The former Arkansas governor and the New York real estate investor are staunch supporters of Israel.

The former Arkansas governor has previously questioned Palestinian identity and is opposed to a two-state solution.

Photographs by Jeff Brown

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”

But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)

In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and so on. Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations. But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated. The result was a reading crisis in America.

The podcast said that “a company and four of its top authors” had sold this “wrong idea” to teachers and politicians. The company was the educational publisher Heinemann, and the authors included the New Zealander Marie Clay, the American duo Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, and Calkins. The podcast devoted an entire episode, “The Superstar,” to Calkins. In it, Hanford wondered if Calkins was wedded to a “romantic” notion of literacy, where children would fall in love with books and would then somehow, magically, learn to read. Calkins could not see that her system failed poorer children, Hanford argued, because she was “influenced by privilege”; she had written, for instance, that children might learn about the alphabet by picking out letters from their surroundings, such as “the monogram letters on their bath towels.”

In Hanford’s view, it was no surprise if Calkins’s method worked fine for wealthier kids, many of whom arrive at school already starting to read. If they struggled, they could always turn to private tutors, who might give the phonics lessons that their schools were neglecting to provide. But kids without access to private tutors needed to be drilled in phonics, Hanford argued. She backed up her claims by referencing neurological research into how children learn to read—gesturing to a body of evidence known as “the science of reading.” That research demonstrated the importance of regular, explicit phonics instruction, she said, and ran contrary to how American reading teachers were being trained.

Since the podcast aired, “teaching Lucy” has fallen out of fashion. Calkins’s critics say that her refusal to acknowledge the importance of phonics has tainted not just Units of Study—a reading and writing program that stretches up to eighth grade—but her entire educational philosophy, known as “balanced literacy.” Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented policies promoting the science of reading in the past decade, according to Education Week, and publishers are racing to adjust their offerings to embrace that philosophy.

Somehow, the wider debate over how to teach reading has become a referendum on Calkins herself. In September 2023, Teachers College announced that it would dissolve the reading-and-writing-education center that she had founded there. Anti-Lucy sentiment has proliferated, particularly in the city that once championed her methods: Last year, David Banks, then the chancellor of New York City public schools, likened educators who used balanced literacy to lemmings: “We all march right off the side of the mountain,” he said. The New Yorker has described Calkins’s approach as “literacy by vibes,” and in an editorial, the New York Post described her initiative as “a disaster” that had been “imposed on generations of American children.” The headline declared that it had “Ruined Countless Lives.” When the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker shared an article about Calkins on X, he bemoaned “the scandal of ed schools that promote reading quackery.” Queen Lucy has been dethroned.

“I mean, I can say it—it was a little bit like 9/11,” Calkins told me when we spoke at her home this summer. On that day in 2001, she had been driving into New York City, and “literally, I was on the West Side Highway and I saw the plane crash into the tower. Your mind can’t even comprehend what’s happening.” Two decades later, the suggestion that she had harmed children’s learning felt like the same kind of gut punch.

Calkins now concedes that some of the problems identified in Sold a Story were real. But she says that she had followed the research, and was trying to rectify issues even before the podcast debuted: She released her first dedicated phonics units in 2018, and later published a series of “decodable books”—simplified stories that students can easily sound out. Still, she has not managed to satisfy her critics, and on the third day we spent together, she admitted to feeling despondent. “What surprises me is that I feel as if I’ve done it all,” she told me. (Heinemann, Calkins’s publisher, has claimed that the Sold a Story podcast “radically oversimplifies and misrepresents complex literacy issues.”)

The backlash against Calkins strikes some onlookers, even those who are not paid-up Lucy partisans, as unfair. “She wouldn’t have been my choice for the picture on the ‘wanted’ poster,” James Cunningham, a professor emeritus of literacy studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Indeed, over the course of several days spent with Calkins, and many more hours talking with people on all sides of this debate, I came to see her downfall as part of a larger story about the competing currents in American education and the universal desire for an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the country’s reading problems.

The question now is whether Calkins is so much a part of the problem that she cannot be part of the solution. “I’m going to figure this out,” she remembered thinking. “And I’m going to clarify it or I’m going to write some more or speak or do something or, or—fix it.” But can she? Can anyone?

On the last day of the school year in Oceanside, a well-to-do town on Long Island, everyone was just delighted to see Lucy Calkins. The young Yale-educated principal of Fulton Avenue School 8, Frank Zangari, greeted her warmly, and at the end of one lesson, a teacher asked for a selfie.

The lessons I saw stressed the importance of self-expression and empathy with other viewpoints; a group of sixth graders told me about the books they had read that year, which explored being poor in India and growing up Black in 1960s America. In every class, I watched Calkins speak to children with a mixture of intense attention and straightforward challenge; she got down on the floor with a group learning about orcas and frogs and peppered them with questions about how animals breathe. “Could you talk a minute about the writer’s craft?” she asked the sixth graders studying poetry. “Be more specific. Give examples,” she told a fourth grader struggling to write a memoir.

