The price of being wrong

Being wrong may cost Lucy Calkins dearly, but did she bring the wrath upon herself?

A prominent researcher in the field of education is being sued. Parents in Massachusetts have alleged that Lucy Calkins, and other scholars, used deceptive marketing techniques and ignored research on the importance of phonics instruction when packaging and selling their curricula.

Much of the response by academics focuses on the effect of indicting professors for the results of their work, which they worry will create a chilling effect in academia. Researchers, before publishing their findings, may stop to think: What if being wrong costs me my livelihood? I worry about the same thing. Assuming that Calkins has been genuine in developing her approach to reading and writing, and that her findings aren’t fraudulent, even if we were to find out that Calkins was wrong about everything, she shouldn’t be financially liable for America’s reading problem.

But I am concerned about something else as well. The story of Calkins makes me wonder: Should researchers package their findings to be used?

I went to graduate school because I believed that decisions made within the world of education ought to be based on rigorous research, specifically from within the walls of a university, where I thought rigorous, unbiased research was conducted. I even studied how research, conducted in universities and elsewhere, was used by education nonprofits to make decisions about policies like school choice. What I learned was that university-based research is hardly ever used to make decisions by these nonprofits unless it suits their end goal — e.g., to prop up or denounce school choice policies. Rather, they rely on other nonprofits who conduct research that matches their interests. Furthermore, university-based research isn’t used because most of the time it’s incomprehensible, not only by the public, but also by the administrators and practitioners working in the field of education — i.e., the folks who researchers are studying and writing about. I also no longer hold the view that university-based research is unbiased, but this is a topic for another day.

Researchers conduct their studies to expand the knowledge base within the purview of their given subject. Most of that knowledge is closed off to the public, only available in paywalled academic journals. Even if the public had access to those journals, the academic jargon and the details of how the study was conducted, which often goes so deep into the weeds that other academics can’t even understand it unless they are trained in the same research techniques, renders the findings unhelpful to the public. Many people, inside and outside of academia, view knowledge being inaccessible, either due to paywalls or the incomprehensible language used to describe studies and their results, as a problem — what’s the point of producing knowledge if no one but those conducting studies and working for universities can access it? Thus, there are often calls for researchers to do a better job of sharing their research findings and knowledge by writing for the public, such as through op-eds, or working with journalists to relay what they know.

This explains the rise in public intellectuals, as they are often referred to. Researchers are also urged to answer the question: So what? What are we, practitioners in the related field of study, to do with what you know? How can we use your findings?

I share the sentiment that what is learned in the ivory tower should not stay there. Hoarding knowledge gives the impression that only a chosen few are allowed to be enlightened and thus the rest must listen to them, which is how some academics view their station in life, I have no doubt. But research conducted at public universities, if nowhere else, ought to benefit the public. If nothing else, it should at least benefit those working in the field being studied, such as education.

But how and to what extent should any given researcher's findings be shared? The story of Lucy Calkins indicates that neatly packaging findings and selling those findings to a school district, for example, along with the statement, “here is the answer to your problems” might not be the best way. This means of transmitting knowledge gives the impression that there is a panacea, a one-way to teach reading and writing, in her case.

University researchers aren’t always right, and often their research is incomplete. The act of a researcher is to contribute to the knowledge base, to build upon what we already know, which creates the foundation that others can then add to. Rarely can a researcher say, especially in the social sciences, which is where I would place education research, “this is it, I have found the solution to our problem. No more to see here.” And when it comes to humans, one-size-fits-all solutions should be heavily scrutinized.

I know a family of unschoolers (those who don’t believe in explicit instruction), for instance, in which one daughter learned how to read well at a young age simply by being surrounded by books in her home and by reading often with her parents, while her brother, who grew up in the same environment, didn’t read until he was nine and never became a great reader. He needed more explicit instruction in how to understand and make sense of language, it seems. This example is of course just one, but goes to show that it is difficult to pin down how to approach learning to read and that there is not one right way.

My teacher training program advocated the use of Lucy Calkins’ curriculum and denounced basal readers. I was all in on Calkins’ approach, especially when it came to writing. I loved the idea of creating a warm and inviting environment to write, where children worked out their ideas on paper, workshopped them with the teacher and other students, and worried about corrections later. An environment in which writing was an organic process.

When I entered my first classroom in a school that was persistently struggling, all of that beautiful imagery went out the window, along with much of what I learned in my education program. I taught the curriculum that was handed to me, in the form of a basal reader, which I was expected to follow — to a T. My school leveled each grade — i.e., classes were made up of students on the same academic level — and I taught the lowest level. In my 5th grade class, nearly all of my students were below grade level, and I knew of only one student who regularly read at home. (Her grades earned her a spot in the other, upper-level class, but the chip on her shoulder landed her in mine.) This group of students, minus the one I just described, had no reading foundation, thus couldn’t enjoy the approach that Calkins advocates. They were the type of kids that her critics are worried about. Looking for context clues, a cornerstone of her approach, didn’t work for them.

I think Calkins is right in some ways. Kids do need to enjoy reading to get better at it. If reading is an arduous, boring task, kids aren’t going to want to do it. The same with writing. But, on the flip side, not all learning is fun in the moment. Kids need to understand how words and sentences are formed to be able to read and write well — to be able to enjoy reading. That process may be difficult at first but will pay off greatly in the long run.

I think Calkins’ crucial error was developing and packaging her curriculum with the intent to sell it. That act made her research easier to implement, thus more likely to be chosen by districts for adoption. It made her research seem official, authoritative. It made her seem right. But, like other education researchers, she doesn’t possess the one single answer to the problem she aims to address. Her error, which led to the backlash she is currently enduring, is that she turned a philosophy into a product, as Helen Lewis, in her article about Calkins for the Atlantic, put it.

Calkins had a theory about how kids learn to read, and theories are not definitive. They are what other researchers use to understand a phenomenon and produce more knowledge. They are the launching point for knowledge, not the end point of what is known.

Thus, would it have been wiser for Calkins to publish her findings then move on to her next study, paying no regard to what happens to the information she puts out into the world? I don’t think so. I think researchers should share what they know and correct misrepresentations of their findings, but they should be careful not to say, “this is how you use my research, and if you use it in this way, your problems will be solved.” Instead an education researcher like Calkins should say, “this is what I know based on my own research and what I know from other studies I have read.” In other words, they should be more humble in how they present knowledge to the audience they aim to serve, with the explicit caveat that the approach they have developed might not work for everyone.