APS Lucy Calkins- how does this happen?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know what percentage of teaching colleges/education schools and school districts embraced the Lucy Calkins balanced literacy curriculum, but I believe the curriculum dominated the market and was used in many states and public school districts. It is hard to blame school districts and public officials for initially adopting it. It was well marketed and was a strong fad that really caught on. Some districts were required by state legislatures to use the curriculum.

I do blame researchers, public officials, and school districts for taking decades before they understood the effects of the curriculum and came to the realization that it was not effective whatsoever. I don't blame teachers. They are not scientists and researchers. They did not understand how to teach someone to read. They used the methodology they learned in college and from the professional training they received. If you read the testimony of teachers who taught the curriculum and realized later how terrible it was, they were sick to their stomachs about all the children who suffered and did not learn to read well because of the curriculum.

I only blame teachers and schools that are still clinging to it. We all know better. A teacher who is still using LC is negligent and should be fired. (And yes, I've met some, including in APS. Last year at BTS night the APS teachers explained that they were not introducing Core Knowledge LA but had decided to do another year of LC in 1st grade. They later backtracked a bit and said they'd also use 95Phonics with LC, but still weren't going to do Core Knowledge LA.)

Yeah, the truth is that the difference between Science of Reading and Balanced Literacy isn’t much. What happened was the three cueing systems BECAME balanced literacy and unbalanced it. At first balanced literacy WAS the idea that kids need sight words, phonics, phonemic awareness and background knowledge to read. (Kind of like the science of reading)

The way people now think about balanced literacy came about because of a book called Guided Reading which overly relied on the 3 cueing systems rather than building solid phonics. It also focused on building sight words in small readers while teaching the 3 cueing systems of reading. Interestingly enough the Guided Reading authors also put out lesser know Making Words and Phonics their Way books to supplement guided reading to provide all pillars of literacy, but those weren’t used as often by teachers. The did provide a lot of good phonics ideas, but still lacked in phonemic awareness which is also very important. So guessing based on the first letter and does it sound right became the first strategy teachers taught rather than sounding out.

It wasn’t just Lucy Caulkins, although she was definitely one of the problems and is an easy whipping girl at this point. Hopefully we have it all figured out and curriculum companies won’t ever have to write another curriculum!

[Anonymous]

Here was the beginning of an approach that ignored phonics and resulted in thousands of kids being placed in special education programs under the category of Specific Learning Disability. A TRAVESTY.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-05-26-mn-3664-story.html