With her slim frame, brown bob, and no-nonsense affect, she reminded me of Nancy Pelosi. “I can’t retire; I don’t have any hobbies,” I overheard her saying to someone later.

School 8 showed the strengths of Calkins’s approach—which is presumably why she had suggested we visit it together. But it also hinted at the downsides. For generations in American public education, there has been a push and pull between two broad camps—one in which teachers are encouraged to directly impart skills and information, and a more progressive one in which children are thought to learn best through firsthand experience. When it comes to reading, the latter approach dominates universities’ education programs and resonates with many teachers; helping children see themselves as readers and writers feels more emotionally satisfying than drilling them on diphthongs and trigraphs.

This tension between the traditionalists and the progressives runs through decades of wrangling over standardized tests and through most of the major curricular controversies in recent memory. Longtime educators tick off the various flash points like Civil War battlefields: outcome-based education, No Child Left Behind, the Common Core. Every time, the pendulum went one way and then the other. “I started teaching elementary school in 1964,” says P. David Pearson, a former dean at the Berkeley School of Education, in California. “And then I went to grad school in, like, ’67, and there’s been a back-to-the-basics swing about every 10 years in the U.S., consistently.”

The progressives’ primary insight is that lessons focused on repetitive instruction and simplified text extracts can be boring for students and teachers alike, and that many children respond more enthusiastically to discovering their own interests. “We’re talking about an approach that treats kids as competent, intellectual meaning makers, versus kids who just need to learn the code,” Maren Aukerman, a professor at the University of Calgary, told me. But opponents see that approach as nebulous and undirected.

My time at School 8 was clearly intended to demonstrate that Units of Study is not hippie nonsense, but a rigorous curriculum that can succeed with the right teachers. “There’s no question in my mind that the philosophy works, but in order to implement it, it takes a lot of work,” Phyllis Harrington, the district superintendent, told me.

School 8 is a happy school with great results. However, while the school uses Calkins’s writing units for all grades, it uses her reading units only from the third grade on. For first and second grades, the school uses Fundations, which is marketed as “a proven approach to Structured Literacy that is aligned with the science of reading.” In other words, it’s a phonics program.

Calkins’s upbringing was financially comfortable but psychologically tough. Both of her parents were doctors, and her father eventually chaired the department of medicine at the University at Buffalo. Calkins’s mother was “the most important, wonderful person in my life, but really brutal,” she told me. If a bed wasn’t made, her mother ripped off the sheets. If a coat wasn’t hung up, her mother dropped it into the basement. When the young Lucy bit her fingernails, her mother tied dancing gloves onto her hands. When she scratched the mosquito bites on her legs, her mother made her wear thick pantyhose at the height of summer.

The nine Calkins children raised sheep and chickens themselves. Her memories of childhood are of horseback riding in the cold, endless hand-me-downs, and little tolerance for bad behavior.

That is why, Calkins told me, “nothing that Emily Hanford has said grates on me more than the damn monogrammed towels.” But she knows that the charge of being privileged and out of touch has stuck. Her friends had warned her about letting me into her home in Dobbs Ferry, a pretty suburb of New York, and I could see why. Her house is idyllic—at the end of a long private drive, shaded by old trees, with a grand piano in the hallway and a Maine-coon cat patrolling the wooden floors. Calkins has profited handsomely from textbook sales and training fees, and in the eyes of some people, that is suspicious. (“Money is the last thing I ever think about,” she told me.)

She became interested in reading and writing because she babysat for the children of the literacy pioneer Donald Graves, whose philosophy can be summarized by one of his most widely cited phrases: “Children want to write.” Even at a young age, she believed in exhaustively prepared fun. “I would plan a bagful of things I would bring over there; I was the best babysitter you could ever have,” she said. “We would do crafts projects, and drama, you know, and I would keep the kids busy all day.”

When Calkins was 14, Graves sent her to be a counselor at a summer camp in rural Maine. She remembers two kids in particular, Sophie and Charlie. Sophie was “so tough and surly, and a kind of overweight, insecure, tough kid,” but she opened up when Calkins took her horseback riding and then asked her to write about it. Charlie loved airplanes, and so she asked him to write about those. The experience cemented her lifelong belief that children should read and write as a form of self-expression.

After graduating from Williams College in 1973, she enrolled in a program in Connecticut that trained teachers to work in disadvantaged districts. She read everything about teaching methods she could find, and traveled to England, where a progressive education revolution was in full swing.

Calkins returned to America determined to spread this empowering philosophy. She earned a doctorate at NYU, and, in 1986, published a book called The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, she expanded her purview to reading instruction.

At the time, the zeitgeist favored an approach known as “whole language.” This advocated independent reading of full books and suggested that children should identify words from context clues rather than arduously sounding them out. Progressives loved it, because it emphasized playfulness and agency. But in practice, whole language had obvious flaws: Some children do appear to pick up reading easily, but many benefit from focused, direct instruction.

