Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if it were.
Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she persuaded them through teaching and advocacy.
FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable civil case against Teacher's College, and other places where teachers were taught this nonsense, for harms done. If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit. But we don't generally put teachers and doctors in the same bucket; for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.
Again, not everything that’s wrong or bad is illegal.
Yet, no one has been held accountable. There has not been any reckoning for that teacher who ignored best practice because 'fuck bush', and all the others who advocated for cueing. Lucy Caulkins has made millions peddling techniques that have ruined the lives of 1000s of kids. If this were a drug, you would be demanding the company be out of business.
> If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit
But we don't see one with respect to popular nutritional advice, which is in a very dismal state with the old food pyramid being promoted as the way and no one can agree on anything because nothing is reproducible.
So, maybe not the best analogy.
What has it been replaced with? I try to keep up with health literature and am not familiar with the food pyramid's replacement. Perhaps it hasn't received as much advertisement as the food pyramid did.
In 2011, the pyramid was done away with altogether and replaced with MyPlate, which remains the USDA's current nutritional guide graphic. https://www.myplate.gov/
It is for certain professions. And the criteria for civil liability are much lighter than that for criminal liability. All professionals should carry liability insurance. And, they should operate under the protection of a limited liability company or something similar.
Well, you've hit upon a thing I'd like to see teachers actually do! Nice, thanks for that.
Yeah dude, people expect you to be able to explain your reasoning. Even reasoning that you did in the past(!) which is pretty much all of it.
If you read the whole article I think you will agree that what you call "phonics" is actually just "reading"...
All of the rest, the context, cues, word-recognition, is something on top of seeing the letters, knowing the sound the make individually, knowing the sound they make when put in sequence. Good readers still see all the letters, don't work on guessing context, looking for cues, or seeing words as unified pictures.
(It's a little more complicated than that though. Yes, individual letters do matter, but good readers aren't mentally sounding out every word they read. Rather, their eyes take in every letter at once and their brains instantly recognize the word. That's why you can probably still read this paragraph even though the middle letters in every word are scrambled.)
Phonics is important for being able to read words your brain isn't already familiar with, which is especially critical during the learning process when "words your brain isn't already familiar with" is like 95% of words. Context clues can help there too, but those aren't nearly as easy or accurate as just sounding out the word.
Fun anecdote: I recently had a chance to re-experience that learning process myself after listening to a long fantasy book series on Audible with lots of made-up terms (names, cities, magic items, etc), then going on a fan forum later and seeing those same words spelled out for the first time ever. Phonics was invaluable to me in puzzling out which words corresponded to which terms I was familiar with from listening to the series.
Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?
Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.
These people belong in gaol. Introducing teaching methods that were known to be wrong because they don't like the style of the effective training. Therefore introducing new training which is less effective. This has damaged countless lives. Reading is a fundamental requirement of modern society, and failing to teach people because you don't like an effective approach is criminal.
Again from the podcast:
"Good reading instruction isn’t boring for children. Maybe adults find parts of it boring. But this shouldn’t be about what adults want. It should be about what kids need.
And there’s no reason that reading instruction aligned with scientific evidence can’t be exciting and beautiful. I think Lucy Calkins sees it that way now too. Because instruction aligned with the science of reading is what she says she’s now selling."