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.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

It’s important not to overstate the role that sexism played in Harris’s loss. She’s the vice president of an unpopular incumbent. Although the U.S. economy writ large is objectively strong, many voters feel pinched by high inflation and interest rates. And after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, Harris had less than four months to make her case to the American public. A very small number of people have ever run for president, and, well, someone has to lose.

[Read: The shadow over Kamala Harris’s campaign]

But some people are biased against female presidential candidates. In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with. (Because they don’t feel strongly attached to a party, independents rely on other characteristics of the candidates to make up their mind.)

The obvious counterpoint is that, although they are still underrepresented, women have attained other types of high political offices. We’ve never had a female president, but women make up nearly a third of Congress. Twelve governors are women.

The presidency may be different from other elected positions, though. When researchers ask voters to list the traits that they want in a president, they rate masculine-coded traits, such as strength, as more important than feminine-coded ones, such as compassion. “The prestige and the height of the office contributes to the perception that women are just too big of a risk to take,” Nichole Bauer, a political-communication professor at Louisiana State University, told me.

Masculinity is so important to the presidency that candidates often try to cast their male opponents as feminine: Think of George W. Bush painting John Kerry as effete in 2004, and Marco Rubio’s opponents mocking him for his high-heeled boots in 2016. Female heads of state tend to emerge in countries—including Germany and the United Kingdom—that have parliamentary systems, in which leaders are chosen by political parties, not by voters.

But women who behave in masculine-seeming ways are also penalized for not being traditionally feminine. “For a woman to be seen as presidential, she would have to be hyper-masculine, but the moment she does that, she is condemned by a swath of the population for violating norms of femininity,” Caroline Heldman, a gender-studies professor at Occidental College, told me. “Sarah Palin tried to straddle the masculine-feminine line really wide, ripping the guts out of a moose, and Hillary Clinton barely stepped on either side of the line with her pearls and her pants. It just doesn’t matter. They all get beaten up in the same sexist ways.”

[From the November 2020 issue: Kamala Harris’s ambition trap]

Members of Congress, meanwhile, aren’t held to this same macho standard. There are more of them, they individually have less power, and they are seen as servants of the people. They’re middle managers to the president’s big boss. And although governors are also chief executives, they don’t command an entire nation’s army. Their families aren’t held up as an ideal American family, with the father in charge. As a female presidential candidate, “you’re upsetting not just our idea of what presidents should be,” Anderson said, “but you’re upsetting a whole bunch of gender norms.”

In their study, Ono and Burden found that the hypothetical female candidates weren’t disadvantaged if they were described as running for Congress rather than for president. Burden told me he suspects this is because there has never been a female president, so voters strain to imagine what a female president would be like.

This creates a maddening situation in which a woman can’t get elected president because there’s never been a woman elected president. Several of the researchers I interviewed were nevertheless doubtful that one would win the presidency anytime soon. “It would be really great to see a woman in the White House in my lifetime, but I’m very pessimistic,” Heldman said. Anderson told me that nominating another woman would be a “strategic risk” for either party.

Essentially, a female candidate would have to overcome her femaleness in order to win a presidential race. She would have to be running with significant tailwinds—as a “change” candidate during a terrible economy, say—so that voters wouldn’t pay too much attention to her gender. This is similar to what happened in 2008: An unpopular Republican was president, the economy was a wreck, and the preternaturally charismatic Barack Obama stepped into the breach. He became the first Black president, and now no one questions whether there could be another. But we’re still holding out for the female Obama. We might be waiting for a while.

For the third consecutive election, the nation remains divided almost exactly in half around the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.

Early this morning, the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump’s 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump held a narrow but clear advantage in all of them as of midnight.

In 2016, those three Rust Belt battlegrounds made Trump president when he dislodged them by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes from the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had won in all six presidential races from 1992 to 2012; four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he wrested them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Now, with Trump regaining an upper hand across Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden made inroads in 2020, the three Rust Belt behemoths appeared likely to decide the winner once more.

The results as of midnight suggested that those three states were tipping slightly to Trump; the patterns of returns looked more like 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in them, than 2020, when Biden beat Trump. Given that Trump appears highly likely to also win the Southeast battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump will likely win the presidency again if he captures any of the three Blue Wall states. He would become only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it again on a third try.

Not only are the same industrial-state battlegrounds at the fulcrum of Trump’s third race, but they remain mostly divided along very familiar lines. As he did in both 2016 and 2020, Trump is running up big margins in exurbs, small towns, and rural communities where most voters are white, culturally conservative people without a college degree. Harris is amassing big—though, in some cases, diminished—margins in the populous, well-educated suburbs around the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The one potentially crucial shift from 2020: The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed Trump making gains among Black and Latino voters, and especially men, not only in the pivotal former Blue Wall states but also elsewhere.

