Are educators legally liable for their students’ failure to learn? A group of parents in Massachusets are trying to find out. They have filed a lawsuit against highly influential Columbia University-based educator Lucy Calkins and her publisher, alleging that Calkins’ curriculum, which teaches reading using word-recognition instead of phonics, is based on discredited science, was fraudulently marketed, and “caused significant harm to generations of students.”
At first glance, this might look like overly-litigious parents scapegoating teachers for their children’s laziness. But nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, this case supports teachers by highlighting the need for accountability in educational leadership.
Classroom teachers, especially those who work with younger children, are expected to deal, patiently and effectively, with every imaginable childhood problem. One classroom might contain kids who are coddled and spoiled, kids who are abused and neglected, kids with a mosaic of mental and emotional disorders, and kids who are otherwise okay, but whose sedentary lifestyle and poor nutrition drive behavior issues.
This is difficult enough, even under ideal circumstances. When compounded by bureaucratic meddling and the constant pressure of having their performance measured by standardized test scores, it’s no wonder that teachers burn out and quit at tremendous rates.
To make matters worse, as the Massachusets lawsuit makes clear, thousands of classroom teachers have been forced to use curricula based on disproven methods, largely because the academic elite refuse to admit when they’re wrong.
To understand how this state of affairs has grown and metastasized in the world of education, it helps to understand how two divergent approaches to literacy education emerged and became entrenched.
The Whole-Word vs. Phonics Debate
In the mid-1800s, a disagreement emerged over the best way to teach reading. Educators like Noah Webster and Thomas Gallaudet believed that using phonemes (the sounds represented by letters and combinations of letters) as building blocks would allow students to decode and read any word, whether it was familiar or unfamiliar.
Phonics-reading proponents were opposed by scholars like Horace Mann (“the father of American public education”), and John Dewey (no relation to Melvil Dewey of the Dewey Decimal system), who saw the phonetic approach as slow and tedious. They proposed a “whole word” approach that taught students to memorize commonly-used “sight words” as complete units, so that they could see and recognize them at a glance. In their view, unfamiliar words could simply be added to a student’s vocabulary as they were encountered through reading.
Evidence that phonics was more effective than the whole-word method came in the early 1900s. The first woman to graduate from medical school in Italy began developing a comprehensive system for early-childhood education, which included the use of phonics. Because her ideas were unfamiliar, the only students she was able to work with were what we would today call “underprivileged” - children from poor families, often with behavior issues and learning disabilities.
The young doctor’s name was Maria Montessori, and the results of the Montessori Method were phenomenal, with her students often outperforming their more well-to-do peers.
Unfortunately, since Italian is a more consistently phonetic language than English, this evidence was unconvincing to advocates of whole-word literacy in England and the United States. They argued that English has so many phonetic exceptions (e.g. silent letters or letter combinations that can be pronounced in different ways), it’s more efficient to learn words as wholes rather than as collections of parts.
Elite academia preferred the whole-word approach, and it was adopted by many U.S. schools. Half a century later, Austrian-born author Rudolf Flesch wrote the 1955 book “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” In it, he argued that the whole-word method had produced a generation of readers that struggled to recognize, pronounce, or comprehend unfamiliar words (personal aside: my college anatomy teacher consistently misread the word “pedicle” as “pentacle” during lectures, probably for this exact reason).
Flesch recommended a return to the phonics system, arguing that understanding the construction of words empowered students to engage more fully with the meaning of written language. Interestingly, the same point had been made centuries earlier by religious leaders like Martin Luther and John Wesley, who proposed that fundamental literacy was the only way the common folk would be able to properly read and understand scripture.
Flesch’s argument made a lot of sense to teachers, parents, and a young author named Theodor Geisel, who wrote a series of children’s books under the pseudonym Dr. Seuss that helped children learn phonics.
Of course, Geisel couldn’t resist poking fun at English’s phonetic inconsistencies through cartoons such as “the tough coughs as he ploughs the dough.”
