It’s commonly accepted by even those who have never studied literacy rates in this country that the number of children who can’t read at grade level is far too large. According to 2023 national statistics, 65 percent of fourth graders can barely read at basic levels, and 21 percent who are 18 years and older are functionally illiterate. This translates into 130 million adults who are unable to read a simple story to their children or read a label on prescription medication. These figures are shocking for an economically successful country.
In California, the literacy statistics are similarly distressing. In 2022, only 42 percent of third graders tested at grade level. Although Covid is often cited as a key reason for this dismal statistic, it is not the sole reason for it. Most of us over the age of 40 don’t remember how we learned to read, and because we are proficient readers, it doesn’t occur to us that we live in a country in which literacy is not universal.
The reason this is so important is because the ability to read is more than a skill; it’s a firm line of demarcation between those who have social and economic opportunities and those who don’t. Low literacy rates are associated with high school dropout rates, the inability to find jobs that provide a living wage, and even an increased chance of incarceration. While this seems a dire pronouncement and your children are learning to read just fine, during Covid, many parents who were exiled to their homes to work remotely discovered that their children, receiving their lessons on Zoom, were struggling to read the simplest materials.
The methods adopted over time for reading instructions have been subject to the same pressure that often affects change in accepted practice, namely financial. Each curriculum adopted for school systems entails the purchase of millions of dollars of materials in the form of books and individual modules. It is a difficult decision to abandon such a huge investment, especially when public funds are involved. This and other factors that involve resistance to change in general play a role in what should be a straightforward goal of teaching children to read.
The one group that could not be faulted during these reading wars was classroom teachers. They were largely unaware of the factors that were dictating their literacy instruction practices. They were teaching what they had been taught during their training. On the front lines, they were doing the best they could while outside forces battled.
FOR IT WAS A WAR, AS THE FOLLOWING SUMMARY WILL REVEAL.
The Early Pioneer: Horace Mann
The reading wars began somewhere in the late nineteenth century with a revered figure in education, Horace Mann, who promulgated his theory of how children best learn how to read. He was firmly against sounding out words—a practice later known as phonics—because he thought children would be distracted from learning the meaning of the words. He believed that if you presented the same word over and over again, children would learn to recognize it and memorize it. His theory was called “whole language.”
Marie Clay: The 1980s
That seed of a theory carried over throughout the 1980s and into 2000, with another revered figure in literacy education, a New Zealander named Marie Clay. She believed that the way to teach children who struggled with reading was to see the same words over and over, which was a variation of the Mann theory. She also decried phonics as a way of teaching, believing instead that children use three “cues” to figure out words—looking at pictures and other context clues. The three-cueing method was incorporated in her famous “Reading Recovery” curriculum which, despite its high cost to implement, took America by storm. By the end of the 1990s, it was taught in 49 states.
The Bush Years: The “Reading First” Initiative of 2000
When George W. Bush was elected president, inspired by his wife Barbara, who was a literacy advocate, he embraced what neuroscience had discovered about how children learn to read. Our brains build a memory of the sounds we hear, and then link their sounds to the words we see, making phonics a bedrock of the process of learning to read. Neuroscience created the basis of the Science of Reading, which is now the gold standard of literacy education.
As a result of these new discoveries, Bush and his advocates wanted the three-cueing method and other similar strategies to be stripped from all literacy education curricula, and for a while, their recommendations were embraced. But ultimately Reading First fell apart as a result of coordinated opposition by teachers’ unions and by those who felt that teaching methods should not be the province of politicians. So along with Bush’s initiative, phonics was banished as a cornerstone methodology for teaching reading.
Lucy Calkins: Academic Superstar
Lucy Calkins is one of the most famous figures in the Reading Wars. Although not a recognized authority in teaching literacy, she made it her objective to learn all she could from people who were. Her theory was that if you provided the right environment—cozy nooks and warm lighting, for example—children would learn to love to read because they would be surrounded by the right conditions. There was no effort in her plan to help kids sound out words. Teachers loved her approach, which carried with it the aura of the Ivy League. Calkins’ institutes, based at Columbia University’s Teachers College, was a mecca for those in the field. Teachers who were chosen to attend classes there were the envy of their peers. But soon there was no need to travel to New York to access the program. Instead, Calkins’ trainers would come to local schools that contracted with her institutes to teach the Calkins method. She had such star power that districts who contracted with the Calkins Institutes sometimes paid up to a million dollars for her trainers to come to them.
However, the Calkins method, called balanced literacy, ultimately did not succeed. Absent a method of sounding out, or decoding words, the children who trained in the Calkins method did not learn how to read.
Lucy Calkins’ reading theory was wrong, and ultimately she admitted it. She was widely rebuked for ignoring the science behind how children learn to read, and after a period of disruption at her institutes, they were disbanded. Meanwhile, she made millions of dollars through her training programs and the books that were published as part of her curriculum. She has used her fame to start a new publishing company to promote what she now says is a method based on science.
Although the Calkins method has been largely debunked, it is still taught in school districts here and abroad, especially in states where there are no standards established for literacy education.
Note: This section relies heavily on the podcast Sold a Story by journalist Em
ily Hanford. The authors highly recommend it.
SUSAN MEISTER is a journalist, columnist, and community activist living in Pebble Beach. Susan’s writing has been recognized with awards for service writing and news feature writing from the Parenting Media Association.
HEIDI KESTELYN, MS, taught for twenty-five years in California schools. She is now a reading specialist at the Bush School in Seattle and an independent consultant in literacy education.