This approach influenced Calkins as she developed her teaching philosophy. “Lucy Calkins sides, in most particulars, with the proponents of ‘whole language,’ ” The New York Times reported in 1997. Her heavyweight 2001 book, The Art of Teaching Reading, has only a single chapter on phonics in primary grades; it does note, however, that “researchers emphasize how important it is for children to develop phonemic awareness in kindergarten.”

The author Natalie Wexler has described Calkins’s resulting approach, balanced literacy, as an attempt to create a “peace treaty” in the reading wars: Phonics, yes, if you must, but also writing workshops and independent reading with commercial children’s books, rather than the stuffier grade-level decodable texts and approved extracts. (Defenders of the former method argue that using full books is more cost-efficient, because they can be bought cheaply and used by multiple students.) “If we make our children believe that reading has more to do with matching letters and sounds than with developing relationships with characters like Babar, Madeline, Charlotte, and Ramona,” Calkins wrote, “we do more harm than good.”

Sentences like that are why critics saw balanced literacy as a branding exercise designed to rehabilitate old methods. “It was a strategic rebadging of whole language,” Pamela Snow, a cognitive-psychology professor at La Trobe University, in Australia, told me. Even many of Calkins’s defenders concede that she was too slow to embrace phonics as the evidence for its effectiveness grew. “I think she should have reacted earlier,” Pearson, the former Berkeley dean, told me, but he added: “Once she changed, they were still beating her for what she did eight years ago, not what she was doing last month.”

For the first decades of her career, Calkins was an influential thinker among progressive educators, writing books for teachers. In 2003, though, Joel Klein, then the chancellor of the New York City public schools, suddenly mandated her workshop approach in virtually all of the city’s elementary schools, alongside a separate, much smaller, phonics program. An article in the Times suggested that some saw Klein as “an unwitting captive of the city’s liberal consensus,” but Klein brushed aside the criticisms of balanced literacy. “I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education,” he said. “I believe teachers are.” Now everybody in the city’s public schools would be “teaching Lucy.”

As other districts followed New York’s lead, Units of Study became one of the most popular curricula in the United States. This led, inevitably, to backlash. A philosophy had become a product—an extremely popular and financially successful one. “Once upon a time there was a thoughtful educator who raised some interesting questions about how children were traditionally taught to read and write, and proposed some innovative changes,” the author Barbara Feinberg wrote in 2007. “But as she became famous, critical debate largely ceased: her word became law. Over time, some of her methods became dogmatic and extreme, yet her influence continued to grow.”

You wouldn’t know it from listening to her fiercest detractors, but Calkins has, in fact, continuously updated Units of Study. Unlike Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, who have stayed quiet during the latest furor and quietly reissued their curriculum with more emphasis on phonics last year, Calkins has even taken on her critics directly. In 2019—the year after she added the dedicated phonics texts to Units of Study—she published an eight-page document called “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘The Science of Reading,’ ” which referred dismissively to “phonics-centric people” and “the new hype about phonics.” This tone drove her opponents mad: Now that Calkins had been forced to adapt, she wanted to decide what the science of reading was?

“Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins,” wrote the cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg, one of the critics interviewed in Sold a Story. “The purpose of the document is to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers.”

Talking with Calkins herself, it was hard to nail down to what extent she felt that the criticisms of her earlier work were justified. When I asked her how she was thinking about phonics in the 2000s, she told me: “Every school has a phonics program. And I would always talk about the phonics programs.” She added that she brought phonics specialists to Columbia’s Teachers College several times a year to help train aspiring educators. (James Cunningham, at UNC Chapel Hill, backed this up, telling me, “She was certainly not wearing a sandwich billboard around: DON’T TEACH PHONICS.”)

But still, I asked Calkins, would it be fair to say that phonics wasn’t your bag?

“I felt like phonics was something that you have the phonics experts teach.”

So where does this characterization of you being hostile toward phonics come from?

“Hopefully, you understand I’m not stupid. You would have to be stupid to not teach a 5-year-old phonics.”

But some people didn’t, did they? They were heavily into context and cueing.

“I’ve never heard of a kindergarten teacher who doesn’t teach phonics,” Calkins replied.

Because this is America, the reading debate has become a culture war. When Sold a Story came along in 2022, it resonated with a variety of audiences, including center-left education reformers and parents of children with learning disabilities. But it also galvanized political conservatives. Calkins’s Units of Study was already under attack from the right: In 2021, an article in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal titled “Units of Indoctrination” had criticized the curriculum, alleging that the way it teaches students to analyze texts “amounts to little more than radical proselytization through literature.”

The podcast was released at an anxious time for American education. During the coronavirus pandemic, many schools—particularly in blue states—were closed for months at a time. Masking in classrooms made it harder for children to lip-read what their teachers were saying. Test scores fell, and have only recently begun to recover.

