Science of Reading or Lucy Calkins? How the nationwide literacy debate is playing out in Lexington

By the time her kids get through middle school, Jennifer Elverum will have spent more than $500,000 teaching them to read. Two of the Lexington resident’s children have dyslexia, a learning disability that makes it difficult to read, write, and spell. 

Her children couldn’t pick up the skill at the same pace as their classmates in Lexington’s public schools. Even with tutoring, one of her older children fell behind, so she enrolled her in a private school where she could get the instruction she needed. 

Elverum is one of many Lexington parents who are upset with the literacy curriculum taught in the town’s public schools. 

“My son is sitting in a classroom in a 30-minute block of independent reading with a beautiful book that he’s holding upside down because he doesn’t know how to read it, and it creates a level of stress, anxiety, and tension,” Elverum explained.

Massachusetts’ literacy rates dropped during the pandemic and have continued to move in the wrong direction. Barely 4 in 10 third-graders were proficient in English on the 2024 MCAS — down 14 percentage points from 2019. Low-income students and students of color are faring worse. In 2022, poor kids in Mississippi and Florida outperformed their peers in Massachusetts in reading, the Boston Globe reported.

About 70 percent of LPS third graders “met or exceeded expectations” in English on the 2025 MCAS.

Public schools across the country have long used “Units of Study,” a curriculum created by Lucy Calkins, to teach children how to read. The original Units of Study involved teachers giving a lesson on reading and then allowing students to choose books they gravitate toward. Students use the first letter of a word, pictures, and context (which is referred to as cueing) to figure out what the words on the page are and mean. Calkins’ method is meant to spark joy in reading by giving students choice. Lexington adopted Units of Study in 2005.

Many children have done well with that method, especially children who come from affluent families. But a 2020 report by a nonprofit stated Units of Study is “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

Children who have learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia; students from less affluent families; and students who entered school without already knowing how to read have struggled with Calkins’ learning style and often fall behind. 

Criticism of Calkins really took off when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Units of Study of failing poorer children. The reporter Emily Hanford noted how Calkins once wrote that children should practice learning letters at home by reading “the monogram letters on their bath towels.” Critics argued her methods were elitist — not all children have shelves full of books at home (let alone monogrammed bath towels) and parents who have time to sit and read with them every day. 

In the past decade, as programs like Units of Study have been falling out of favor, at least forty states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented policies promoting curricula based on what’s known as “Science of Reading.”

Science of Reading is a body of research that shows how humans learn to read and write. The research shows that skills such as phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension must be explicitly and systematically taught — in a way that is far less laissez-faire than Units of Study. Phonics is a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system — cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” for example.

Massachusetts is one of the few states that has not passed legislation that promotes Science of Reading. 

Lexington Public Schools Superintendent Julie Hackett says she’s skeptical of government intervention in public school curricula.

“I don’t think the government should be involved in curriculum and instruction — period. It is a dangerous overreach that is not good for schools or for democracy, quite frankly,” she said. “Curriculum design is complex and should be left to educators.”

A letter to Gov. Maura Healey, which was signed by more than 300 teachers and administrators — including Hackett and about 70 other Lexington educators — warned against a “one-size-fits-all approach to literacy instruction.” 

Lexington has implemented more phonics in its curriculum, however. The district added a phonics lesson under the curricula “Fundations” and “Heggerty” to its existing Calkins-style curriculum for kindergarten, first, and second graders in 2022. Every day, those students have a 30- to 45-minute phonics lesson in addition to the Units of Study lesson the district has long taught.

Elverum argued that isn’t enough. 

“It’s only a small percentage of their ELA block that they’re spending doing phonics and then the other block they’re spending in that Lucy Calkins balanced literacy methodology where they’re not practicing the concepts that they learned during their phonics lesson, so they’re never developing those phonics to mastery,” Elverum said. 

Hackett also shared her opinion with the Globe.

“Reading is a complicated endeavor, and children accomplish it in various ways. They learn differently and have different learning trajectories. They bring their culture, background, and language knowledge into the reading experience, integrating all this with the letters and sounds they try to master,” Hackett and Lesley University professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige wrote.

Critics of Science of Reading argue the method takes choice away from teachers and students, and that the books with which students learn to read are boring and don’t foster the same joy in reading that Units of Study does.

Elverum disagrees. “My kids love it, they’re learning how to decode a word and when they can, it opens their world to everything, to reading street signs, and the joy of reading comes with knowing how to do it,” she said.

Regardless, Lexington is giving new curricula a chance this year. The district is piloting three different reading curricula in eighteen elementary classrooms. Right now, those students are trying “Arts and Letters” and in November, they’ll try “EL.” Both of those curricula are based in Science of Reading research. In January, they’ll test run a Calkins-style “Revised Units of Study” curriculum, which is an updated version of Units of Study that incorporates phonics. 

Elverum questioned why the district would trial another Calkins-style curriculum since research shows her method does not work for all students. The district has only made “small investments” into Revised Units of Study (though it has long used Units of Study) and wants to give the whole curriculum a chance, Hackett explained. 

Lexington’s Literacy Working Group, which was created over the summer to evaluate how literacy is taught in Lexington’s elementary schools, will keep a close eye on how the pilot programs go. The group is led by Sara Calleja, Lexington’s director of elementary literacy, and consists of School Committee members Larry Freeman and Sarah Carter, two principals, an assistant principal, teachers from across the district, literacy coaches, and special education teachers, among others. 

“We’re gonna be going in and doing literally 100 different observations of these different curricula and really trying to figure out what we need to do, and if the feedback we get from parents, teachers, and administrators is that we need more phonics, then we will figure out a way to implement that,” Carter told the Observer. 

Elverum isn’t the only Lexington parent who is fed up with the district’s (and the state’s) standard for teaching literacy. A group called Lex4Literacy, of which Elverum is a member, went to the State House earlier this month to advocate in favor of identical senate and house bills that call for the state to promote high-quality comprehensive literacy in public schools. 

Arts and Letters and EL are both considered high-quality comprehensive literacy programs. Hackett is skeptical of those programs because she said there is “no evidence of effectiveness (on them) available yet.”

Measuring the effectiveness of literacy curricula is difficult across the board. Mississippi is often cited as an example of a school system that experienced significant improvement after introducing a new reading curricula — but that was part of a wide array of changes implemented at the same time. There are often multiple variables in play which makes it difficult to attribute changing test scores to literacy curricula alone.

Regardless, changes could come to Lexington’s reading curriculum next year. After students are done piloting the third curriculum in the spring of 2026, the Literacy Working Group will evaluate how the students did and recommend which curriculum Hackett should implement next year.

“Adopting new curricula is a big decision that requires a thoughtful approach and lots of input, especially from our teachers,” Hackett said. “I don’t know where we’ll land at the end of the pilot, but I am excited about the process and eager to learn more.”