The Daily - The Fight Over Phonics

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

About 50 years ago, the educator Lucy Calkins pioneered a technique called balanced literacy, which de-emphasized the use of phonics to teach reading. It was widely adopted in the United States, including in New York, the country’s largest public school system.But doubts about the approach persisted, and now it seems that using balanced literacy has given a generation of American students the wrong tools.Dana Goldstein, who covers family policy and demographics for The Times, discusses the story of balanced literacy and how Professor Calkins is trying to fix the problems that the technique created.Guest: Dana Goldstein, a national correspondent for The New York Times who writes about family policy and demographics.Background reading: Lucy Calkins has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics. Critics may not be appeased.Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for “the science of reading.” Can they get results?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The New York City Department of Education says in 2019, only 53% of third grade students were proficient in reading. That rate fell to 49% in 2022. That is why the city says it announced plans today to dramatically change the way children are taught to read. A few weeks ago, the nation's largest public school system,

New York City, abandoned its current system for teaching kids how to read. A few weeks ago, the nation's largest public school system, New York City, abandoned its current system for teaching kids how to read. This is not just in New York. This is all across the nation. Eighty percent of the kids in Chicago do not read on grade level. In Detroit, 91 percent do not read on grade level. It was the latest and biggest acknowledgment to date that a generation of American students has been given the wrong tools to achieve literacy.

This is a national problem, and it's the educational crisis of our time. Today, my colleague Dana Goldstein, on the influential educator who helped create those flawed tools, and is now trying to fix the problems that they created. It's Tuesday, June 6th. Dana? Good morning, Michael. Good morning. I can see that you've brought some books and I think we're going to need them. So thank you for doing that. We're here to talk about how kids learn to read in the United States. And so to begin with, I think it would be useful for you to define and demonstrate the big schools of thought that exist in American education about the best way to teach kids to read. So if you'll indulge us. Yes, well, probably the dominant way over the past few decades has been a school of thought called balanced literacy. And balanced literacy really focuses

on letting children choose those books that they gravitate toward, giving them a lot of time to read quietly by themselves, having children sort of really focus on the meaning of stories, what happens in them, and really look a lot at the pictures, even use the pictures to guess the words on the page. Okay. Let's demonstrate balanced literacy through this delightful looking book in front of us.

Yes. This is a book called Mixing Colors. My five-year-old daughter brought it home from her classroom, which has a balanced literacy library in it. And let's go ahead and open the book. It has a big splotch of red paint, a big splotch of yellow paint, and then it shows them mixing together to form orange. Right. If I can read it, it says red and yellow make orange. Yes. And there's a few things I would just call your attention to about this page. First of all, you can kind of guess what the words will be by the colors, right? I mean, five-year-olds, six-year-olds in kindergarten, they know their colors already. And so they very little even need to look at the words to get. I think my two-year-old son would say red, yellow. Yeah. The other thing I would point out is while the concepts of the colors are very easy, the words themselves are really hard for a kindergartner. Yellow is a really hard word.

It has some irregular pronunciations and so is orange. Okay. The second method. Yes. This book is part of a set that's based on something called the science of reading, and it heavily focuses on phonics. The science of reading and phonics are ways that teach children to read through a really sequenced introduction to the sounds and letter combinations that make up the English language. So we wouldn't be introducing the word yellow, for example, before we do cat, dog, and other very simple words like that. That teach us what those consonants and vowels do. Exactly.

Okay, so we're opening up this book. Yep, the book is called Sam. And the purpose of this book, as we'll notice, is really to teach that the letter A in many cases says ah. So page one says Sam and cat. So it has three different uses of A saying A in three different words. Sam and Cat. Yeah, and let's just do one more page.