Unfortunately, not everyone was a fan of phonics. Flesch was countered by Dr. Kenneth Goodman, who characterized reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game,” arguing that recognizing whole words was a more natural process than deconstructing words into phonemes.
The theories of Dr. Goodman, who was closely aligned with Noam Chomsky and other progressive academics, were highly influential in educational circles during the 1980s and ’90s – the era when Lucy Calkin and her peers were earning their own credentials. Thus, even though, as the lawsuit against Calkins points out, the overwhelming preponderance of research evidence proves that phonics is the superior method, the whole-word method continues to be promulgated by the credentialed class of educators.
“Defendants claimed that their literacy offerings were backed by or grounded in ‘research.’ But the research is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Indeed, the few studies that Defendants have cited in support of their approaches are unreliable, methodologically flawed, and lack sound theoretical or empirical foundations.
This stubborn insistence on whole-word education has not aged well. Over the last few years, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama - historically three of the worst states for literacy - achieved astonishing turnarounds by replacing whole-word methods with phonics-based ones. In doing so, these states have closed in on Florida, which itself became one of the best states in the nation for childhood literacy by adopting phonics in the late 1990s.
All of which begs the question: if we’ve had reason to believe for over half a century - and perhaps for more than a century - that phonics is best, why have schools resisted teaching it? While credentialism, authority bias, and other systemic social issues played a big role, one of the most proximal reasons was standardization.
Industrial Schooling
Horace Mann and the other founders of the modern education system were working within the milieu of the Industrial Revolution. Interchangeable parts, standard processes, and consistent quality control were the new, hot trends. From their perspective, there was no reason that these concepts, which were revolutionizing manufacturing, could not be applied to the classroom.
One of the keys to the Industrial Revolution was standarization. Everything from nails and screws to pieces of lumber were being machine-made to standard specifications, which could easily be verified. To Mann and his colleagues, it made sense that using standardized curricula, teaching methods, and tests could similarly result in children who had been educated to standard specifications.
This industrial influence is the reason for traditions such as the bell that rings to announce class changes, or the way children are sorted into classes based on age rather than on skill level. School was envisioned as an assembly line: a young child goes in one end, and a productive member of society comes out the other.
In theory, this standardized approach allows for the promulgation of “best practices” and across-the-board evaluations. In practice, it forbids individualization, and incentivizes teachers to “teach to the test.” This is partially why whole-word teaching has continued to be used: it allowed teachers to have students memorize the words on the test, allowing them to attain satisfactory scores, even with minimal comprehension.
The Importance of Local Action
In the United States, despite the best efforts of the Department of Education and teacher’s unions to establish authoritarian control, local school boards and state secretaries of education still allow communities some influence over what is taught. This is why states like Florida and Mississippi were able to (eventually) abandon failed policies and embrace more successful ones.
But, unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the rule. Lucy Calkins’ curricula was adopted by thousands of schools because it was well-funded. It looked good, sounded good, and provided teachers with classroom-ready materials. The fact that it didn’t work took decades to reveal, because her credentials were impeccable.
In contrast, the “Mississippi Miracle” and the continued success of Montessori education show what can be accomplished when parents and teachers work together to help children realize their full potential as individuals, not simply as cogs in a societal machine.
With that said, education must be treated in a holistic way. School districts that have tried to shoehorn Montessori techniques into otherwise conventional programs have had disappointing results, because of the fundamental incompatibility of these educational philosophies. Taking bits and pieces of an individual-focused methodology and inserting it into a system that treats children like interchangeable parts just doesn’t work.
Teachers work hard, and they deserve to be supported by parents and administrators. For too long, elite academics have insisted that classrooms be run like little factories, forcing teachers to use inefficient teaching methods, and then blaming them for poor educational outcomes.
Hopefully, the Massachusets lawsuit will draw more attention to this issue, resulting in a win for children, parents, and teachers.