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Teaching Lucy

In the December 2024 issue, Helen Lewis wrote about how one woman became the scapegoat for America’s literacy crisis.

A heartfelt thank-you to Helen Lewis for her reporting on Lucy Calkins and the most recent phase of the “reading wars.” As a career English teacher whose mother was also a career English teacher, I have had a front-row seat to the reading wars for decades. Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast was particularly frustrating to me for its oversimplification of Calkins’s reading workshop and its all-too-typical sidelining of teachers’ voices. Wise educators have known for a very long time that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to reading instruction; effective teachers combine phonics with other strategies that help develop a student’s identity as a reader. It is shocking to none of us that the solution is “both, and” and not “either/or.” Lewis’s article was a breath of fresh air. Calkins is by no means flawless, but her Units of Study remain some of the most comprehensive and useful language-arts curricula out there in a sea of flashy, colorful nonsense.

Trish Manwaring
San Rafael, Calif.

Helen Lewis’s interesting article on Lucy Calkins sadly missed some of the substance behind the “phonics”–versus–“whole language” debate. Beginning-reading teachers immediately encounter a reality Lewis doesn’t mention: Although many other languages are highly phonetic, English is not, so an approach that relies mostly on teaching the sounds of letters can leave children confused and frustrated.

In fact, some of the most common English words are nonphonetic. For example, the words to and do do not rhyme with so or go. One and gone don’t rhyme either. And why are to, too, and two all pronounced the same? Only context and experience with real texts can help readers learn which pronunciation is appropriate.

Programs that rely mostly on phonics impose reading materials on children that tend to exclude nonphonetic words in order to make the text “decodable.” That sounds great in theory, but nonphonetic words are so common in English that when you leave them out, the resulting texts are nonsensical. Many sound so stupid that they can turn kids off from reading.

This is what Calkins was trying to avoid. This inherent challenge in teaching reading in English is studiously ignored by the Sold a Story podcast. The nature of the English language makes a balanced approach combining phonics and normal texts the most sensible strategy for teaching reading.

Nick Estes
Albuquerque, N.M.

When I was in grad school at Columbia’s Teachers College, I worked as a student teacher at P.S. 87 in Manhattan, a so-called Lucy school. I was placed in a kindergarten class and a fourth-grade class. It was apparent to me that a significant number of children were not benefiting from the curricula and needed phonics to launch them into reading. To have continued with Calkins’s method of instruction alone would have been ludicrous. You have to tailor your technique to the needs of each student.

Although some students may not need phonics instruction and may even be bored by it, others need it to succeed academically. Teachers should have the independence to make decisions about which children will benefit from which type of instruction and how much instruction they will need. It will vary from student to student—and teachers and supervisors need to be trained to recognize that and make the appropriate educational decisions.

Laurie Spear
New York, N.Y.

I began my teaching career in 1976. I was a kindergarten teacher, trained well in my California district, and I’ve watched the conflicts over reading and writing instruction ever since. At some point in my teaching journey, I learned about Lucy Calkins. I loved what she had to say. I know two things are true: Lucy Calkins has been a great contributor to the knowledge of how to teach literacy, and many of us have asked too much of her. Teachers cannot take a blanket approach to teaching literacy. Calkins provided many good things over her long career, even if she did not provide everything, and for that I am grateful. Educators and administrators should be learners, too, who understand the complexity of teaching reading. Shame on those who left Calkins hanging out to dry.

Wendy Zacuto
Playa Vista, Calif.

I appreciated Helen Lewis’s article about Lucy Calkins because it added some much-needed nuance to the conversation about reading instruction in American schools. I am a former teacher, and I attended Lucy Calkins’s trainings at Columbia. But I’ve learned a lot since then.

Our education system suffers from several problems that have made it possible for flawed instructional methods to achieve wide reach. Many states and districts push teachers to adopt curricular programs with “fidelity”—that is, without ever questioning them. Even in schools where teachers have a little more freedom, they’re rarely given the tools or time to evaluate the quality of instructional methods themselves. I remember being handed Calkins’s reading curriculum in my third year of teaching, and I wondered about the research that undergirded its methods. But the curriculum books didn’t provide much information. I didn’t know where else to look, and even if I had known where to find the facts, I didn’t have time to do research on my own, because I had just three days to set up my new classroom.