Matt and Cat. Yeah. Right, and there's no way I would know that that fellow is Matt because he's not a splotch of red paint. Yeah, you would not know that his name was Matt if you didn't read the book. Okay, so to summarize, balanced literacy focuses more on stories, context, illustrations. It's learning to read a word by considering the meaning of the story and what word might fit into the themes and the images on the page. By contrast, science of reading includes a big dose of phonics,

which is to say a kid learns the letters' sounds, the consonants, vowels, the common combinations that we talked about like ca for cat, and therefore is going to sound out the words rather than try to rely on contextual clues. You got it. And the two schools of thought represented by these two books, balanced literacy on one hand and the science of reading on the other,

have been battling it out in this country for decades as to which is the best method, the right method for teaching young children how to read. And reading, of course, is the most fundamental skill of all schooling. Reading is the first thing kids need to do when they get to school. And what's happening right now is a big and important reckoning over which of these methods is right and which is wrong. And how did we get to this overdue moment of reckoning? Let's start in the 1960s.

At that time, there was really no settled way to teach children how to read. But in the late 1960s, early 1970s, something was happening in education and the counterculture. And it was this idea that all learning should be based on the child's curiosity, that children could sort of naturally figure it out on their own if given the right environment. And one person in particular really embodies that school of thought and came to be a real leader in the United States with this idea. And her name is Lucy Calkins. And what should we know about Lucy Calkins? Lucy Calkins grew up outside Buffalo.

She was one of nine children. And although her parents were doctors, they also maintained a working farm. And they put the kids to work on the farms as a bit of an eccentric family. Or idyllic, depending on your view. Yeah. She said she worked really hard and she learned how much a child can really do because her and her siblings were expected to care for these animals. And she always was really interested in teaching. So do you mind if I ask you some biographical questions? No,

just go ahead. I'm all set to do whatever you want. I know you got started. And over the course of my reporting, I had the opportunity to interview Professor Calkins and speak to her about how she got started in teaching and how she came to develop her ideas about how children learn. She got started in teaching and how she came to develop her ideas about how children learn. I wanted to be a good teacher. I taught with fervor. But I didn't know what I was doing, and I needed to know more. And in the early 1970s, she decided to go apprentice herself in the elementary schools in England. And the reason she wanted to do that is because they were known as being at the forefront at that time of progressive child-centered education. The idea that children's curiosity could really drive learning, that teachers were guides to develop kids' curiosity,

not that teachers had all the answers or the adult was the real leader of the classroom. So the opposite of the teacher with the stick at the front saying, like, look at the chalkboard and this is what we're doing. Exactly. And that's exactly what Lucy Calkins wanted to get away from. So I flew to Heathrow and hitchhiked, stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked to Oxfordshire. So she goes over to the UK and she's in Oxfordshire and she absolutely falls in love with the type of teaching that she sees in those elementary schools. So the teaching was a kind of a simple, highly structured kind of really workshop so that the teacher could be responsive.

Kids were deeply engaged in projects. There was an emphasis on craftsmanship and care. She did projects that was an emphasis on craftsmanship and care. Like, for example, she told me about watching children just arrayed in front of a mushroom. You know, they would have the kids very painstakingly observe the mushroom and try to draw it with great accuracy and, you know, careful, invested, deep work. And they spend an hour just looking at the different parts of the mushroom and sketching it in their notebooks and coloring it in. This is very 67 years. Yes, it's very creative. And I think there's definitely a strong appeal to this. You know, I think about, say, taking my five-year-old to the park and she might say, look at this flower.

