The Tale of HSE School District’s Lost Curriculum
Once upon a time, the HSE School District had a strong curriculum that challenged students in reading, spelling, math, science, and language. Unfortunately, though most parents do not realize this, the district traded this curriculum in 2014 for a failed “philosophy” developed by Lucy Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University. Under this new “philosophy,” there are no language arts textbooks and no money is given to teachers to pay for outside resources they are forced to use. Because of Lucy Calkins’ lack of direction, teachers have to have a large number of supplemental materials. As our district accepted this program, it also did away with spelling tests, worksheets, writing worksheets, and homework. And the situation has been exacerbated by the adoption of the 1:1 program, under which our kids use an iPad exclusively in our district.
Under this new system, basic skills are suffering, and students are increasingly unable to write, spell, or punctuate as they enter middle school. Without a curriculum, students are also losing the ability to recognize a complete sentence, to write or recognize a paragraph, and to capitalize “I” consistently. They are not being taught how to use the words ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘were’, ‘because’, ‘feel’. They are not being taught to follow 1-3 step instructions, or to problem solve, either socially or academically. If kids are not given a strong foundation of basic skills, they cannot understand more complicated concepts in the upper grades. Despite these disastrous results, the Calkins “philosophy” is the only resource that has been given to K-5 teachers in the HSE School District.
Under the Lucy Calkins philosophy, “three-cueing” involves telling students to look at context and sentence structure, along with letters, to figure out words. For beginning readers, this isn’t the easiest way to learn how to decipher printed text. Data now shows that Calkins’ approach does not work. Skilled readers do not use “cues” to read, but this is the main idea taught in this program. Because of this, the program reinforces bad behaviors that struggling readers face. Seven experts in literacy independently reviewed the program after a report from the group, Student Achievement Partners (SAP) came out, their expertise focused on their areas of expertise in phonics and fluency, text complexity, building knowledge and vocabulary, and English learner materials. They compared Units of Study to existing research on literacy instruction and have found that this program does not give enough attention to phonics, the foundational basis on which children build their language and reading skills. Because of complaints from teachers, some phonics were added in 2018. Even though phonics is being touched on, it is still doesn’t provide children with the kind of explicit instruction and practice time that research has shown is needed for all students to develop good reading skills.
The Calkins program also allows a child the freedom to choose what they want to read. Teachers are aware that children often choose the easiest book to read to finish their requirements, but not challenging their reading skills. Children who enjoy reading and are self-motivators can do okay in this program, but the students who start from behind tend to stay behind. The smarter kids will advance while the struggling students do not.
“Children who routinely adopt alternative cues for reading unknown words, instead of learning to decode them, later find themselves stranded when texts become more demanding and meanings less predictable. The best route for children to become fluent and independent readers lies in securing phonics as the prime approach to decoding unfamiliar words.”
— Primary National Strategy 2006b cited by Dr. Kerry Henpenstall in The Three-Cueing Model: Down for the Count?
The writing program in Lucy Calkins’ Unit of Study is all about journaling. That in itself is not bad, but there is no language instruction, associated with it. Students are supposed to write “freely” every day. However, because there is no guide instructing students to capitalize the first word, or to write in complete sentences, or to use correct punctuation, the exercise does not teach or reinforce basic skills, which the students therefore never develop. Writing “freely” sounds like more fun than receiving instruction on punctuation, but without informing the basic skills like this, our children cannot become great writers.
Teachers use Indiana State Standards to develop their own curriculum, lessons, scope and sequence, and assessments. As a result, there is zero consistency among schools. If a child moves from one school to another, it is possible that either there will be skills that are repeated or skills that will simply not be covered at all with this lack of consistency. As the students are passed onto the next grade, there has been no true assessment of their skills, and they reach the upper grades without mastering the basics. The middle school teachers do not know where students are lacking because everyone has been taught differently. Some children can’t write at all, which obviously prevents them from writing “freely”.
We have to demand better for our children. We have to push to adopt a curriculum that gets “back to the basics,'' or we will be graduating kids who were never given the chance to succeed, while schools around us are. Bring back worksheets, spelling words and a better reading program that we had before. As parents, we need to push for an actual curriculum with scope and sequence.
Resources:
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2020/01/27/lucy-calkins-reading-materials-review
https://www.coreknowledge.org/blog/the-shortcomings-of-lucy-calkinss-units-of-study/
https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/right-read/dear-lucy-open-letter-lucy-calkins
https://eduvaites.org/2020/01/25/understanding-the-concerns-about-teachers-college-reading-workshop/
https://dyslexiaida.org/critics-respond-to-calkins-position-statement-about-science-of-reading /