In many respects, the results available as of midnight were a reminder that even in a race involving a figure as unique as Donald Trump, in politics (as in Casablanca), the fundamental things apply. Since World War II, it has been extremely difficult for parties to hold the White House when an outgoing president was unpopular: The White House flipped partisan control when Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008. Popular presidents haven’t always been able to guarantee victory for their party when they leave (the White House changed hands when relatively popular chief executives stepped down in 1960, 2000, and 2016), but unpopular outgoing presidents have usually presented an insurmountable obstacle.

If Harris ultimately falls short, that pattern would represent a big part of the reason. Biden’s deep unpopularity at the end of his term operated as a huge headwind for her. In the national exit poll, only 40 percent of voters said they approved of Biden’s job performance as president. In the battlegrounds, Biden’s approval rating ranged from a low of only 39 percent (in Wisconsin) to a high of 43 percent (Pennsylvania). Harris ran better than usual for a nominee from the same party among voters who disapproved of the outgoing president’s performance. But even so, the large majority of discontented voters in all of these states provided a huge base of support for Trump. In the national exit poll, fully two-thirds of voters described the economy in negative terms. Only one in four said they had suffered no hardship from inflation over the past year.

A lot has changed for Trump since the 2020 election. He launched a sustained campaign to overturn the results of that election, which culminated in the January 6 insurrection; Supreme Court justices he’d appointed helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion; he was indicted on multiple felony counts in four separate cases, and convicted on 34 of them; and he was hit with civil judgments for financial fraud and sexual abuse.

Yet the exit polls, at least, found remarkably little change in his support levels from 2020 among white voters across the battlegrounds. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, his white support was virtually unchanged from 2020; he suffered a small decline in Pennsylvania, and a slightly larger one in North Carolina.

Compared with 2020, white voters with at least a four-year college degree moved slightly, but not dramatically, away from Trump in those five big battlegrounds. Harris won about three in five white women with a college degree, a big improvement from what the exit polls recorded in 2020. But Trump offset that by improving at least slightly since 2020 among white voters without a college education, who tended to give Biden especially low marks for his performance. Crucially for Trump, he retained overwhelming support among white women without a college degree everywhere except Wisconsin, where he split them evenly. Democrats had hoped those women might abandon him over abortion rights and a general revulsion to his demeaning language about women. Because those blue-collar white women appeared on track to provide Trump as big a margin as they did in 2016 and 2020, the national exit polls showed Trump winning most white women against Harris—just as he did against Biden and Clinton. That will likely be a subject of intense frustration and debate among Democrats in the weeks ahead, whether or not Trump wins the race.

Overall, the abortion issue benefited Harris substantially, but not as much as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates who swept Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. In that election, the exit polls found that Democrats Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania won more than four-fifths of voters who said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances; in Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers won three-fourths of them. But this time—with the economy weighing on those voters—Harris won only about two-thirds of those pro-choice voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. That slight shift might prove decisive. (In the national exit poll, Trump won almost three in 10  voters who said abortion should be legal all or most of the time; one-fourth of women who supported legal abortion backed Trump.)

Because abortion rights did not give her as much of a lift as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2022, Harris did not appear on track to expand on Biden’s margins in many of the big suburban counties key to the modern Democratic coalition. She looked to be roughly matching Biden’s huge advantages in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia. But she did not narrow the roughly 3–2 deficit Biden faced in Waukesha County, outside Milwaukee, perhaps the biggest Republican-leaning white-collar suburb north of the Mason-Dixon line, as of midnight. In Oakland County, outside Detroit, Trump appeared on track to slightly narrow her margin, perhaps dealing a fatal blow to her chances.

In the well-educated county centered on Ann Arbor, Harris’s margin of victory seemed on track to decline from 2020, in what might be a reflection of youthful discontent over the support she and Biden have provided for Israel’s war in Gaza. In Dane County, Wisconsin, centered on Madison, she appeared in line to match only Biden’s 2020 share and not the even higher number Evers reached in 2022. Overall, in several of the suburban counties across the Blue Wall states, Harris appeared on track to finish closer to Hillary Clinton’s margins in 2016, when she lost these states, than Biden’s in 2020, when he won them.

The failure to expand on Biden’s performance in suburban areas left Harris vulnerable to what I’ve called Trump’s pincer movement against her.