And we can talk about how the sun and the rain help it to grow and notice how many petals it has, its color. So, of course, children's curiosity does drive a lot of their learning, and there is an intuitive truth here. So, what emerges from this experience that Lucy Calkin has in the UK? Well, what eventually comes out of this is a strong philosophy that she has, a theory, that children can use these curiosity inquiry-based methods to learn anything, including how to read. Okay, so how does she proceed down this path? Interestingly, she gets her PhD in teaching children how to write,

not how to read. And she does something in writing education that is really revolutionary. You know, prior to the work of Lucy Calkins and colleagues of hers, a lot of teaching children how to write was really rote. It was boring. It was about spelling, grammar, penmanship. And while those things are important, they might not have really sparked kids' desire to write all that much. And what Lucy Calkins did is she took the concept of sort of a graduate school writing workshop for adult writers where you keep a journal, you practice writing about your life. And she said, let's have elementary school writers do this. And what was really

interesting about this is that when elementary school kids were given writer's notebooks and journals and they were encouraged to write without focusing too much on stuff like spelling. Many of them really could do it. So this worked. Yeah, for many kids, not for all, but for many kids, it did work really well, and teachers absolutely loved this. So Lucy Calkins, you know, through the 80s and 90s, she became so beloved for her writing workshop technique for young children. But she starts to hear more and more from teachers, and she notices herself when she's going across the country training educators that for kids who struggle with writing,

reading is really at the core. That reading is the fundamental skill that they need to get down if they're going to become great, enthusiastic writers. So she decides that she wants to start exploring creating her own approach to reading, something that would draw upon what she sees as the strengths of what she did with writing, something that centers the child, lets their curiosity guide the curriculum, and gives the student a lot of free choice in what they read. And so at that point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she begins to branch out into the teaching of reading. So what happens when she brings this approach to reading? So she comes out with a book in the early 2000s called The Art of

Teaching Reading, and it very much calls back to her earlier work on the art of teaching writing. She takes a workshop approach. She gives children a lot of free time in the classroom to sort of pick books and quietly read. She starts doing this in kindergarten. Kindergarten students, for the most part, cannot read. So what they're doing quietly when they are quote unquote reading is really just flipping the pages and kind of looking at the pictures and the words, not actually reading. really just flipping the pages and kind of looking at the pictures and the words, not actually reading. And she has a real approach to sounding out words or phonics.

She's skeptical of it. She acknowledges that phonics is part of learning to read, but rather than sort of spend a lot of classroom time teaching children the correspondence between the letters on the page and the sounds we hear in spoken language, she cautions that doing this in too structured of a way is really going to turn kids off. And she even says if a kid is struggling to correctly read the word, don't have them sound out the letters. That's not how you should prompt them. Instead, you should have them flip back through the pages of the book, consider the meaning of the story, look at the pictures, and think about what word could be right. Really interesting.

So this approach is fundamentally not about phonics, maybe even a little anti-phonics. She might resist that if you said it that way because what she'll say is, I always said there was some place for it. But that's really not what teachers took from her writing and from the speeches she gave. They took from her writing and the speeches she gave that focusing too much on phonics is going to harm children. They should be thinking about the meaning of stories. They should be enjoying the pictures on the page. When they struggle, they should guess. enjoying the pictures on the page. When they struggle, they should guess. Guess what the word is based on the meaning of the story and the pictures that they see. Don't labor over the

letters in the word. Okay, so how influential does this approach that Lucy Calkins is, it sounds like pioneering, become? Very influential. And as balanced literacy grows and Lucy Culkin's curriculum materials spread out across the country, there's a big upside for her. She's in business. She is. And in addition to being a professor at Columbia University, she has two private companies, a domestic private company and a foreign one that sell these materials and sell teacher training across the United States and around the world. And by the early 2000s, it becomes the primary way that teachers and graduate schools of education are taught to teach children how to read. And it becomes the way that probably about half or more of American elementary schools teach kids. And to give you an example of how much success she's

having selling this curriculum, New York City, the largest district in the country, which educates one million children, in the early 2000s under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, actually mandated that schools use Lucy Culkin's methods and materials. Wow. So to call back to, Dana, the beginning of our conversation, to the degree that there's been a big, long battle in this country over the right way to learn to read between the science of reading, this phonics-based approach, and balanced literacy, this Lucy Calkins approach, it sounds like around this point, by the time New York City is adopting this in such a profound way,

