Jeff Kwitowski

Well-reported piece but it misses something essential. The Achilles Heel of Calkins approach isn't phonics, it's what comes next: worshipping student engagement to excess, and encouraging the idea that if kids just love to read they'll become good readers. It doesn't work that way. My South Bronx school was a Calkins school. In five years teaching 5th grade, I never had a single student who could not "read" (decode). Their struggle was with comprehension. It's why I became an E.D. Hirsch disciple. My staff developers from Calkins' shop stressed reading comprehension skills and strategies; they insisted my students were bored. They needed books that reflected their interests and experiences with characters "who looked like them." Put those "just right" books in their hands and--voila!--success would follow. But Hirsch's work described my students' struggles as if he'd been in my classroom: "No," he might have said had he been there, "it's background knowledge. It's vocabulary." An education that is all mirrors and no windows creates the *illusion* of literacy -- kids seem competent when reading and writing about topics they know, as Hirsch's work would predict, because they're reading about topics they know and understand. But it creates a "false positive" for Lucy and her acolytes. The language proficiency "skills" they demonstrate don't translate to tests or the broader world of mature literacy, because they are not skills at all. They're an effect of knowledge. Lucy still doesn't get it: if you want kids to be broadly literate, they must be broadly educated and endowed with the knowledge that literate writers and speakers know *and assume they know* too. That's what literacy and language proficiency is. It's not a skill you teach, it's a condition you create.

"Students in virtual schools are far more likely than their brick-and-mortar school peers to report incidents of bullying, trouble with teachers, or their academic needs not being met at their previous school." fordhaminstitute.org/nationa…

Next time someone says schools are "underfunded" ask how much they think their local school district should spend per student. More often than not, they'll name a figure *less* than the district is already spending.