I Met Lucy Calkins at The Reading League. I Still Have Questions.
Last week, I ran into Lucy Calkins at The Reading League Conference in Chicago, and I have been simmering on it for a bit.
If you don’t know my story, it was featured in Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story. I was the teacher and the mom who had been trained in the very practices that would later fail my own child.
Lucy Calkins was a huge part of my preservice teacher training at the University of Georgia. I still have my copy of The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, my district introduced me to Fountas and Pinnell’s Guided Reading. Balanced literacy wasn’t something sitting on the fringes of my professional life. It was thoroughly embedded in how I had been taught to think about literacy.
I believed it, and I taught it with fidelity, and then I had a child with dyslexia.
Anyone who has been through that knows that it changes the way you look at everything.
I watched a system that was supposed to teach my child to read cling to practices that didn’t teach him to read. I was actually told that the balanced literacy approaches being used in his school were appropriate for children with dyslexia. I have emails from that time explaining that they weren’t going to focus on sounding words out.
I still get emotional thinking about that.
Now I know what my child needed. I know what the research says. And I know how deeply entrenched this methodology has become in our schools.
So standing in the same physical space as Lucy Calkins at a conference devoted to advancing the science of reading was complicated for me.
For clarity, I don’t have a problem with Lucy Calkins learning.
Everyone should be learning.
If someone discovers that what they believed, taught, promoted, or sold does not align with the evidence, I absolutely want them sitting in the room learning something different.
But learning creates a responsibility to act on your new knowledge.
Lucy and I had a short conversation at the conference. She talked about teachers learning all this information and then having to go back to their districts and figure out how to actually implement it.
And I kept thinking: Teachers have been trying.
The science didn’t suddenly appear when it became popular to attend a science-of-reading conference. Researchers, teachers, parents, advocates, and people with dyslexia have been sounding alarms for years.
Some of us have been begging systems to listen.
Some of us were dismissed.
Some teachers were told to follow the curriculum anyway.
Some parents were told to trust the experts.
And some kids paid the price, especially kids with dyslexia.
That’s why, for me, the question isn’t whether Lucy Calkins should be allowed in the room.
The question is what happens after she leaves that space.
For years, I have said that we cannot keep trying to repair the Balanced Literacy Fortress. At some point, you have to admit the foundation was wrong. You don’t patch the roof. You don’t replace a few windows. You don’t repaint the walls and hang new curtains. You must dismantle what was built on a faulty foundation and rebuild it based on what the evidence tells us about how children learn to read.
And that is what I am wondering:
Will Lucy Calkins dismantle the fortress she helped build?
Or will she renovate it?
Those are not the same thing.
Today, the newest versions of Units of Study are being marketed as incorporating science-of-reading principles, foundational skills, and knowledge building.
Adding evidence-aligned practices to a program raises an important question: When are we willing to acknowledge that some of the underlying beliefs and practices were wrong?
Not outdated.
Not misunderstood.
Not simply in need of “refinement.”
Wrong.
And if they were wrong, I believe someone has to account for what those practices meant for children.
I haven’t seen that reckoning yet.
I haven’t heard the public acknowledgment that I think families and teachers deserve. I haven’t heard enough about the children who struggled unnecessarily while adults were taught to encourage them to use strategies other than actually reading the words on the page.
And I especially haven’t heard enough about children with dyslexia.
Those children matter in this conversation.
My child matters in this conversation.
The thousands of parents who were ignored when they advocated for evidence-based instruction matter.
The teachers who now realize their training did not adequately prepare them to teach children how to read matter.
And the kids who decided somewhere along the way that they were the problem matter most of all.
So yes, Lucy, keep learning.
Sit in the sessions. Listen to the researchers. Talk to teachers. Talk to parents. And please, talk to adults and kids with dyslexia who lived through classrooms formed by these practices.
Learn everything you can, but then tell us what you learned.
Tell us what you got wrong.
Tell us what you would tell the teachers who were trained in your work.
Tell us what you would tell the parents whose children couldn’t read.
Tell us what you would tell the children with dyslexia who needed explicit instruction in the code while the adults around them were being taught something very different.
And then tell us what you’re going to do about it.
There is one more piece of this that we need to be willing to say out loud.
If I am a superintendent today with limited resources and an enormous responsibility to get literacy instruction right, and I have a choice between investing in well-vetted, evidence-aligned materials with strong evidence behind them or investing again in materials from someone whose previous approach helped lead us down the wrong road, why would I choose the latter?
That isn’t about revenge.
It isn’t about refusing to let people change.
It’s about accountability.
Changing your thinking is good.
Changing your materials is better.
However, when your work shaped literacy instruction in thousands of schools and influenced generations of teachers, I think change also requires publicly reckoning with what came before.
Lucy Calkins built an empire.
Now I want to know what she is willing to dismantle.
Maybe showing up at The Reading League is part of that journey. I hope it is.
But attending a conference isn’t the reckoning.
Learning isn’t the reckoning.
Updating Units of Study isn’t the reckoning.
The reckoning begins when we are willing to say clearly what went wrong, who was harmed, and what we are going to do differently because of it.
I believe people can learn.
I believe people can change.
I believe there should be room for both.
But I also believe that when your influence helped shape how an entire generation of teachers was taught to teach reading, learning something new isn’t the end of the story.
It’s where the responsibility begins.