“Parents had, for a period of time, a front-row seat based on Zoom school,” Annie Ward, a recently retired assistant superintendent in Mamaroneck, New York, told me. She wondered if that fueled a desire for a “back to basics” approach. “If I’m a parent, I want to know the teacher is teaching and my kid is sitting there soaking it up, and I don’t want this loosey-goosey” stuff.

Disgruntled parents quickly gathered online. Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group that started out by opposing school closures and mask mandates, began lobbying state legislators to change school curricula as well. The reading wars began to merge with other controversies, such as how hard schools should push diversity-and-inclusion programs. (The Moms for Liberty website recommends Sold a Story on its resources page.) “We’re failing kids everyday, and Moms for Liberty is calling it out,” a co-founder, Tiffany Justice, told Education Week in October of last year. “The idea that there’s more emphasis placed on diversity in the classroom, rather than teaching kids to read, is alarming at best. That’s criminal.”

Ward’s district was not “teaching Lucy,” but using its own bespoke balanced-literacy curriculum. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Ward told me, the district had several “contentious” meetings, including one in January 2023 where “we had ringers”—attendees who were not parents or community members, but instead seemed to be activists from outside the district. “None of us in the room recognized these people.” That had never happened before.

I had met Ward at a dinner organized by Calkins at her home, which is also the headquarters of Mossflower—the successor to the center that Calkins used to lead at Teachers College. The evening demonstrated that Calkins still has star power. On short notice, she had managed to assemble half a dozen superintendents, assistant superintendents, and principals from New York districts.

“Any kind of disruption like this has you think very carefully about what you’re doing,” Edgar McIntosh, an assistant superintendent in Scarsdale, told me. But he, like several others, was frustrated by the debate. During his time as an elementary-school teacher, he had discovered that some children could decode words—the basic skill developed by phonics—but struggled with their meaning. He worried that parents’ clamor for more phonics might come at the expense of teachers’ attention to fluency and comprehension. Raymond Sanchez, the superintendent of Tarrytown’s school district, said principals should be able to explain how they were adding more phonics or decodable texts to existing programs, rather than having “to throw everything out and find a series that has a sticker that says ‘science of reading’ on it.”

This, to me, is the key to the anti-Lucy puzzle. Hanford’s reporting was thorough and necessary, but its conclusion—that whole language or balanced literacy would be replaced by a shifting, research-based movement—is hard to reconcile with how American education actually works. The science of reading started as a neutral description of a set of principles, but it has now become a brand name, another off-the-shelf solution to America’s educational problems. The answer to those problems might not be to swap out one commercial curriculum package for another—but that’s what the system is set up to enable.

Gail Dahling-Hench, the assistant superintendent in Madison, Connecticut, has experienced this pressure firsthand. Her district’s schools don’t “teach Lucy” but instead follow a bespoke local curriculum that, she says, uses classroom elements associated with balanced literacy, such as the workshop model of students studying together in small groups, while also emphasizing phonics. That didn’t stop them from running afoul of the new science-of-reading laws.

In 2021, Connecticut passed a “Right to Read” law mandating that schools choose a K–3 curriculum from an approved list of options that are considered compliant with the science of reading. Afterward, Dahling-Hench’s district was denied a waiver to keep using its own curriculum. (Eighty-five districts and charter schools in Connecticut applied for a waiver, but only 17 were successful.) “I think they got wrapped around the axle of thinking that programs deliver instruction, and not teachers,” she told me.

Dahling-Hench said the state gave her no useful explanation for its decision—nor has it outlined the penalties for noncompliance. She has decided to stick with the bespoke curriculum, because she thinks it’s working. According to test scores released a few days after our conversation, her district is among the best-performing in the state.

Keeping the current curriculum also avoids the cost of preparing teachers and administrators to use a new one—a transition that would be expensive even for a tiny district like hers, with just five schools. “It can look like $150,000 to $800,000 depending on which program you’re looking at, but that’s a onetime cost,” Dahling-Hench said. Then you need to factor in annual costs, such as new workbooks.

You can’t understand this controversy without appreciating the sums involved. Refreshing a curriculum can cost a state millions of dollars. People on both sides will therefore suggest that their opponents are motivated by money—either saving their favored curriculum to keep the profits flowing, or getting rich through selling school boards an entirely new one. Talking with teachers and researchers, I heard widespread frustration with America’s commercial approach to literacy education. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to love the idea of a packaged solution—Buy this and make all your problems go away!—but the perfect curriculum does not exist.

“If you gave me any curriculum, I could find ways to improve it,” Aukerman, at the University of Calgary, told me. She thinks that when a teaching method falls out of fashion, its champions are often personally vilified, regardless of their good faith or expertise. In the case of Lucy Calkins and balanced literacy, Aukerman said, “If it weren’t her, it would be someone else.”

Jeff Brown for The Atlantic

One obvious question about the science of reading is, well … what is it? The evidence for some kind of explicit phonics instruction is compelling, and states such as Mississippi, which has adopted early screening to identify children who struggle to read—and which holds back third graders if necessary—appear to be improving their test scores. Beyond that, though, things get messy.