as are so many other districts, that Lucy Calkins' approach, balanced literacy, is winning. Yeah, absolutely, that's true. But while she was pushing this out across the country, and it was wielding so much influence, and so many teachers and students were falling under its sway, there was something else happening that was really casting doubt on whether this was truly the best way to teach children how to read. We'll be right back. So Dana, tell us about this doubt

that's starting to emerge about balanced literacy and Lucy Calkins' now very popular bestselling approach to how to read. Yes, well there were always voices in dissent to her approach and to the balanced literacy philosophy. And a really important group of dissent were parents of children with dyslexia. And a really important group of dissent were parents of children with dyslexia. They were saying, my kid is not learning how to read in school. I went out and I had to pay with my own money for really expensive tutoring. And guess what the tutor did with my child? What? Taught them phonics.

Interesting. And all of a sudden, my child, who was diagnosed with a learning disability and was really struggling, is at least able to get the basics down, is able to read. And why should I have to pay for this? What about parents who can't afford to pay? Schools, you have let us down. Interesting. But those parents were sort of seen as squeaky wheels, advocating for their particular children. And perhaps they were asking for something that wasn't right for the general group of learners.

Got it. And I think school districts saw it as a niche request to a large degree. So you're saying dissent and doubt a little bit gets disregarded and maybe kind of bulldozed. Yeah, yeah. Now, here's a really interesting thing. Starting around the 1990s, functional magnetic resonance imaging, the MRI machine, allowed researchers to look at the brain of a reader, of children learning to read, of adult readers, and it really shed a lot of light on how it is that reading takes place in the brain.

And what did it find? It found that while we're reading, we're using a lot of those parts of our brain that we use for speaking and listening. And those parts are doing the hard work of connecting those letters and words on the page to what we all do naturally know how to do as human beings, which is to speak and to listen to language. And that's what reading is. listen to language. And that's what reading is. Reading is the work of connecting letters and words to the sounds of spoken language. So that is an understanding of reading as being profoundly auditory.

And from what you've been describing of Lucy Calkin's work, she has deliberately de-emphasized that notion of sounding out words in a rigorous way. Yeah, the MRI machine made a really helpful intervention here. It gave us some really big clues that leaving out the sounded out piece, the phonics piece, was going to really do children a disservice. So by the time Lucy Calkins' reading curriculum is becoming ascendant and adopted in places like New York City, Dana, as you have told us, there's actually anecdotal evidence that it's not working for key groups of kids like those with dyslexia, and then this scientific evidence that the entire approach is basically kind of wrong based on how the human

brain works and how we learn to read. Right. And what happens over the past, say, six or seven years is that the doubt grows and grows due to a few key developments. First of all, there's all of these test scores coming out that are showing that it's just so persistent that about a third of children in America do not have basic reading skills. And from a civil rights perspective, although all children are affected by these reading problems. They cut across class. They cut across race. It is the fact that low-income children are affected most by these problems. And so there's a real equity issue here too. And so people are frustrated. And so that draws more people to learn about the science of how kids learn to read, and become familiar with this doubt that exists about

balanced literacy. I think scientific research on reading has progressed enormously and has yielded findings that are absolutely rock solid. And there are some really important writers and thinkers that start to speak out. One of them is Mark Seidenberg. He publishes a book called Language at the Speed of Sight. And what this book does, he's a cognitive scientist, it tries to bring that cognitive science to educators. A child who's learning to read already knows something about spoken language quite a lot, and their immediate problem is to figure out how print relates to spoken language. And he goes out and he really gets quite a lot, and their immediate problem is to figure out how print relates to spoken language. And he goes out and he really gets quite a lot of attention for this book.

