Lucy Calkins/Fountas & Pinnell being sued for selling ineffective reading programs

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's the educators who need to get sued. They should have known better than to buy a shit program with no phonics.

And you should know that it isn’t educators who choose and do purchase curriculum. My colleagues and I basically went behind our admin’s back to teach phonics.

Exactly this! No one program or curriculum is going to be perfect. Anyone who has taught in the classroom learns that very quickly. I used both of these systems as an mcps teacher but I also provided phonics instruction because it was needed.

I had a happy hour with a bunch of moms the last day of my daughter's 1st grade year and out of the 12 moms, 10 had been told that they needed to pay for private reading tutoring or consider holding their student back because they weren't meeting reading benchmarks. The moms were all very upset and comparing and sharing tutor info. All felt completely blindsided because they expected our highly regarded APS elementary to teach their kids to read and all read with their kids regularly, which is what they'd been told to do by the establishment to teach a love of reading and create a strong reader.

Our school used Lucy Calkin's reading workshop and it was utterly failing kids. I was astounded. I'd taught my daughter to read the summer before K using the phonics based program Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I'm so glad I did. The other kid who could read on grade level was an early reader and had learned before kindergarten.

I still know these kids and moms. One was diagnosed ADHD and another has dyslexia. The other kids all caught up quickly with phonics tutoring. They're smart kids who just hadn't been taught what they needed to learn to read.

I don’t mean this as offensively as it is going to come off, but as resourced as people are in Arlington why didn’t the moms just work with them? How were the kids not reading by first grade on their own? And why would a resourced parent not sit and teach their kids? My kids both learned before K just by reading with me.

DP
Some kids learn to read on their own. Most need explicit phonics instruction.

Many school systems haven't been providing that which is why reading scores are at all time lows

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/us/reading-skills-naep.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

[Anonymous]

Between 20-30% of kids will learn to read no matter which curriculum is used.

That means that 70-80% of students will need a good curriculum. Something Phonics-centered.

[Anonymous]

Amazing

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents in Massachusetts are actually suing them. The crux of the argument is that 1-the reading programs they sold to school districts across the country don't work because there is no phonics component and 2-they KNEW the reading programs didn't work.

Doesn't Fairfax still use these programs? I was forced to when I was a teacher, and we would get into trouble if anyone found out we were teaching phonics (which many of us did in secret).

I wish Fairfax parents would sue them.

Clearly you’re not in FCPS. If you were, you’d know that no one has used Caulkins in years and that EVERYONE in the county is using Benchmark which has explicit phonics instruction.

Whatever. My kid that just graduated used it their entire elementary school and it carried on much longer. Many of the kids still in K-12 went through this program.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it's the educators who need to get sued. They should have known better than to buy a shit program with no phonics.

Agreed. Teachers voted on these programs and educators run the administrative levels in FCPS too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's the educators who need to get sued. They should have known better than to buy a shit program with no phonics.

And you should know that it isn’t educators who choose and do purchase curriculum. My colleagues and I basically went behind our admin’s back to teach phonics.

Exactly this! No one program or curriculum is going to be perfect. Anyone who has taught in the classroom learns that very quickly. I used both of these systems as an mcps teacher but I also provided phonics instruction because it was needed.

I had a happy hour with a bunch of moms the last day of my daughter's 1st grade year and out of the 12 moms, 10 had been told that they needed to pay for private reading tutoring or consider holding their student back because they weren't meeting reading benchmarks. The moms were all very upset and comparing and sharing tutor info. All felt completely blindsided because they expected our highly regarded APS elementary to teach their kids to read and all read with their kids regularly, which is what they'd been told to do by the establishment to teach a love of reading and create a strong reader.

Our school used Lucy Calkin's reading workshop and it was utterly failing kids. I was astounded. I'd taught my daughter to read the summer before K using the phonics based program Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I'm so glad I did. The other kid who could read on grade level was an early reader and had learned before kindergarten.

I still know these kids and moms. One was diagnosed ADHD and another has dyslexia. The other kids all caught up quickly with phonics tutoring. They're smart kids who just hadn't been taught what they needed to learn to read.

I don’t mean this as offensively as it is going to come off, but as resourced as people are in Arlington why didn’t the moms just work with them? How were the kids not reading by first grade on their own? And why would a resourced parent not sit and teach their kids? My kids both learned before K just by reading with me.

I think the parents had been told that they should read with their kids so that's what they were doing--that's what teachers told us to be doing per Lucy Calkins. And there was also a view per LC that teaching boring phonics would spoil kids' love of reading, so you shouldn't do that. Parents also had faith that the school would teach their kids to read. After all, they're well respected schools right? And up until that moment teachers had said the kids were fine and not behind, so it was a pretty big shift.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's the educators who need to get sued. They should have known better than to buy a shit program with no phonics.

Agreed. Teachers voted on these programs and educators run the administrative levels in FCPS too.

I'm a teacher and we did in fact vote on one of these programs. We voted NOT to have it. Admin made us put our names on the ballots. Every teacher who voted NO was called into the main office and asked to change their vote. Threats were made. I'm not sure how many people gave in and changed their vote, but admin brought the program in the following year. It was a colossal failure. There was a bunch of teacher turnover, the literacy coach quit halfway through the year. Reading scores never got any better. I don't work there anymore, but I heard through the grapevine that a couple of years ago they got one of the new phonics programs instead.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's the educators who need to get sued. They should have known better than to buy a shit program with no phonics.

Agreed. Teachers voted on these programs and educators run the administrative levels in FCPS too.

The teachers who voted for Lucy Calkins had been trained in grad school using Fountas and Pinnell. They had been taught it was best practice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's the educators who need to get sued. They should have known better than to buy a shit program with no phonics.

Agreed. Teachers voted on these programs and educators run the administrative levels in FCPS too.

The teachers who voted for Lucy Calkins had been trained in grad school using Fountas and Pinnell. They had been taught it was best practice.

+1 University schools of education/teacher cert programs are a huge culprit here, too. Neither in grad school nor undergrad did I learn how to teach reading in a systematic manner with phonics. I went to a university well-regarded for its education program and as a whole (heck, the Lucy Calkins crap came out of one of the best universities in the entire world) - as far as literacy goes, I learned a lot about how to "inspire a love of reading" in students, how to structure a literacy block, how to pick "culturally relevant texts" and that kind of stuff...but explicitly being taught the systematic steps and processes of HOW to teach kids to read? Nope. I graduated from undergrad in 2004 and it was alllll balanced literacy.

Fortunately for my students, I invested a lot of personal time into learning how to properly teach kids to read because I very quickly saw the gaps in how I was trained. But many (most?) people who were trained in that era didn't. They...gasp...trusted that they were learning best, research-based practices from their universities. Which I think is not that unreasonable to expect from your university...?

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/13/1219318432/teacher-training-programs-dont-always-use-research-backed-reading-methods
But teacher training programs like this one don't always prepare educators to use researched-backed reading methods, like phonics. In a 2023 study, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) surveyed nearly 700 teacher training programs across the country. Their findings:

"Only about a quarter of the teachers who leave teacher preparation programs across our nation enter classrooms prepared to teach kids to read [in a way that's] aligned to the science and research on reading," says Heather Peske, president of NCTQ.