Ask any veteran educator, and they will tell you that our school systems have a knack for repeating the same mistakes. I worry that the new “science of reading” movement is being co-opted by curriculum publishers, professional-development providers, and “experts” who are seeking profits by promoting a silver bullet—just as they have with other en vogue methods in the past. My kids’ school district just adopted a new curriculum that allegedly reflects the “science of reading,” but it seems like the same type of mediocre curricula that have been peddled to big school systems for decades.

If we really want research-based instruction in our schools, we have to be humble about what we know and don’t know about effective reading instruction. We have to be wary of anyone pushing quick fixes, and we need to teach teachers how to be critical consumers of research and users of curricula. Educators can’t do this alone: We need more nuanced reporting like Lewis’s so that all of us—educators, parents, citizens—can better understand the problems we face and how we might solve them.

Jennie Herriot-Hatfield
San Francisco, Calif.

Helen Lewis replies:

I loved reading these responses, because the spread of opinions echoed what I heard while doing my reporting: that people with significant expertise can come to wildly divergent conclusions about the roots of America’s “reading crisis.” What first attracted me to this story was the idea that bad outcomes can happen without anyone involved having bad intentions. Debates over curricula make sense only in the wider context of American education— ever-changing standards, racial and class disparities, a sometimes chaotic bureaucracy, politicized decisions at the state level. Also, Nick Estes is entirely right to point out that English is very irregular. For a while, Finland’s strong performance in reading was attributed partly to its strongly phonetic language. But in the past few years, that country’s reading scores have fallen precipitously—and no one can really say what’s changed. A good reminder that this subject demands caution and humility.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Stuck In Place,” Yoni Appelbaum explores why Americans, once the most mobile people on the planet, have become less and less apt to move to new homes in new places over the past 50 years. The decline in geographic mobility, he argues, is the most important social change of the past half century, shaping our politics, our culture, and how we relate to one another. For our cover image, the artist Javier Jaén designed an abandoned moving truck resting on concrete blocks, symbolizing a nation that has stopped moving to seek new opportunities.

— Liz Hart, Art Director

Corrections

“The Loyalist” originally stated that Kash Patel did not include the events of October 30, 2020, in his book. In fact, Patel did include a brief narrative of events for that day. “Modi’s Failure” originally stated that Narendra Modi was formerly the governor of Gujarat. In fact, Modi was chief minister.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

The Indian prime minister praised Trump while angling to avoid the steep 'reciprocal' tariffs the US president plans.

With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.

But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.

Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power. Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Crucially, this abuse of the state’s power does not require upending the Constitution. Competitive autocracies usually begin by capturing the referees: replacing professional civil servants and policy specialists with loyalists in key public agencies, particularly those that investigate or prosecute wrongdoing, adjudicate disputes, or regulate economic life. Elected autocrats such as Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Nayib Bukele all purged public prosecutors’ offices, intelligence agencies, tax authorities, electoral authorities, media regulatory bodies, courts, and other state institutions and packed them with loyalists. Trump is not hiding his efforts to do the same. He has thus far fired (or declared his intention to fire, leading to their resignation) the FBI director, the IRS commissioner, EEOC commissioners, the National Labor Relations Board chair, and other nominally independent officials; reissued a renamed Schedule F, which strips firing protections from huge swaths of the civil service; expanded hiring authorities that make it easier to fill public positions with allies; purged more than a dozen inspectors general in apparent violation of the law; and even ordered civil servants to inform on one another.

[Read: The spies are shown the door]

Once state agencies are packed with loyalists, they may be deployed to investigate and prosecute rivals and critics, including politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, influential CEOs, and administrators of elite universities. In the United States, this may be done via the Justice Department and the FBI, the IRS, congressional investigations, and other public agencies responsible for regulatory oversight and compliance. It may also be done via defamation or other private lawsuits.

The administration doesn’t have to jail its opponents to bully, harm, and ultimately intimidate them into submission. Indeed, because U.S. courts remain independent, few targets of selective prosecution are likely to be convicted and imprisoned. But mere investigations are a form of harassment. Targets of selective investigation or prosecution will be forced to devote considerable time, energy, and resources to defending themselves; they will spend their savings on lawyers; their lives will be disrupted; their professional careers will be sidetracked and their reputations damaged. At minimum, they and their families will suffer months and perhaps years of anxiety and sleepless nights.