Dig into this subject, and you can find frontline teachers and credentialed professors who contest every part of the consensus. And I mean every part: Some academics don’t even think there’s a reading crisis at all.

American schools might be ditching Units of Study, but balanced literacy still has its defenders. A 2022 analysis in England, which mandates phonics, found that systematic reviews “do not support a synthetic phonics orientation to the teaching of reading; they suggest that a balanced-instruction approach is most likely to be successful.”

The data on the effects of specific methods can be conflicting and confusing, which is not unusual for education studies, or psychological research more generally. I feel sorry for any well-intentioned superintendent or state legislator trying to make sense of it all. One of the classrooms at Oceanside School 8 had a wall display devoted to “growth mindset,” a fashionable intervention that encourages children to believe that instead of their intelligence and ability being fixed, they can learn and evolve. Hoping to improve test scores, many schools have spent thousands of dollars each implementing “growth mindset” lessons, which proponents once argued should be a “national education priority.” (Some proponents also hoped, earnestly, that the approach could help bring peace to the Middle East.) But in the two decades since growth mindset first became ubiquitous, the lofty claims made about its promise have come down to earth.

Keeping up with all of this is more than any teacher—more than any school board, even—can reasonably be expected to do. After I got in touch with her, Emily Hanford sent me seven emails with links to studies and background reading; I left Calkins’s house loaded down with units of her curricula for younger students. More followed in the mail.

Even the most modest pronouncements about what’s happening in American schools are difficult to verify, because of the sheer number of districts, teachers, and pupils involved. In Sold a Story, Hanford suggested that some schools were succeeding with Units of Study only because parents hired personal tutors for their children. But corroborating this with data is impossible. “I haven’t figured out a way to quantify it, except in a very strong anecdotal way,” Hanford told me.

Some teachers love “teaching Lucy,” and others hate it. Is one group delusional? And if so, which one? Jenna and Christina, who have both taught kindergarten in New York using Units of Study, told me that the curriculum was too invested in the idea of children as “readers” and “writers” without giving them the basic skills needed to read and write. (They asked to be identified only by their first names in case of professional reprisals.) “It’s a piece of shit,” Christina said. She added: “We’re expecting them to apply skills that we haven’t taught them and that they aren’t coming to school with. I’ve been trying to express that there’s a problem and I get called negative.” Jenna had resorted to a covert strategy, secretly teaching phonics for up to 90 minutes a day instead of the brief lessons she was instructed to provide.

But for every Jenna or Christina, there’s a Latasha Holt. After a decade as a third- and fourth-grade teacher in Arkansas, Holt is now an associate professor of elementary literacy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she has watched from the sidelines as the tide turned against Calkins. “The dismantling of this thing, it got to me, because I had taught under Units of Study,” she told me. “I’ve used it, and I knew how good it was. I had lived it; I’ve seen it work; I knew it was good for kids.”

Aubrey Kinat is a third-grade teacher in Texas who recently left her position at a public school because it decided to drop Units of Study. (The school now uses another curriculum, which was deemed to align better with the science of reading.) Suddenly, she was pushed away from full novels and toward approved excerpts, and her lessons became much more heavily scripted. “I felt like I was talking so much,” she told me. “It took the joy out of it.”

For many school boards facing newly politicized parents who came out of the pandemic with strong opinions, ditching Lucy has had the happy side effect of giving adults much more control over what children read. Calkins and some of her dinner guests had suggested that this might be the true reason for the animus around independent reading. “I do start to wonder if this really is about wanting to move everybody towards textbooks,” Calkins said.

Eighteen months after her series launched, Hanford returned in April 2024 with two follow-up episodes of Sold a Story, which took a less polemical tone. Unsurprisingly so: Calkins had lost, and she had won.

The science of reading is the new consensus in education, and its advocates are the new establishment. It is now on the hook for the curriculum changes that it prompted—and for America’s reading performance more generally. That is an uncomfortable position for those who care more about research than about winning political fights.

Some of the neuroscience underpinning Sold a Story was provided by Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (He did not respond to an interview request.) Since the series aired, he has welcomed the move away from Units of Study, but he has also warned that “none of the other major commercial curricula that are currently available were based on the relevant science from the ground up.”

Because the usefulness of phonics is one of the few science-of-reading conclusions that is immediately comprehensible to laypeople, “phonics” has come to stand in for the whole philosophy. In a blog post last year, Seidenberg lamented that, on a recent Zoom call, a teacher had asked if they needed to keep teaching phonemic awareness once children were good readers. (The answer is no: Sounding out letters is what you do until the process becomes automatic.) Seidenberg now worried that the science of reading is “at risk of turning into a new pedagogical dogma.”

