The Cult of Lucy Calkins Is Our Fault
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how the education profession's tendency toward hero worship allowed flawed literacy approaches to persist for decades.
Key Takeaways
- Hero worship enabled bad practice - The profession elevated Lucy Calkins to guru status rather than critically evaluating her methods
- We chose this - Educators and administrators adopted her programs without demanding evidence of effectiveness
- Skepticism is a professional duty - The antidote to cult-like adoption of any approach is rigorous demand for evidence
Transcript
The cult of Lucy Calkins.
We've got to talk about this because if you read the comments on my last video about how Lucy Calkins and her publisher and Columbia University are getting sued for not essentially emphasizing phonics enough, if you just read the comments, you would think that everybody has always hated Lucy Calkins and her units of study.
And that is not the case.
People love Lucy Calkins, or at least historically, people loved Lucy Calkins.
And really, it was talked about as a cult.
I went to the training in 2008 when I became a principal.
I went to New York City, went to Columbia University, went to the Lucy Calkins training.
Lucy Calkins came to my district and did training for our administrators and her staff did training for our staff.
People loved Lucy Calkins.
You know what I'm talking about.
You know I'm not making this up.
And I think we have got to grapple with not only the need to teach phonics, like I think that's part of it, but that was just a symptom of the hero worship and the cult that like honestly we're responsible for as a profession.
Nobody made us look up to Lucy Calkins as some sort of goddess who could do no wrong.
Nobody made us...
be gullible about claims about reading that we should have known better about.
This was something that we chose to participate in as a profession.
I'm no exception to that.
My teachers were no exception to that.
Lucy Calkins, at the time I was a principal, was a legitimate celebrity who could walk on water.
And I think we've got to really evaluate as a profession, why do we look up to people that way?
Why do we have this attitude that says, you can do no wrong if you're enough of a rock star.
I mean, like, that was the language people used.
Like, Lucy Calkins is a rock star.
Like, she didn't do that to us.
She didn't say, hey, everybody, I'm a rock star.
You should believe whatever I tell you, regardless of what else you know about how to teach.
Like, we did this to ourselves to a great extent.
And that doesn't, you know, absolve anybody else of what they did.
But I think when it comes to the hero worship and the credulity, we've got to take some responsibility for that as a profession.
Let me know what you think.