in largely illiterate society were the only persons routinely knowing how to read. What is not appreciated about reading is that it translates across languages; once you know how to read, the language doesn’t matter as long as you know, so most Jewish children in previous centuries were growing up speaking Yiddish, the local language e.g. Polish, and reading Hebrew. It is a hop, skip and a jump from reading Hebrew to reading Yiddish (usually written in the Hebrew alphabet) to reading Polish even though Polish is written in Latin letters. Reading is reading.
Those children living in the multilingual communities of Eastern Europe did not study languages other than Hebrew in a classroom. Another example: merchants wanting their kids to follow dear old dad into the profession, would send junior off to the merchants in other countries to work for them and thus “pick up” those countries’ languages. Textbooks and classrooms in Dutch, Italian, etc. were not available nor needed.
As with so many matters connected to language learning, popular notions of language speaking and learning do not comport with how things actually work out. Individual differences in wiring can nudge someone in one way or another toward or even away from reading. My wife’s cousin spent a career in the Navy refurbishing jet aircraft engines. He told me he has all these technical mauals but he can’t read them. Instead he just ‘looks at the engine to see how it works.” Holy Moly!” Yet we always find people who defy expectations. Reading is like that: it doesn’t respond well to attempts to box it and put a ribbon around it. Foreign language learning is the same; I’m a good ‘monitor’, i.e. I can speak albeit haltingly, in a language I’ve studied by constructing a sentence rapidly in my head based on applying rules I’ve learned. Many people, including some FL teachers, think that that IS the way you speak another language: learn the rules and then apply them laboriously in your head and out pops something comprehensible. There are people who migrate to the U.S., spend forty years here, and never pick up a decent command of English; others arrive and are communicating within a few months and go on to refine their command.
How does that compare with reading? Be it via direct instruction with or without phonics specifically, or by what detractors of the loosey-goosey (to use their deprecatory term) methods, almost anyone subjected to schooling learns to read, sort of. Being able to read and write may not include a lot of writing, and when it does it has driven more than one teacher into madness. Someone who uses subordinate clauses effortlessly when speaking now garble the whole mess when pen touches paper. Now add to that the Anglo-American doctrine of correctness, i.e. writing something that no one speaks or rather ‘talks like,’ and you compound confusion with shame. “Now do your parents let you talk like that?” implies, “And if they do your mother is a slattern and your father no doubt absent.”
But read they will. For many, what they read may seem like the words of the judge and attorney in a court room, part Norman French and part Middle English. Assigning novels like Silas Marner (which I’ve only heard of) is villified despite that annoted one who read it or the like and found it inspiring and assigning novels like The Cool World is talking down and failing to uplift. This type of criticism of teachers is exacerbated when the students are Black and the teaching staff White. What gets lost in the argument is reading. More to the point, that people are different and so learn to read differently.
And here is where Calkins comes in. In the world of education the one-size-fits-all solution fills the bill. Diane Musumeci wrote a great book on three educators in FL teaching in the late Medieval Period. They prescribed ‘programs’ that sound much like Krashen or Calkins: reading is its own reward, speaking another language is just another way to communicate. What happened? The monks teaching Latin just wanted something to do Monday morning. As this was before the arrival of Star Bucks or any coffee at all, you can imagine the head banging going on at Matins (more accurately: Prime) as Magister anticipates his angels. One stalwart on a listserv for FL teachers told me privately that most teachers just want something to do for Monday morning. Believe me, I know the feeling and nothing could contain my excitement when over the weekend I came up with a great lesson plan. But most teachers have other plans for their weekends.
Aside from the teachers, the admins need a tool to show off (in my old district that would not be a phrase to use) and a package deal guaranteed to have the angels ordering tacos in the original Spanish (substitute crepes or schnitzel or cannoli or whatever Romans ate at jentaculum). And then there’s cost. On the other end, there is the prospect of Texas adopting your textbook, true gold.