Hanford has also expressed ambivalence about the effects of Sold a Story. She compared the situation to the aftermath of No Child Left Behind, a George W. Bush–era federal education initiative that heavily promoted a literacy program called Reading First. “It became focused on products and programs,” Hanford told me, adding that the ethos turned into “get rid of whole language and buy something else.” However, she is glad that the importance of phonics—and the research backing it—is now more widely understood, because she thinks this can break the cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. She added that whenever she talks with lawmakers, she stresses the importance of continuing to listen to teachers.

What about her portrait of Calkins as rich, privileged, oblivious? Forget the monogrammed towels, I told Hanford; there is a more benign explanation for Calkins’s worldview: Everywhere she goes, she meets people, like the teachers and children in Oceanside, who are overjoyed to see her, and keen to tell her how much they love Units of Study.

But Hanford told me that she’d included the towels line because “the vast majority of teachers, especially elementary-school teachers, in America are white, middle-class women.” Many of these women, she thought, had enjoyed school themselves and didn’t intuitively know what it was like to struggle with learning to read and write.

Reporting this story, I was reminded again and again that education is both a mass phenomenon and a deeply personal one. People I spoke with would say things like Well, he’s never done any classroom research. She’s never been a teacher. They don’t understand things the way I do. The education professors would complain that the cognitive scientists didn’t understand the history of the reading wars, while the scientists would complain that the education professors didn’t understand the latest peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, a teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home. At the same time, school boards and state legislators, faced with angry parents and a welter of conflicting testimony, must answer a simple question: Should we be “teaching Lucy,” or not?

No matter how painful the past few years have been, though, Calkins is determined to keep fighting for her legacy. At 72, she has both the energy to start over again at Mossflower and the pragmatism to have promised her estate to further the cause once she’s gone. She still has a “ferocious” drive, she told me, and a deep conviction in her methods, even as they evolve. She does not want “to pretend it’s a brand-new approach,” she said, “when in fact we’ve just been learning; we’re just incorporating more things that we’ve learned.”

But now that balanced literacy is as unfashionable as whole language, Calkins is trying to come up with a new name for her program. She thought she might try “comprehensive literacy”—or maybe “rebalancing literacy.” Whatever it takes for America to once again feel confident about “teaching Lucy.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Teaching Lucy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Photographs by Wesaam Al-Badry

It’s the evening rush hour on the Friday before Election Day in Omaha, and about two dozen die-hard Democrats are making a racket. They’re standing on a bridge overpass, cheering, whooping, blowing whistles, holding up little American flags, and waving white signs emblazoned with a blue circle. Even in this Republican area on the outskirts of Nebraska’s biggest city, the cars passing by are honking in approval.

The signs say nothing—it’s just that big blue dot in the middle—but their message is no mystery here. “I don’t think there’s anybody in this city who doesn’t know what the blue dot represents,” Tim Conn, a 70-year-old retiree who has spray-painted a few thousand of the signs in his backyard, told me. More than 13,000 blue dots have popped up on Omaha lawns in the past three months, an expression of political pride in what has become a Democratic stronghold on the eastern edge of a deep-red state.

The blue dots embody a surge of enthusiasm for both Kamala Harris and Omaha’s outsize significance to the national election. Nebraska allocates some of its electoral votes by congressional district, and if Harris defeats Donald Trump in the Rust Belt’s “Blue Wall” states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—while losing the battlegrounds to the south, Omaha and its suburbs would likely deliver her the 270th vote that she needs to win the presidency. The district is so important that Trump and his allies repeatedly pressured Republicans in Nebraska’s legislature to change the rules in his favor. (The legislators rebuffed him a final time in September, and Trump has made little effort since to win Omaha the old-fashioned way—by earning more votes.)

Omaha could also determine control of Congress. Democrats view the GOP-held House district as one of their best opportunities to flip a seat and help recapture the majority. And in at least one postelection scenario, an upset victory by the independent Dan Osborn over Senator Deb Fischer—polls show the race is close—would give him the power to choose which party controls the Senate.

[David A. Graham: How is it this close?]

All this has made a region that’s hundreds of miles from the nearest swing state a potential tipping point for the balance of federal power. “Nebraska is literally in the middle of everything,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair, told me. “They try to say that we’re a flyover state, but ha-ha, joke’s on them.”

Nebraska began splitting up its electoral votes more than three decades ago, but only twice since then has Omaha’s vote in the Second Congressional District gone to a Democrat; Barack Obama won it by a single point in 2008, and Joe Biden beat Trump by six points in 2020.

This year, however, Harris is poised to carry the district by more than either of them. The area is filled with the white, college-educated voters who have largely recoiled from Trump since 2016, and a New York Times/Siena poll last week found the vice president leading by 12 points. Neither Harris nor Trump, nor their running mates, are campaigning in Omaha in the closing days of the election—a sign that both candidates see the district going to Harris.

