Various responses to Lucy Calkins' "Science of Reading" essay.'

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Very popular blogger, Professor Pamela Snow, writes a response to Lucy Calkin's 'Science of Reading' essay:

https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2019/11 ... -with.html

Running with the hare and hunting with the hound. My response to Lucy Calkins' "Science of Reading" essay.

This week, Lucy Calkins of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, and highly published Heinemann author and creator of reading, writing, and spelling materials for teachers, published a piece entitled No-one gets to own the term “the science of reading".

Although Calkins’ work is not directly referenced in Australia as much as it appears to be in North America, the kinds of ideas she espouses, certainly do permeate, via the ubiquitous Balanced Literacy, which readers of this blog will know is really just Whole Language 2.0.

I’ve had a careful read of Calkin’s essay, and would like to share some reflections here.

Firstly, there’s the title, which does seem to have a slightly petulant, foot-stamping edge to it. Calkins is right, in the sense that no-one “owns” the science of anything. Science is its own master, and does not have one face for some, and another face for others, despite Kenneth Goodman’s extraordinary statement to Emily Hanford earlier this year, that “my science is different”.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Other responses to Lucy Calkins essay are being flagged up on Twitter so I'm adding them:

Lucy Calkins on the “Science of Reading.” Seriously.

Posted November 25, 2019

by Claude Goldenberg, Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, Stanford University

https://www.corelearn.com/lucy-calkins- ... seriously/

Which brings me to Lucy Calkins’ most recent contribution to the seemingly never-ending saga of “What is the best way to teach reading?” or at least, “How should we teach children to read?” Welcome to the latest skirmish in the hot-and-cold-running Reading Wars. You know the lay of the battlefield … letters, sounds, phonics, decoding, etc. vs. whole word, whole language, literature-based reading, etc.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Margaret Goldberg provides a detailed response and analysis of what Lucy Calkins has written in her essay compared to what Lucy has written in her educational materials for teaching reading:

Dear Lucy,

https://righttoreadproject.com/2019/11/26/dear-lucy/

I hope that in your learning process you’ll be willing to hear from teachers like me, who have struggled to reconcile your programs with reading research. Any changes you make to your materials will improve instruction for millions of children and the way you explain your revisions will impact professional development for teachers everywhere.

I hope you’ll read on as I share some areas in your published programs that I think could use your attention. Shining a light on a few practices is worth some discomfort if it contributes to the creation of better tools for teachers.

New learning will likely result in new materials and trainings, but I hope that in addition to creating new work you will continue to revise what you’ve already published. Words such as “guess” are written in lesson plans that will be used across the country unless you campaign to retract them. Problematic practices (like guessing instruction and time spent with predictable texts) will continue unless you actively discourage them. I hope that you will continue to look back, reflect and revise, and that you will then look forward to all the good you can do by bringing classroom practice closer to reading science.

You have enormous influence and I look forward to seeing how you use the power of your words to guide the instruction of teachers across the country.

Sincerely,

Margaret Goldberg

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Literacy specialist and consultant, Lyn Stone, has written a satirical piece in response:

HEY SMARTASS! No one gets to mess with my market share!

https://lifelongliteracy.com/hey-smarta ... ket-share/

Hi everyone!

I’ve been asked to coin a derogatory term for my detractors to help shift attention off the weaknesses in my resources and put it back where it should be: on the Reading Wars. To that end, I’m going to go with phonics-centric. It has an eccentric connotation to it, as well as hinting that they’re a bit obsessive. Smart, huh? I’ll also be referring to them as a nefarious ‘interest group’ who are trying to claim that they own science. I’m not going to outright call them the Phonics Mafia or even phombies, as some of my more unhinged colleagues are wont to do because I’d like my followers to believe that I’m way better than that, but between you and me, those labels are pretty funny, no? Lol!

What I might do is start by offering my opinion that the phonicators mean well, bless their hearts, but they need to shut up, because no one wants to go back to that time when all children, regardless of background, were mercilessly forced to learn how to read and write proficiently. Repeat after me, “The real problem is poverty…the real problem is poverty!”

I’d also like to take the first of many opportunities to discredit and deride a very dangerous movement, comprising my worst nightmare, and yours too if you’re clinging to whole language: well informed parents! Gasp! Those scamps have HAD ENOUGH of their dyslexic children being poorly taught and are making quite a lot of bad-for-business noise, if you know what I mean. How DARE they? Those chumps aren’t qualified to mess up teaching reading. Sheesh!