For a long time, no one really knew how children learned to read. It was more debates among people who had philosophies. And there's a crusading journalist. Her name is Emily Hanford. She's an audio journalist with American Public Media. She starts to publish a series of audio documentaries about kids with dyslexia, about how we learn to read. Schools think they're teaching kids to read. Of course they do. But it turns out there's a big body of scientific research about reading and how kids learn to do it. This research shows there are important skills

that all kids need to learn to become good readers. And in lots of schools, they aren't being taught these skills. And many, many people listen to this in the education world. Teachers are sort of emailing these podcasts to each other and saying, oh my gosh, and this is a real emotional time for teachers who are for the first time, some of them after 20, 30 years in the classroom, being exposed to cognitive science on how kids learn to read. And many teachers I've interviewed have described to me a sort of nagging sense that something was off, that they had used these balanced literacy methods the best way they knew how, that they had really enjoyed going to those summer training programs with Lucy Calkins.

They admired her. They loved reading her books. And for teachers who just had that feeling maybe that they weren't reaching all the kids that they wanted to reach, who tried their best for years to find out that all this time there was powerful persuasive evidence that other methods are more effective. It was devastating emotionally, psychologically devastating for many educators. What you're describing, Dana, sounds like a huge clash in the making. All these teachers and parents learning that the way they have been teaching or that their kids have been taught to read was wrong or off through this podcast or through this cognitive psychologist. And yet, Lucy Calkin's curriculum is still being taught across the country. So at some point, that clash does arrive, and it must be kind of spectacular.

Yes. You note the problematic use of balanced literacy and I have experienced that firsthand both as a mom and a legislator. Over the past five, six years, a major change has occurred. Having been an educator and having many of us on this conference committee, it is amazing how trends cycle through

and they're not always good trends. More and more policymakers were clued into this debate that was going on about the science of reading. So today, I'm calling for a renewed focus on literacy and on the way we teach reading in the state of Ohio. And dozens of states started to pass laws actually requiring that structured phonics be taught in elementary schools. Y'all, we don't have a science-based reading curriculum in this school district. We don't teach children phonics. And dozens of school districts began to pull Lucy Culkin's curriculum out of classrooms. Did you read about the Mississippi miracle yesterday?

That Mississippi's reading scores have shot way up. We see it in places like Mississippi, Washington, D.C. You know, as a representative of NAACP, we look at this as a civil rights issue. Our kids have to be able to read, and it has to start with the state. It's in the state constitution that kids are supposed to get education in California.

Oakland, California, where the NAACP was crucial in asking that Lucy Calkins' curriculum not be used anymore. Wow. A real coalition of people, left-right, civil rights groups, educators, parents coming together to push for change. In New York City, more than half of our students are not on grade level. And in a sign of just how big the shift is, New York City, Lucy Calkins' hometown, the first big district to really embrace her approach. Phonics and phonemic awareness has been missing in far too many of our schools,

and we're going to fix that. Has decided that her materials are no longer on the approved list of ways to teach kids to read in the country's largest school district. A huge blow to her curriculum, and I have to imagine to her reputation. Massive. And this puts a lot of pressure on Lucy Calkins

and the product which she is trying to sell, which is a reading curriculum that does not include much phonics. Hmm. So what does she do? After initially resisting and fighting back, a huge turn happened. She starts to acknowledge that she hasn't done maybe quite as good of a job as she could in including the science of reading and phonics in her curriculum. And about one year ago, she made an even bigger change. She created a version of her curriculum,

which for the first time included daily structured phonics lessons. And that is now for sale across the country. So she recognizes that she has missed a pretty big boat here in the story of how American kids learn to read. And she adjusts in a way that I imagine, given the philosophy that you've been describing here, given her background, that experience in England, might have been very humbling and difficult. I think it was really, really painful for her. humbling, and difficult. I think it was really, really painful for her.

And last year, I did get the opportunity to have a really long interview with her about her process and coming to terms with this. And probably the biggest question I had was given there has been science suggesting that phonics is really important for children, the MRI research, but even prior to that, dating back to the 1960s, how is it that it's only been in the last few years that she made this change?

