For parents like Caitlin Boyle, the public schools of Fort Mill, South Carolina, offer an appealing alternative to the much larger school system just across the state line. It’s a small district with high test scores and low poverty.
Boyle says her family moved from Mecklenburg County several years ago, attracted by Fort Mill’s schools. But now she’s leading a push to get the Fort Mill School District to abandon what she calls discredited reading materials and techniques.
“I just always assumed that the district would, of course, be using the best reading program for my child,” said Boyle, who says she recently learned that wasn’t true.
The district of almost 18,000 students is living out the latest twist in America’s long-running struggle over how to teach reading.
“This debate has gone on for many, many, many years. You can go all the way back to the phonics lessons, even back 20, 30 years ago when I was still in school,” said Joe Burke, chief communication officer for Fort Mill Schools.
The latest round is tangled up in culture wars — but also fueled by an American Public Media reporter’s deep dive into the topic. Some in Fort Mill say it’s time to follow the lead of North Carolina and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools when it comes to reading.
Boyle illustrates the complexity of the debate. She’s vice chair of the York County chapter of Moms For Liberty, a national group that formed soon after COVID-19 closed schools. Mask mandates were one of the first flash points for the parental rights group, and Boyle says she pulled her son out of Fort Mill schools when South Carolina required students to wear masks. She says the way he was taught to read there has caused ongoing struggles with reading and spelling.
Fort Mill schools and the local Moms for Liberty chapter have been through other “culture war” clashes as well, such as critical race theory and books that some parents deem inappropriate.
But where most culture wars themes push emotional hot buttons, the reading critiques that Boyle and others have presented at recent school board meetings tend to be academic. They talk about meta-analysis of data, and the reading rope model and a host of curriculum and training vendors.
Reading podcast sparked debate
Burke says the Fort Mill district is aware of the complex and nuanced research related to reading, and uses it to tailor reading instruction to each child’s needs. The district uses an approach called balanced literacy, which includes some of the material that Boyle and other parents oppose, but also many of the techniques they support.
Much of the recent debate is driven by “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong,” a four-hour podcast from American Public Media reporter Emily Hanford. It came out just a few months ago.
“The podcast ‘Sold A Story’ was my introduction to balanced literacy and my ‘Aha!’ moment. Because before now I kept wondering why, why is my child having a hard time reading?” Fort Mill parent Stephanie Sherrill told the school board earlier this month.
Sherrill, who is not a member of Moms for Liberty, says she had wondered if her daughter had a reading disability. After listening to the podcast, she says she realized that “they’re not teaching (children) how to read. They’re teaching memorization and guessing the context based on other words and that doesn’t work for her, and it doesn’t work for nearly half of the students in her fourth-grade classroom who are all struggling.”
“Sold a Story” traces America’s reading struggles back to research done with New Zealand schoolchildren in the 1960s. That research, Hanford reports, was later proven to be wrong. But by then it had morphed into a wildly popular approach to reading instruction, one that encourages children to explore reading freely and infer the meaning of written words rather than learning to sound them out.
The case against Calkins and cueing
One of the biggest proponents of that approach is an American professor named Lucy Calkins. She created workshops and material for educators that encourage students to use a strategy called cueing. Instead of phonetically sounding out a word, students are told to figure out the meaning by looking at pictures and the first letter of the word.
Calkins herself acknowledged in “Sold a Story” that cueing doesn't work well for many students, and is revising her material.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools recently rejected the cueing strategy after using it for several years. “This is a practice that the research has indicated that we must abandon. Your child will not be taught to check pictures to identify words or make guesses based on the first letter they see. We want our students to look at every letter in the words, apply phonics knowledge, and sound words out!” the district said in a “Science of Reading” document posted last year.
South Carolina state Sen. Michael Johnson is married to a Fort Mill teacher. He says he’s talked to several local educators and heard mixed reviews.
“Those range from ‘The Lucy Calkins system works’ to ‘The Lucy Calkins system, you can’t teach it, you gotta outlaw it all over South Carolina,’ ” he said.
Johnson says he’d like to see South Carolina take a stronger hand in limiting use of those materials — and follow the lead of states like North Carolina and Mississippi, which require teachers to receive extensive training in what’s been dubbed the science of reading.
“We’re trying to move in some of the directions that we’ve seen our neighboring states and other states go to,” he said.
Two years ago, North Carolina’s General Assembly earmarked $50 million to put all elementary school teachers through a program called LETRS, which is short for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling. Johnson says South Carolina needs to be willing to put up some big money as well.
“If you’re going to move in that direction, what you have to do is spend a lot of money on training. You just can’t mandate it and hope that they’ll go train themselves,” Johnson said.
He said that’s not likely to happen this year.
A big bill to see the bills
“Balanced literacy” and “science of reading” are both terms that encompass broad schools of thought and research, with various interpretations and lots of companies marketing related products.
Burke, the spokesman for Fort Mill schools, said his district selects material from a menu of state-approved products.
“We actually began adding in pieces of other programs like the science of reading before this debate really got going,” he said.
Burke says district leaders don’t see a need to ban any of the options, including the Lucy Calkins material.
Stephanie Foltz is a former reading specialist with two children in Fort Mill schools, and a member of Moms for Liberty. She says a true balanced literacy program should include all of the additional support that would help children learn to read, but the Lucy Calkins material seems to be displacing that type of instruction.
Foltz, Boyle and other parents critical of the Calkins approach filed a request for invoices dating back to 2016 to see how much the district is spending on that material. They were told it would cost $2,354.82, with $588.70 due upfront before the district would begin pulling the records. They followed up with scaled-back requests, but still faced fees ranging from about $200 to $600.
Burke says South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act allows fees to cover the cost of public record requests.
“The district has chosen to do this when a request is broad enough in scope to require significant staff hours or materials such as copies to complete,” he said.
Performing well or not?
Burke says Fort Mill’s reading data shows that “we perform very well with all the stuff that we’re currently using.”
Overall, almost 74% of all elementary students earned grade-level scores or higher on last year’s state exams. But across the country, reading scores are linked to demographics. Simply put, students who arrive with advantages from home are far more likely to pass reading tests.
The Fort Mill school district has the lowest poverty level of any district in South Carolina, according to the state’s 2022 poverty index.
“Parents in this district, they have every life circumstance working in their favor to have their kids reading going into kindergarten,” said Boyle, who argues that Fort Mill shouldn’t be smug about pass rates that largely reflect family advantages.
Like most districts in America, Fort Mill also has racial discrepancies in reading scores. The white students who make up the majority of the district had a 77% pass rate on elementary school reading exams last year, compared with 48% of Black students.
Nichell Newton is a former CMS educator who has two children in Fort Mill schools and has run twice for the school board there. She’s Black, and she says the biggest problems with reading are in the town’s historically Black Paradise neighborhood.
Newton isn’t ready to declare allegiance with Moms For Liberty, but she agrees that Fort Mill’s teachers need more science of reading training.
“It is not good, especially if we’re calling ourselves the No. 1 school district,” she said. “We’ve got to do better.”
Burke says that if the state requires changes, Fort Mill will comply.
Until then, debate over the value of the Lucy Calkins reading lessons is likely to continue. There are two broad points of agreement: Burke and the parents all say reading should not be a “one size fits all” approach. And they all praise the work of local teachers, even if they clash over how those teachers are being trained and what materials they’re given to work with.