As in both of his earlier races, he posted towering numbers in rural areas and small towns. Trump posted his usual imposing advantages in the blue-collar suburbs around Pittsburgh, and appeared to gain dramatically in the mostly blue-collar counties including and around Green Bay.

From the other direction, he appeared to further narrow the traditional Democratic margins in heavily minority central cities. That was particularly evident in Philadelphia. Exit polls showed Trump slightly improving among Black voters in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; that contributed to his win in North Carolina and gave him gains that placed him on the brink of flipping Wisconsin and Michigan as of midnight. In the national exit poll, Harris basically matched Biden’s vote share among white voters overall—but she fell slightly among Black voters and more substantially among Hispanic voters.

Almost lost in the ominous news for Democrats from the battleground states was the possibility that Harris would win the national popular vote, even if Trump also appeared likely to improve on his showings on that front from 2016 and 2020. If Harris did win the national popular vote, it would mark the eighth time in the past nine presidential elections that Democrats have done so—something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system, in 1828.

Yet even if Democrats achieved that historic feat, they faced the bracing prospect that Republicans could win unified control of the House, the Senate, and the White House while losing the national popular vote. Until the 21st century, that had happened only once in American history, in 1888; if it happens again this year, it would mark the third time in this century that Republicans will have won complete control of Washington while losing the popular vote.

Trump isn’t likely to view losing the national popular vote, if he does, for a third time (something only William Jennings Bryan had previously done) as a caution light. If anything, he will likely view the prospect that he could win the decisive battleground states by bigger margins than he did in 2016 and gain among voters of color as a signal to aggressively pursue the combative agenda he laid out this year. That includes plans for massive new tariffs, the largest deportation program in U.S. history, a purge of the civil service, and the use of the military against what he calls “the enemy from within.” Unless something changes dramatically in the final counts from the decisive states, American voters will have chosen, once again, to leap into that murky unknown.

The biggest risk our democracy faces this election is whether the votes cast will even matter. Any number of scenarios could play out. Ballots could be (and in fact have already been) lit on fire, or the courts could intervene to throw out votes. But the possibility we should fear the most is the one we still have a chance to prevent: the United States Congress overturning the election.

Donald Trump in 2020 and early 2021 tried to use Congress to do just this, but he also tried so much else that remembering the details is hard. The details, however, are important. Trump’s desperation after losing the election led him to push to disallow votes everywhere he could—browbeating state legislatures, local election boards, state courts, federal courts, and ultimately the U.S. Congress on January 6. It all failed spectacularly, but that was an amateur effort, and one that would have required near-perfect execution to succeed. Joe Biden had won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, meaning that Trump would have had to overturn the results in several states to become president.

This time, the election results might be closer. A tight margin would allow Trump to play in all of the same fora as last time, and now with people who have spent years developing the art of the steal. Even if Trump loses every court case, every attempt to persuade a state governor or state legislature to toss out the popular vote, and every maneuver to try to pressure state and local officials, he may yet use Congress as a backup plan.

[Tyler Austin Harper: Of course Black men are drifting toward Trump]

This is, I suspect, the “big secret” Trump mentioned this week, with a grin, to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. It’s a secret only because Trump wants to keep it in his back pocket, but it may be quite similar to what he attempted last time. Under laws passed by Congress, including the Electoral Count Act and the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, here’s what is supposed to happen:

On January 6, 2025, the House and Senate are to assemble to watch as electoral votes from each state are opened and counted. If a member of Congress has an objection to the vote from any particular state, the objection must be signed by at least 20 percent of the members of both chambers for it to be taken up. Only two categories of objections are permissible: if a state’s electors were not “lawfully certified” (such as if a state certified a fake slate of electors), or if an elector’s vote for a candidate was not “regularly given” (such as if the electors were bribed, voted for an ineligible candidate, or voted in the wrong manner). Otherwise, Congress is to treat a governor’s certification of a slate as “conclusive.” If the 20 percent threshold is met in both chambers, the issue will be debated for up to two hours. Afterward, both the House and the Senate must vote. The objection is sustained if a simple majority supports it in both chambers. If a simple majority in both chambers agrees with an objection to the appointment of a state’s electors as not “lawfully certified,” then that state is excluded from the Electoral College, altering the denominator in the College. (If a particular elector is struck under the “regularly given” provision, by contrast, the denominator does not change.) This means that the number of votes needed to win in the Electoral College drops accordingly when a state’s electors are struck for not being “lawfully certified.” For example, if an objection to Pennsylvania’s slate were sustained, the state’s 19 electoral votes would be eliminated, and winning the presidency would take 260 electoral votes instead of 270.