Up against this, how did Calkins manage to win over so many adherents? Krashen has done wonders, with ‘comprehensible input’ now de rigeur, but not at all like Calkins’ money machine. It may have blown up now but she seems smart enough to have set aside some (the reviewer shows us the posh side of Calkins but nothing ostentatious), while Krashen carries on as a California professor. But in my world, both are heroes, fighting against intrenched ignorance and arrogance as well as a multitude of special interests and stake holders. Lewis traces curricular controversies but not so far back as I go, recalling my days at a “teaching machine” with programmed instruction, a vehicle for American dominance in the age of Sputnik (google it). The machine was a chair attached to a device that scrolled a roll of paper, threading it so as to allow the student to pause it and answer questions. A wrong answer brought not a claxon but a redirect to a review and then on to a similar question to elicit, finally, the correct answer. I’m telling you, we kids were jumping in our seats. One kid programmed his scroll as a piano roll to play Rock Around the Clock.
Woud I had time to review all these educational reforms. Some were right on target, others only stabbed at it, and others were wholly unsuited to the human mind. You really would not believe some of the tried and untried methods. Underneath all that is reading, Reading is FUNdamental. Without math you can still learn and without a FL you can still learn (all those Ph.D. candidates exhausting themselves on their thesis while (wo)manfully cramming for a French test, event if their field had nothing to do with anything French. Why? Because years ago when historians and mathematicians and geographers came from families wealthy enough to send them to university and to support them in an ill-paying professorship, travel abroad with FL study were the sine qua non of a scholar; therefore anyone purporting to be educated had to have a ‘command’ of something foreign. Absolute nonsense but it continues; my friends shelves are filled with books on French and German and whatever else their program director suggested they should “know.”) That parenthetical digression only underlines the foundational nature of reading.
But if not all people learn to read in the same way and phonics as a method shows great results across the board, what’s the problem? Lewis treats phonics as a dynamic effort with research coming in to support it, but it has been doing the same thing for decades and few people doubt it teaches children to read. So again, what’s the problem? Could it be what we expect out of reading? And here again the public space is bifurcated: do employers need workers who can read or do we want that vaunted informed citizenry of our founding fathers? Might an informed citizen gum up the works of the well-oiled Gigantum Oleoum Products Corp.? Might one such even turn out to be a dreaded whistle-blower? Well, Lewis nails that one, quoting the conservative Manhattan Institute the way Calkins’ program teaches students to analyze texts “amounts to little more than radical proselytization through literature.” My god, doesn’t that sound like a cartoom character, Mr. Gotbucks or Sen. Foghorn Leghorn? “Ah say, ah say, ah say, this here prosylututin’s got to stop! Next thing you know, they’ll be wantin’ to join a union! Great balls o’ fire.” Overdrawn you say? Tune in C-SPAN or the news and just listen.
Seriously, I have actually seen being used in a fifth grade classroom a social studies textbook whose chapter on slavery had drawings and text showing the mistress of the plantation bringing hot soup to a sick slave. That would be OK because that did happen but let’s show the flesh ripped off the back of a slave, too. Fair and balanced, you know? (in that vein, the textbooks came from 1945 and the teacher/principal apologized for them, saying they were hand-me-downs to this poor Catholic school, but still…..) We know there are Progressive interpretations and others and all those within the American political framework should be represented but not outright propaganda for one of the world’s most despised ‘traditions’ so brutal the Nazis studied it as a model for their isolation of the Jews (and rejected parts of it as ‘too harsh’).
What we expect out of reading is that students can access all – all – the literature available not only in their own culture but in other cultures and not just their contemporaries but voices from the past as well. What we cannot expect is equal outcomes; some students may read up on economics and move toward socialistic resolutions and others to a more libertarian approach, but my school required an economics class with the express purpose of inculcating the valuing of the free enterprise system. I’m all for the free enterprise system and controlled capitalism but not for courses designed to lead students to equal outcomes. And herein lies the problem, to wit:
“I want to know my kid is soaking it up.” Well, that pretty much excludes critical thinking, doesn’t it? Do you see how far from kids reading we get, so quickly? When critics of anything give you an either/or choice, my beautiful way or that other pit of hell, you know you are in with the wrong crowd. We either have an appreciation of diversity or we have reading… cannot have both, Buddy.”
