Maryellen MacDonald & Mark Seidenberg

Calkins became a lightning rod because she represented the sheer intransigence of educators in the face of evidence that their methods for teaching reading were ineffective and ill-conceived. 

Calkins has now conceded that problems with her approach discussed in Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story were real. The problems were not small ones. Calkins grossly underestimated the extent to which beginning readers need instruction about how print represents sound and meaning. She instead encouraged the strategy of guessing words from context, a slow, error-prone process often employed by poor readers. Calkins erred in taking this as the path to becoming a skilled reader, which made the task more difficult. Her approach was also wholly inadequate in addressing the needs of children who struggle to read because of dyslexia or other conditions that interfere with learning.  

The Calkins curriculum could nonetheless be sufficient for some children: those who were taught basic skills at home, in pre-K, or by a tutor. For such children, any curriculum that didn’t extinguish their interest in reading would suffice. Calkins’ approach was insufficient for the rest, who don’t have the luxury of extra reading instruction outside of school. By failing to provide adequate instruction in school and outsourcing basic skills instruction to the home, the Calkins approach and other Whole Language/Balanced Literacy curricula magnified the impact of socioeconomic factors that underlie “achievement gaps”.