Lucy Calkins

Lucy Calkins is an American educator and professor at Teachers College, Columbia University who is best known for creating the Units of Study reading and writing curriculum.

Early life Calkins and her eight siblings were raised by their parents who were both doctors. Calkins used to babysit Donald Graves's children, which got her interested in reading and writing. She attended Williams College and graduated in 1973. She earned her doctorate in English education from NYU.

Career Calkins was a high school teacher in Connecticut. She left that job for an unpaid internship at a primary school in Oxfordshire to learn about the British education model, which was considered to be more effective at teaching reading than the United States.

In 1981, Calkins founded the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project institute in Columbia University's Teacher College.

In 1986, she published The Art of Teaching Writing before expanding her teaching philosophy to reading with the publication of The Art of Teaching Reading in 2001.

Calkins created the reading and writing curriculum, Units of Study, which is used in thousands of American schools. In the early 2000s, it became central to the New York City public school system's curriculum.

In 2021, The American Institute for Research published a peer-reviewed study which found that schools using Units of Study and Calkins' Reading and Writing Project approach outperformed those that did not.

Criticism

In October 2022, American Public Media debuted a podcast called Sold a Story, attacking Calkins’ work and the teaching of reading in American public schools. In 2024, The Atlantic covered the criticism of Calkins and reported on how she had become scapegoated for reading score declines.

In 2024, a lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging that “deceptive” and “defective” products from publisher Heinemann and three authors, including Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, made it harder for children to learn to read.

In 2025, the court dismissed the case, claiming it was not adequately equipped to assess the quality of evidence used to support Balanced Literacy.

Selected publications