Some readers may know The New Yorker as the venerable magazine of snobs. “It’s where you can get great poems and original fiction by the best writers of English!” Others may think of it as the source of many funny cartoons. Still others may see it as a regular source of long-form journalism.

However one characterizes it, on 1 September 2022, The New Yorker featured a report on reading instruction. Jessica Winter published “The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy: Is a controversial curriculum, entrenched in New York City’s public schools for two decades, finally coming undone?” Using their considerable knowledge of controversies in reading, reading instruction, the world in general, and their decoding of the tile, readers of Special Education Today might anticipate that Ms. Winter’s report is about changes in early literacy instruction in New York city (as discussed in these pages in May 2022).

Those savvy SET readers would get it right. Ms. Winter began her ~6000-word article thusly:

In the first spring of the pandemic, as families across the country were acclimating to remote learning and countless other upheavals, I sat down on the living-room sofa with my daughter, who was in kindergarten, to go over a daily item on her academic schedule called Reading Workshop. She had selected a beginner-level book about the alliterative habitués of a back-yard garden: birds and butterflies, cats and caterpillars. Her decoding skills, at that stage, were limited to the starting letter of each word, and all else was hurried guesswork—pointing at “butterfly,” she might ask, “Bird?” and start to turn the page. I coaxed her to look at how the letters worked together, to sound them out, starting by taking apart the first few phonemes: bh-uh-tih, butt. She didn’t appear to be familiar with this approach. She seemed to find it frankly outrageous.

Ms. Winter mixed her experiences with reading with her young daughter during COVID times with familiar evidence of dismal outcomes and news about revisions to “Units of Study.” She connected “Units of Study” with “balanced literacy.” She reported that “Units” is at least the cousin, if not the sibling, of the approach promoted by Irene Fountas and Gay Pinnell (undated). She noted that both the Calkins and the Fountas-and-Pinnell methods for teaching have little support in serious research (she even mentioned the report of the National Reading Panel1)…she even worked in the phrase “science of reading!”

Ultimately, Ms. Winter argued that curricula are not the final determinants of literacy. She identified money—poverty in general and inadequate education funding—as important culprits in poor reading achievement. She concluded that dumping an weak curriculum is something educators can do, but it’s not likely to be sufficient to make change in reading outcomes.

Along the way, Ms. Winter discussed relatively recent movements in reading instruction in New York City. She dropped paragraphs about famous-name education advocates such as Horace Mann, Andrew Carnegie, Rudolph Flesch, Jeanne Chall, Ken Goodman, and many others...right up to Emily Hanford! So, this is probably an article worth a read.

Readers may want to get additional perspective on the curricula I’ve mentioned. Not that the reports from EdReports are the be-all-end-all-source, but SET readers might want to consult those reports about the Calkins (EdReports, 2018) and the Fountas and Pinnell (EdReports, 2019) curricula. These reports apply consistent criteria in evaluating educational products. EdReports indicated that neither curriculum “met expectations.”

Sources

Calkins, L. (undated). Units of study. Website: https://www.unitsofstudy.com/

EdReports. (2018). Units of study. https://edreports.org/reports/overview/units-of-study-2018

EdReports. (2019). The Fountas & Pinnell phonics, spelling, and word study system. https://edreports.org/reports/overview/the-fountas-pinnell-phonics-spelling-and-word-study-system

Fountas, E., & Pinnell, G. S. (undated). Fountas and Pinnell Information and teacher community. https://www.fountasandpinnell.com

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/smallbook

Winter, J. (2022). The rise and fall of vibes-based literacy: Is a controversial curriculum, entrenched in New York City’s public schools for two decades, finally coming undone? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-and-fall-of-vibes-based-literacy.