And what does she say? What I feel right now is that the last two or three years, what I've learned from the science of reading work has been transformational and has really made me a far better educator. Yeah. You know, it really wasn't all that satisfying of an answer. She told me that she had clued into this the last few years. Probably after Emily Hanford's first stop. She mentioned the journalist Emily Hanford. She mentioned Mark Seidenberg, the cognitive psychologist i spoke about in other

words she was coming across this really powerful research alongside so many members of the public who were waiting for the first time that that's a hard concept to swallow for a leading educator perhaps one of the leading educators when it comes to reading, and somebody who works at a major university somehow had blinders on and never heard of this science that said that phonics was essential and her system had fundamental flaws. Do you find that credible? So I really tried to drill down on this with her over the course of several interviews. Before that, were there ever opportunities for someone like you to meet with someone who looks at reading from a neuroscience type of background? How often, if ever, did that happen? And maybe it never happened. I don't know.

Well, you certainly can't say that there's not opportunities to do that. One of the things that really came out in our conversation is that she was working very much in the realm of theory and philosophy and ideas about reading. These romantic ideas about child-driven learning, the child's curiosity driving the classroom, the teacher being a guide as opposed to sort of the bearer of information. And this was an ideology that was very strong in the part of the academy, the part of the university world that she came from. I mean, I don't think that I thought about an MRI machine

as part of how you get to know a reader. And as she said to me, she didn't think of MRI machines as a crucial piece of evidence in how kids learn. She said those types of researchers did not spend time in classrooms. That was something that created skepticism for her and many of her colleagues. Like, we spend time talking to teachers, watching kids in classrooms. Those cognitive scientists never go to K-12 schools. They don't know what an elementary school is like.

There was a sort of resistance there to accepting that those experts had much to say about what schools do. All of that makes a certain sense, Dana, but I'm mindful of what you said about Lucy Calkins, which is that she's selling a curriculum. So isn't it possible as well that this is a person who resisted absorbing evidence that her curriculum was wrong because she made a lot of money selling that curriculum? You know, I can't look into her soul and know what drove her. I think that we all

know that when our economic interests align with something we believe in really deeply, it's going to be really, really hard to doubt that. Right. Doubly hard. So difficult. And I think that's what happened here. But where I will give her credit is that there are other leaders in the balanced literacy world who have not made the changes that she has made and have not even acknowledged, even up till now, 2023, that anything was wrong. How does Lucy Calkins, and I'm sure that came up in your conversation with her, think about the concept of accountability here? Because according to the science and research, she and those she worked with have led lots and lots of kids astray. Does she feel guilty for basically leading so many people to embrace a form

of the teaching of reading that we now think has been somewhat discredited? I pushed her on this. I asked her about it. You know, some critics, they want something more like an apology. Some teachers have said to me there needs to be almost like a national reckoning or grieving process for reading issues in the country. people who have supported Onyx first would be wise to learn from

from others and that sure, they could apologize for, you know, not trusting teachers, not giving kids important engaging projects to work on, not creating classrooms that are vital. And, you know, I think that we all of us do the best we can.

She turned the question around, and she said, actually, I think those who pushed phonics so heavily owe an apology. Why? She said, I think they owe an apology for overlooking the importance of joy, overlooking the importance of writing. Is there, you know, are people asking whether they're going to apologize for overlooking writing, for not inviting kids to bring their own important

knowledge and stories to the classroom? Are they going to apologize for not building on kids' strengths? I think, you know, all of us are imperfect, and we do the very, very best we can, and hopefully we're willing to say, you know, I need to keep listening to others. In other words, she sort of drew upon what she continues to see as the strength of her approach, as opposed to, I think, you know, truly acknowledging that something was really, really wrong. That's not sounding like someone taking a lot of accountability, or sounding at all regretful, which is maybe the case that she's not. She has not personally really offered the apology that many parents and teachers are looking for.