Still, the Harris campaign and allied groups have spent more than $4 million in the area, which has also imperiled Omaha’s Republican representative, Don Bacon. Trump has spent only around $130,000. “That’s the biggest undertow for us,” Bacon told me on Saturday before a GOP get-out-the-vote rally in a more conservative part of the district. Public polls have shown Bacon’s opponent, the Democratic state senator and former middle-school science teacher Tony Vargas, ahead by a few points. Last week, the Cook Political Report, a leading congressional prognosticator, shifted its rating of the race as a “toss-up” to one that Vargas is slightly favored to win.

Public polls show Tony Vargas, right, narrowly leading his opponent, Republican Representative Don Bacon.  (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

A retired Air Force general serving his fourth term in Congress, Bacon outran Trump in 2020, winning reelection by 4.5 points. He defeated Vargas by a slimmer margin two years ago, and Vargas is running again—this time with more money and more backing from prominent members of his party.

Bacon has positioned himself as a moderate—he’s a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus—and frequently criticized the conservative hard-liners who ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But Bacon has been reluctant to cross Trump, and he lost some supporters by backing the former president’s late push to award all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the statewide winner, which would have effectively stripped power from many of his own constituents. “They’re so mad about that,” Vargas told me on Saturday, noting that Bacon received an endorsement from Trump soon after he signed a letter supporting the change. “Now we know what Don Bacon actually is. He’ll sell out Nebraskans if it means holding on to his seat of power.” At an Osborn event the next day, I met a former Republican and Bacon voter, Paul Anderson, who told me that he wrote in a friend’s name on his ballot rather than support Bacon again. “He’s afraid of Donald J. Trump,” Anderson said.

Vargas’s previous campaign and his plentiful TV ads have made him a recognizable face in the district. When one elderly woman answered her door on Saturday and saw him standing on her stoop, her eyes widened as if he were Ed McMahon about to hand her a giant check. She assured Vargas that both she and her daughter would vote for him. “I’ll remember, don’t worry,” she said. As we walked away, Vargas showed me the canvassing app on his phone: The woman was a registered Republican.

For Nebraska Democrats, the most pleasant Election Night surprise would involve a race in which they haven’t even fielded a candidate. Osborn, a Navy veteran and local union leader, rejected the party’s endorsement and elected to campaign instead as an independent, and he’s stunned Republicans and Democrats alike by running nearly even with Fischer, a two-term incumbent who won both her previous races by more than 15 points.

Osborn has caught on with a cross-partisan, populist campaign that mixes support for abortion rights, labor unions, and campaign-finance reform with a hawkish, Trump-like stance on border security. Republicans in the state have accused him of being a Democrat in disguise, but he’s appealed to voters in Nebraska’s conservative rural west by backing so-called Right to Repair laws—popular with farmers. He has also hammered Fischer’s opposition to rail-safety measures and her vote that delayed the provision of benefits to military veterans injured by toxic burn pits. In one commercial, Osborn, a longtime mechanic, takes a blowtorch to a TV showing one of Fischer’s attack ads.

Mostly, though, he seems to be winning support by criticizing both parties, and his success is validating his decision to spurn the Democrats. “This wouldn’t be close if he were running as the Democratic candidate,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist who has written about the “two-party doom loop,” a term Osborn has used during the campaign. Osborn has vowed to stay independent and said that he would refuse to align with the GOP or the Democratic Party as a senator (unlike the four independents currently serving in the Senate, who all caucus with the Democrats).

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Osborn’s pledge has its doubters, including fans such as Drutman. If either party has a clear majority, Osborn might be able to stay independent. But if both Osborn and Harris win, and Republicans wind up with exactly 50 Senate seats, his refusal to caucus with either party would hand the GOP a majority—and with it the ability to block Harris’s agenda and potentially her nominees to the Supreme Court. “There’s going to be so much pressure on him,” Drutman told me, “and he’s going to have to build a pretty strong infrastructure around him to manage that.”

Osborn has insisted that he wouldn’t budge. “I want to challenge the system, because the system needs to be challenged,” he told me. Osborn acknowledged that leaders in both parties “are gonna come knocking on my door, and then that’s going to allow me to use leverage to make deals for Nebraska.” Yet he gave other indications that he’d want to empower Democrats. He told me, for instance, that he supported filibuster reform and would back the Democrats’ push to remove the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to pass a law restoring abortion rights—a move the party might be able to make only if he helped them assemble a majority.

Republicans are confident that, come Wednesday morning, the question of Osborn’s party alliance will be moot. The national GOP has sent money and reinforcements to rescue Fischer’s bid—Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was stumping for her on Saturday—and her campaign has released polls showing her ahead of Osborn by several points. Independent candidates have threatened Republican incumbents a few times in recent years, only to fall short when GOP voters rallied around their party’s candidate in elections’ final weeks; in Kansas in 2014, the independent Greg Orman was polling close to Senator Pat Roberts for much of the campaign, but he lost by more than 10 points.