Plus, the administration need not target all critics. A few high-profile attacks, such as a case against Liz Cheney, a prominent media outlet, or selective regulatory retaliation against a major company, may serve as an effective deterrent against future opposition.

Competitive-authoritarian governments further subvert democracy by shielding those who engage in criminal or antidemocratic behavior through captured referees and other impunity mechanisms. Trump’s decision to pardon violent January 6 insurrectionists and purge prosecutors who were involved in those cases, for example, sends a strong signal that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under the new administration (indeed, that’s how many pardon recipients are interpreting the pardons). Likewise, a loyalist Justice Department and FBI could disregard acts of political violence such as attacks on (or threats against) campaign workers, election officials, journalists, politicians, activists, protesters, or voters.

[Read: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

They could also decline to investigate or prosecute officials who work to manipulate or even steal elections. This may appear far-fetched, but it is precisely what enabled the consolidation of authoritarian rule in the Jim Crow South. Protected by local (and often federal) authorities in the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist groups used violent terror and election fraud to consolidate power and disenfranchise African Americans across the region.

Finally, state institutions may be used to co-opt business, media, and other influential societal actors. When regulatory bodies and other public agencies are politicized, government officials can use decisions regarding things such as mergers and acquisitions, licenses, waivers, government contracts, and tax-exempt status to reward or punish parties depending on their political alignment. Business leaders, media companies, universities, foundations, and other organizations have a lot at stake when government officials make decisions on tariff waivers, regulatory enforcement, tax-exempt status, and government contracts and concessions. If they believe that those decisions are made on political, rather than technical, grounds, many of them will modify their behavior accordingly.

Thus, if business leaders come to the conclusion that funding opposition candidates or independent media is financially risky, or that remaining silent rather than criticizing the administration is more profitable, they will change their behavior. Several of the country’s wealthiest individuals and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Disney, already appear to be adjusting in that way.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

Democracy requires robust opposition. Opposition parties and civil-society groups cannot function without money and without a large and replenishable pool of talented politicians, lawyers, journalists, and entrepreneurs.

But using the state’s power against critics will likely deter many of them, depleting that pool. Talented politicians may decide to retire early rather than face an unfounded investigation. Donors may decide that the risk of contributing to Democratic candidates or funding “controversial” civil-rights or pro-democracy organizations is not worth it. Media outlets may downsize their investigatory teams, let go of their most aggressive editors and reporters, and decline to renew their most outspoken columnists. Up-and-coming journalists may steer clear of politics, opting instead to write about sports or culture. And university leaders may crack down on campus protest, remove or isolate activist professors, and decline to speak out on issues of national importance.

Civil society therefore faces a crucial collective-action problem. Individual politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents act rationally and do what seems best for their organizations. They work to protect their shareholders’ interests and stave off debilitating investigations or lawsuits. But such isolated acts of self-preservation have collective costs; as individual players retreat to the sidelines, the opposition weakens.

Some of these costs will be invisible. The public can observe when players sideline themselves: congressional retirements, university presidents’ resignations, the ceasing of campaign contributions, the softening of editorial lines. But we can’t see the opposition that never materializes—the potential critics, activists, and leaders who are deterred from getting in the game. How many young lawyers will decide to remain at a law firm instead of running for office? How many talented young writers will steer clear of journalism? How many potential whistleblowers will decide not to speak out? How many citizens will decide not to sign that public letter, join that protest, or make that campaign contribution?

Democracy is not yet lost. The Trump administration will be politically vulnerable. Unlike successful elected authoritarians such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, Trump lacks broad popular support. His approval rating has never surpassed 50 percent, and incompetence, overreach, and unpopular policies will almost certainly dampen public support for the new administration. An autocratic president with an approval rating below 50 percent is still dangerous, but far less so than one with 80 percent support. The new administration’s political weakness will open up opportunities for opposition in the courtroom, on the streets, and at the ballot box.

Still, the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives. It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.