Congress’s 2022 Reform Act was intended to reduce opportunities for mischief, but even so, mischief may yet emerge. For example, what does “lawfully certified” mean? If Trump claims that undocumented immigrants voted in a state, does that mean the state’s vote was not “lawfully certified”? What about claims that absentee ballots were wrongly counted? Or that ballots arrived late?

The answer to all of these is an unequivocal no. Lawfully certified has long had a much more precise and technical meaning about procedure—simply whether the state’s governor has certified the vote. That narrowness has led some to say that there is nothing to fear, especially because Congress has tightened the rules in the 2022 act and made it harder for Congress to second-guess election results. I very much hope that’s right. It should be right. It is right. But we are living in a world where the whole enterprise and meaning of law is contested, and where politicians stretch laws past their breaking point. James Madison warned us about this in The Federalist Papers, calling law a mere “parchment barrier.” This time, the parchment may not hold.

Here’s how the nightmare scenario could play out. Imagine the election puts Kamala Harris in the lead, with 277 to Trump’s 261 votes. Further imagine that part of that lead comes from Pennsylvania. And then imagine that Pennsylvania decides to count mail-in ballots that are missing the required handwritten date on the envelope. Trump then challenges that practice, claiming that the Pennsylvania legislature has set rules that forbid counting those ballots. He goes through the Pennsylvania courts, all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which rejects his challenge and allows the ballots to be counted. Trump then goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also rejects his challenge.

Although that should be the end of the madness, it may not be. On January 6, one-fifth of the House and one-fifth of the Senate can claim that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acted improperly by counting these ballots, in defiance of state law. They can assert that they have the right to interpret the law independently, and that Pennsylvania has acted lawlessly. The good news here is that Congress in 2022 foreclosed that independent congressional-determination route, and said that court decisions are binding on Congress when it acts on January 6. But there is room for tendentious arguments about what Congress actually legislated, and some (including Senator Ted Cruz) have already said they believe that the 2022 act is unconstitutional. So despite Congress’s very strong 2022 efforts in this regard, an unprincipled House and Senate could try to assert these powers. The assertion of such powers would be bogus, but a debate on the floor would then ensue, and if a raw majority of the House and Senate sustain the objection—no matter how specious it is—Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes would be struck, leaving 258 electoral votes for Harris and 260 for Trump. Trump would then be declared the president.

Such a decision could and should be contested in court, and challenged all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the challenge should win. Congress would be defying the parts of the 2022 law that tightly restricted the types of objections, as well as provisions in the law that make court determinations conclusive on Congress. The question is, if Congress acts lawlessly, what will the Supreme Court do about it? Some are pointing to the Court’s recent decision to permit Virginia to strike 1,600 individuals from the voting rolls as evidence of its politicization, but defenders of the Court can point to the fact that it stayed out of the mischief in 2020, with hopes that it will act responsibly again in this go-round. The situations are, however, different. The 2020 request was on the part of the mischief makers, asking for the Court to affirmatively intervene in Trump’s favor—something the Court was apparently loath to do. This time, nonintervention favors Trump. The Court can say it is acting neutrally by not hearing the case and, by doing so, effectively hand the presidency to Trump in defiance of the will of the people.

[Read: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

The Supreme Court, of course, is fully capable of realizing the difference between affirmatively intervening in 2020 (where it was being asked to facilitate Trump’s theft of the election) and 2024 (where it would be asked to prevent such a thing). A decision to stay out in the face of congressional lawlessness should be unthinkable. And let us hope that it is (recall the Court just last year in Moore v. Harper rejected, by a 6–3 vote, a Republican Party theory that would have given it an immense advantage in federal elections). But just in case, one important thing must be done to prevent this nightmare from unfolding: vote.

If as a result of the vote on November 5, Harris claims a decisive victory in the Electoral College, then there is little to fear, much as Trump might try to fight it. And even if the Electoral College is close, remember that Americans also vote for the House and the Senate on November 5. And the new House and Senate, not the existing ones, will make all of the decisions outlined above on January 6, 2025. If the Democrats control the House, or hold the Senate, this divided government will prevent the nightmare scenario from coming to fruition. And even if the Republicans control both houses in 2025, electing people who will honor the language and purpose of the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act—which, again, was written to prevent this scenario—will put an end to the madness.

So when you vote, vote for candidates who will ensure that the will of the people will govern. James Madison in “Federalist No. 55” reminds us that the “degree of depravity in mankind … requires a certain degree of … distrust,” but “there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” Republican government, Madison went on, depends on the latter. Let us pray that those qualities lead Americans to the polls on Tuesday and, once there, that they vote to protect our democracy.