Left: Veterans protest at Republican Senator Deb Fischer’s rally on Saturday. Center: Senator Tom Cotton stumps for Fischer. Right: Dan Osborn, Fischer’s challenger, has run nearly even with her in polling. (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

Fischer has kept a low profile as a senator, and Republicans privately say she initially did not take Osborn seriously enough as a challenger. She’s embraced Trump in the apparent hope that his coattails will carry her to victory. When I asked Fischer why the race was so close, she pointed at me and the other national reporters who had come to one of her final rallies. “I explain his success to you folks in large part,” she said, “because I think you wanted to see a race here and you believed a lot of his polls that he put out early. We are going to win this race, and we are going to have a strong, strong showing.”

For his part, Osborn is courting Trump voters aggressively, recognizing that he cannot win with Democrats and independents alone. He has refused to say whether he’s voting for Trump or Harris. “As soon as I say who I’m voting for, I become that,” he told me. But Osborn’s closing ads leave the distinct impression that he’s backing Trump. “I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border,” he says in one. “If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.”

Osborn’s rightward turn has made it awkward for Democrats like Kleeb, the state party chair, who is clearly rooting for him even if she can’t say so publicly. “Yeah, it’s complicated!” she said when I asked about Osborn, letting out a big laugh. Kleeb told me she’s frustrated that Osborn has backed Trump on border policy and even more so that he assails both Republicans and Democrats as corrupt. “It’s unfair to criticize us as the same,” she said. Still, Kleeb continued, it’s obvious that on most issues, Osborn is preferable to Fischer, a down-the-line Republican: “We’ve told all of our Democratic voters—you need to weigh the issues that you deeply care about and who is closest to you. That’s who we suggest you vote for.”

To most Democrats in Omaha, the choice is easy. When I visited Jason Brown and Ruth Huebner-Brown, I found an Osborn sign on a front lawn festooned with campaign placards. None were bigger, however, than the one Jason created: the blue dot.

The Browns have been Harris enthusiasts since 2019, when she was their first choice in the crowded field of Democratic primary contenders then campaigning over the Iowa state line a few miles away. Inspired by the Democratic National Convention’s exhortation to “do something,” Jason began tinkering in their garage. He cut off the top of a bucket, used it to outline a circle, and spray-painted over a sign for a local lawn service. He showed it to Ruth and asked if he should add any writing, like Vote or Kamala. “No,” she replied. “It makes you stop and think for a second. Just leave it plain.”

Attendees pray at a Fischer rally (left), and the Browns make blue-dot signs (right). (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

They put the sign up in their yard in August, and soon after, neighbors started asking where they had gotten it and whether they could get one too. Before long, the Browns were ordering blank white signs from Amazon, first by the tens, and then by the hundreds. Jason made the first couple thousand by hand in their backyard, and then they enlisted the help of another neighbor, Conn, who had better equipment. After they had distributed 5,000 blue dots, the Browns finally gave up and started having them mass-produced by a political-sign company.

Jason and Ruth were telling me the story as we sat at their dining-room table, where they resembled the kind of superfans you might see satirized in a Christopher Guest movie. Both wore blue-dot T-shirts over blue jeans and blue long-sleeved shirts. Jason, 53, had a Kamala hat and blue shoes—he also has blue-shaded sunglasses—while Ruth, 58, wore blue-dot–shaped earrings. As we were speaking, the doorbell rang: A pair of young men were there to pick up more signs. (They give them out for free, though most people make donations that cover their costs.) The Browns have taken a leave of absence from their consulting business through the election; earlier this fall, they postponed a long-planned cruise.

At first, they told me, they saw the signs as part of an education campaign, because they found that many Omaha voters did not appreciate the city’s importance in the presidential election. Although the Second District has had its own electoral vote since the 1990s, the reapportionment following the 2020 census has made it more important for Harris than it was for past Democratic candidates—a result of shrinking blue states losing electoral votes to growing red ones. (In 2020, Biden wouldn’t have needed the district’s vote to reach 270, so long as he carried the Blue Wall states; he ultimately won 306 electoral votes.)

[Ronald Brownstein: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

As the blue dots took off, the Browns said they came to represent a sense of local pride, as well as inspiration to Democrats who feel isolated and powerless in red states. Ruth has tried to keep the vibe positive—she calls the signs “happy blue dots”—but she told me that the anxiety Democrats feel about the election has also played a part in the movement’s popularity. “I think there’s more enthusiasm because people are more scared this time,” she said.

I mentioned that I had spoken with one Democrat who worried that if Omaha delivered the election to Harris, Trump would make another attempt to lean on Republicans in the legislature to hand him all of Nebraska’s votes before the Electoral College meets in December. The Second District’s vote was saved in September by a GOP holdout, Mike McDonnell, who resisted pressure from other Republicans. Would he hold firm if he was all that stood in the way of Trump’s election?

Jason told me he’s sure that Republicans would come for the blue dot again, and he’s prepared for one more fight. If Omaha is responsible for electing Harris, “we’ll be running up and down that street, waving flags, tears of joy,” he said, “followed by, Oh, shit.”