While we’re at it, now that Bob Sweet is no longer around to defend his life’s work, it’s probably safe to start complaining about the threat Reading First posed to brands like mine.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

I'm cross-referencing this thread with one I've started on the 'Around the World: News and Events' forum as it is so pertinent.

Look what has happened in Arkansas - a law has been introduced to promote and adopt only those programs based on the reading science so surely Lucy Calkins' work would not be acceptable according to this new law?

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1330

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Here is more on this issue described via 'Education Week':

The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren't Backed by Science

By Sarah Schwartz

December 3, 2019

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019 ... SOC-SHR-FB

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Here is a truly heartfelt collective letter rebutting Lucy Calkins' essay. It is really important that program authors and publishers are not shielded from real people and real children who suffer as a consequence of flawed guidance and flawed material - no matter how well-meaning the authors and publishers and no matter how extensive and 'glossy' the material. The problem remains how to hold people and publishers to account when the research findings are clearly showing their guidance and material is flawed and potentially damaging to at least some children? With a non-adversarial perspective, rather than the notion of 'holding them to account' and having to go through lengthy and expensive legal routes, why oh why can't these publishers take responsibility and change their direction and materials accordingly. This is 'updating' in the light of a wealth of incontrovertible information and outcry:

https://iferi.org/wp-content/uploads/20 ... System.pdf

On Lucy Calkins and Trusting the System

Dear Lucy,

Thank you so much for acknowledging what parents of students with dyslexia have known for quite some time; your program does not work for students with dyslexia. We even wish that your program worked for the remaining 80-85% of general education students, but that would simply not be true. As you also stated, the science of how one learns to read is settled. A variety of researchers have studied the skills good readers use to decode words, and they even more fully understand how the strategies used by poor readers and skilled readers differ. According to ​Reading Rockets​, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, good readers know letter-sound correspondence, how to manipulate sounds within a word (phonemic awareness), how to recognize that word chunks or morphemes make certain sounds (phonics) and are able to apply written spellings representing the spoken word (alphabetic principle). Poor readers do not know how to do those things.

This summer, Emily Hanford referenced a study by Stanovich in 1975. He found that poor readers were those who used pictures to guess the words written on the page. His research into exactly how good readers learn to read (as summarized by ​Reading Rockets​) has been reproduced many times in the past 40 years by a number of independent researchers. Yet, your program encourages teachers to instruct students to learn to read using the exact skills that poor readers use. As parents, it’s difficult for us to wrap our heads around the fact that districts using your program are teaching students to read using the skills poor readers use to compensate for their inability to directly decode words using the letters. As parents we sometimes try to teach their child to read by sounding out the letters on the page only to have the teacher use a multistep guessing game to try to figure out a word. It’s functionally incompatible. We also know that the dyslexia tutors we hire privately (at personal expense) require so much time to retrain students away from the bad habits associated with guessing words on the page. Simply put, what you teach are the coping mechanisms that poor readers employ when they lack direct decoding skills. We have to pay for our children to learn to directly decode the printed word in order to help them read. It’s heartbreaking to watch and participate in this process because our children suffer the loss of self- esteem, positive academic self-concept, and lose out on family time when their literacy learning happens over the summer or after school.

This rebuttal to your essay is intended to convey the parental and family perspective. Let’s focus on the consequences of being compliant parents within your program, as delivered by the public schools our children attend. It comes down to this, Lucy: children and parents are both frustrated! We are often told to “just wait and your child will just learn to read on his/her own”.

As families, we are stretched farther than most will ever know emotionally and financially, but we are educated, organized and persistent. We will not give up until children with dyslexia are identified in schools and taught basic literacy skills based on the science of reading as is their right under a free and appropriate education. ​ Just wait and trust us, Lucy, that the science of reading will work for all children in the classroom, teachers will have more confidence in teaching children how to read and ultimately tests scores will increase. ​We think that’s what we all want, right?

Meanwhile Lucy, it’s a travesty to watch this happening to our families. For families who cannot ‘donate’ tens of thousands of dollars necessary to teach their children to read, your article doesn’t mention where these children SHOULD expect to receive services. Do you have an answer, Lucy? What address should we use when we send you the receipts for the cost to our families?

Katie Kasubaski
Claudine Kavanagh
Kari Baumann
Decoding Dyslexia - Wisconsin

https://www.readingrockets.org/article/ ... learn-read

https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/0 ... ch-reading