And when we decided to do this episode, I did reach back out to her team to ask her if her thinking had changed since we last spoke. And they said no. They referred me back to the interview she already gave me last year. But one big thing that has changed, though, is that these new materials are for sale. And she has told the 15 to 20 percent of American schools that are using her old materials that they should update. And if they want to buy the new stuff, they can get a discount. the new stuff, they can get a discount. So even though folks may be looking to her for more of an emotive response, I do think there will be positive change for schools in her network by seeing the fact that she is no longer selling the old approach. From what you're saying, Dana, the result of everything that's happened here, this

journey that we've been on that's ended where it's ended, is that dozens, maybe hundreds of school districts across the country are now changing how they teach kids to read. And I have to imagine that's a pretty messy process because you're talking about curriculum that are in place, that teachers have been taught how to use, and I don't suspect that's like flipping a switch. It's really hard. It's really expensive. You don't just have to replace the curriculum materials and the books in the classroom libraries. You have to retrain the adults in the system, some of whom still believe in this. So it's a very difficult shift. So how's it going? And what does it look like in a district like the one we're in,

New York City, the biggest school district in the country? Well, I have some personal experience with this. My daughter is finishing up her kindergarten year here in New York City Public Schools in Brooklyn. And at the beginning of this school year, she brought home these books that are really hard for her to read because they don't have sequenced phonics words. They're more of a balanced literacy. Yeah, the balanced literacy library books, like Mixing Colors, the one we started out looking at. And it was frustrating to try to read the books with her. Her teacher had asked us to look at them at home, but she was really struggling. She was having trouble sounding out those words because they were a little bit hard for her. But I will say about halfway through the year, I noticed a huge

shift. My daughter's principal is enthusiastic about these changes, and she has been asking teachers to reconsider what they're doing in the classroom. And about halfway through the year, my daughter Talia started telling me, C-H goes ch. S-H goes sh. And just in the past few weeks, she started telling me about what happens when E and I are next to each other or O and U. And so she has absolutely loved this. And I've noticed a huge change in her ability to sound out the words. She's being taught phonics and it sounds from what you're saying like she's now a better reader as a result. Absolutely. She has made huge strides.

I have to ask you a complicated question. You're a parent of a kid in the New York City public school system who, it sounds like, was being taught some of the stuff that now feels like it wasn't really working for a little bit of time. I don't know how long. Do you find yourself mad at Lucy Calkins at all? You're not just a journalist. In this case, you're a parent. You're a New York City public school assistant parent. How do you think about that?

You know, that's a hard one. As a reporter, I try to stay above the fray and be objective. Of course, as a parent, I'm not. When I'm struggling with my kid to, you know, teach her not to look at the pictures, but to look at the words when she's learning how to read, I have to admit, you know, I feel very frustrated. But at the same time, there were some things Lucy Calkins was right about. Phonics alone is not enough.

Kids do need access to books. They need a big vocabulary. Writing is really important. And you know, for so many things in raising children, we do want to be guided by their curiosity. It's just that learning to read, really learning to read, is hard. And it is not natural. Children cannot teach this to themselves. Phonics is the crucial building block,

and Professor Calkins undersold it. Well, Dana, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, there was growing evidence that Ukraine's long-planned spring counteroffensive against Russian forces, which could change the course of the war, may have begun. Ukraine's military undertook a sustained barrage of air and ground attacks along multiple sections of the war's front line,

including the Russian-occupied region of Donetsk in Ukraine's east. Much is riding on the counteroffensive, whose goal is to repel Russian forces and liberate Ukrainians living under Russian control. Success could strengthen Ukraine's case for longer-term military commitments from the West and improve Ukraine's negotiating power in any future peace talks with Russia. Today's episode was produced by Muj Zaydi, Will Reed, Ricky Nowetzki, and Claire Tennisgetter, with help from Sydney Harper. It was edited by Mark George and Liz O'Balin, contains original music by Diane Wong, Marion

Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.