#472: Writing With Compassion

Why I appreciated “Teaching Lucy,” by Helen Lewis

Happy Thanksgiving, loyal readers.

I’m away on vacation, so today’s issue is going to be shorter than usual. I’m going to feature just one article and tell you why I liked it.

The piece is, “Teaching Lucy,” by Helen Lewis, published in The Atlantic.

If you’re an educator — and particularly, if you are a teacher of reading — you’ll recognize the subject of the article, Lucy Calkins. If you’re not familiar with Ms. Calkins, she used to be one of the most famous educators in the United States, with thousands of teachers using her methods of reading instruction. Then a few years ago, Ms. Calkins faced a backlash, spearheaded by a journalist named Emily Hanford (whom I interviewed in 2018), that challenged her approach, summarily canceling her and making her a pariah.

Typically I wouldn’t choose to share this type of article. After all, I’m not a big fan of the Reading Wars. I don’t enjoy following self-righteous educators, convinced that their way is the only way to teach all children, yelling at other educators and calling them dumb. In addition, I’m always nervous when The Atlantic publishes articles on education. They’re usually elitist in nature. And finally, most writing on education is not outstanding, so I tend to pass it up.

But writer Helen Lewis does a brilliant job here. She writes with compassion. I highly encourage you to read the piece, especially if you’re a parent or an educator.

How One Woman Became The Scapegoat For America’s Reading Crisis

For decades, Lucy Calkins was at the top of American education. She developed a reading curriculum, Units of Study, that believed that children learn best when taken seriously as meaning makers. Her approach — later called Balanced Literacy — combined direct phonics instruction with exposure to whole books that students chose based on their interests. Part of the point was to instill in young people a love of reading. For at least a generation, most children in the United States learned to read using Ms. Calkins’s method.

But over the last 10 years, a group of educators, cognitive scientists, and parents of children with dyslexia have blamed Ms. Calkins for what they call her irresponsible and unscientific approach to teaching reading. The reason our young people cannot read is that we’ve let Lucy teach them. They emphasize an approach called the Science of Reading, which focuses on direct phonics instruction. Children grow to love reading because they possess the skills to read proficiently. Leading this effort was Emily Hanford, a journalist who felt strongly that Ms. Calkins was doing a disservice to children. Her podcast, Sold a Story (featured here in 2022), galvanized the anti-Lucy movement, essentially canceling her and causing hundreds of school districts to abandon Units of Study.

In this well-written profile, Ms. Lewis examines this controversy, explains how Ms. Calkins fell from grace, and considers whether she can regain her good name.

By Helen Lewis • The Atlantic Monthly • 23 min • Gift Link

From our hotel room in Seoul. It snowed!

💬 My Thoughts

First, my biases:

• I’ve always worked with high school students. As much as I believe in the Science of Reading, I also know that direct phonics instruction cannot be the only approach with adolescents who struggle to read. By the time they’re teenagers, they’ve accumulated reading identities, based on their lived experiences, that are not easy to untangle.

• Although on the one hand I appreciate the work of Emily Hanford to uncover the problems of Balanced Literacy, I always felt her reporting lacked nuance.

OK, with those caveats out of the way, it’s finally time for me to share why I appreciated this article so much. If you want an inside look, feel free to read my annotations as you follow along. Here are a few reasons:

1️⃣ Ms. Lewis recognizes and does not dismiss that the personal conflict between Ms. Calkins and Ms. Hanford was instrumental to this story
It is certainly true that there was a movement by thousands of educators to criticize Balanced Literacy and to uphold the Science of Reading as the best way to teach children to read. But Ms. Lewis accurately acknowledges that the attacks on Ms. Calkins were also personal, with Ms. Hanford leading the charge.

In Sold a Story, Ms. Hanford characterizes Ms. Calkins as out of touch. She is a privileged white woman, Ms. Hanford argues, whose beliefs stem from an esteemed New England childhood. Ms. Lewis expertly draws out this conflict, eliciting a defensive response from Ms. Calkins.

While making sure to note that Ms. Calkins did not indeed come from extravagant wealth, Ms. Lewis does not refrain from sharing details of her current lifestyle. Almost as important as the merits of the reading debate was Ms. Hanford’s depiction of Ms. Calkins as a snooty queen, aloof to criticism. In her writing, Ms. Lewis picks up on this populist trend in American education to vanquish an educational star. And the ultimate point was to win, by any means necessary — even if that meant publishing podcast after podcast that stated the same thing (there were many!).

2️⃣ However, Ms. Lewis broadens the scope of the reading controversy, making sure to explain the larger context
It would be easy for Ms. Lewis to focus exclusively on the conflict between Ms. Calkins and Ms. Hanford. Certainly, there is enough vitriol between the Balanced Literacy and the Science of Reading camps to fill many magazine pages. But instead of again fanning the flames, which would have been boring and annoying, Ms. Lewis takes a broader view, making sure we understand the recent Reading Wars in greater context.

In one passage, for example, Ms. Lewis zooms out, helping her reader realize that Americans have always wanted easy solutions to complex problems.

Later in the piece, Ms. Lewis spends significant space to explain another reason that the controversy became so heated — namely, that reading instruction became imbroiled in our post-pandemic culture wars. If you were a Lucy fan, you were a soft, out-of-touch progressive. If you were an advocate of the Science of Reading, you were an American patriot.

3️⃣ Most importantly, Ms. Lewis writes with compassion
Over the last 10 years of doing Article Club, perhaps the single most important thing I’ve looked for in writing is compassion. When I find a piece that includes nuance and humanity, I immediately gravitate toward it. This was one of those pieces.

In this article, Ms. Lewis does an extraordinary job helping the reader get to know Ms. Calkins. Not all of it is positive — like the references to the monogrammed towels, or this comparison of her cancellation to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001:

But then Ms. Lewis doesn’t give up on Ms. Calkins. There are stories from her childhood, for instance, as well as from the first decades of her career. There are also expressions of regret — and evidence that she is doing her best to listen to her critics and start anew. In short, Ms. Lewis offers us Ms. Calkins as a whole person, filled with faults as well as dreams. She’s stubborn, sure. But she’s also human, a regular person — and a bit scared. “I can’t retire,” she says, at 72 years old. “I don’t have any hobbies.”

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