Oh Boy! At this point in writing this I see how I myself feel pulled in several directions. One is to dig down into the anti-Calkins school and relate it to fissures in society, which Lewis does, by the way, and well. And I want to explore with you further the weeds of language. And then there is the question of balance, can it be achieved? And so forth. You cannot expect politicians and bureaucrats to get into the weeds on every topic they deal with; Senator Paul Simon was a rare exception; his book, The Tongue-Tied American made a case for a knowledge of FL The professionals, the scholars, educators, school board members, and students can educate themselves…… if they know how to read. I’ll bet if you told an administrator and especially a school board member struggling with a budget that Pasi Sahlberg wrote in Finnish Lessons how Finland puts about half of all early grade students into Special Education and by high school the number is negligible, i.e. give support early on where it counts, not after seven or eight years of torturous failure and humiliation “riding the short bus to school.” The chances of us doing that here are negligible.
BTW, I want to put to rest the so-called Canadian cure for FL ignorance. It is based on a fact: French throughout schooling is required for Canadian students and they learn it passably well; the same for French-speaking Canadian students and English (I once had a Canadian Quebecoise whose English was minimal). As a thought experiment, think this through as a solution to America’s FL education situation.
Lewis does well in displaying the enormous complexities of the American need to educate its youth. And the resistance to more open, meaning-making aka loosey-goosey methods isn’t the only resistance. One teacher so dissatisfied with the Calkin method she was forced to use told the interviewer that whenever she pointed out problems she was labeled negative. Among teachers that is the band-wagon effect: get on board or get off the train. Two teachers during a workshop turned to me asked me if I knew anything about TPRS. I explained it briefly and lapsed into silence only to have one of them turn to me and say, “Since you practice TPRS….” That is a short-circuit of the worst kind; the fact that I can define ‘murder’ doesn’t mean I murder people. Idiotic, but in the context of teachers’ world there is a strong link between knowing about something and being involved in that something. Thank god every time a Russian visitor was dumped on me I did not embarrass myself, especially when I was teaching classes over closed-circuit TV (it turned out not to be so closed when someone in the grocery store recognized me: “Oh, you’re that Russian teacher. I love your show!”). Thus anyone speaking knowledgeably about these open, meaning-based language teaching methods must be both an expert and going whole hog into it. Perhaps that is because so many teachers are swamped just with surviving day to day to support a family they cannot imagine anyone simply dabbling in TPRS or anything else.
Hanford had a good point when she defended a more directed teaching method like phonics by saying so many teachers are White, middle-class women who enjoyed school and reading and do not well understand students whose parents do not read to them every night and perhaps do not even hear English at home. Those students may have the same problem many teachers do, too swamped trying to survive to enjoy reading Animal Farm.
Summing this up as much as it is possibe to do to such a sprawling and deep subject as this, I would set up two camps encapsulated by the word “own.” Used by the inclusive, open crowd in the context of learning to read it betokens the inner experiences of comprehension and internalizing and then creating with what has been read. Used by the exclusive, closed-set crowd intent on identifying dangers it implies a threat to the order of things; you can’t just let people go around thinking their own thoughts; where will that lead? Like the pastor who is not so much against dancing but against what it leads to, so just don’t dance. Stalin said ideas are more powerful than guns; we wouldn’t let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas? And there is the crux: ideas. It is the authoritarian mind set vs the growth mind set, inclusion vs exclusion, what we see in the Project 2025 hostility to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies. In an open learning place, the role of emotion is acknowledged e.g satisfaction, joy……. as is the role of cognition resulting in assigning and creating meaning.
Even as we look at this controversy, we see proponents of phonics and direct instruction fearing that this ‘science of reading’ will itself become dogma. One teacher wanted to know if once students are reading well should phonics instruction continue. Wouldn’t ‘reading well’ be a signal to branch out? Perhaps that teacher intuited that some of her community members may not be all that friendly to branching out. This teacher component is ineluctable. I recall one teacher leaving the room after an exceptionally good offering of techniques for spurring FL learning saying the only thing he got out of it was that flip card with English on one side and Spanish on the other and when that Spanish side was exposed, Oh oh. His devilish grin promised swift and terrible retribution for violators. This is why we have to face facts: teachers are every bit as variable as are their students; you can no more have cookie-cutter teachers than you can have cookie-cutter students. You go to war with the army you have and to class with the students you have; once in position you do it all, no holding back. The students will notice that and such teachers can inspire studetns; not all but when is that true of anything? The question we have here then is do we grab that easy one-size-fits-all, bespoke package and just hand out worksheets or do we work to reach every possible kid we can, regardless of the method?