Troy schools spent $14k on ‘whole language’ literacy conference

Troy Public Schools spent more than $14,000 on registration fees and airfare for a 2024 reading conference hosted by a consultant whose literacy curriculum is widely criticized in academia as ineffective, according to records obtained by Michigan Capitol Confidential.

The district sent eight people to the July 2024 event, New Frontiers in Reading and Writing Institute in New Hampshire, which was organized by the Mossflower Reading and Writing Project.

“This work aligns with our curriculum goals within our District Improvement goals and is in alignment with the work of our teaching and learning team,” according to a June 26 email. The names of the sender and recipients are redacted in the documents provided to CapCon in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

The total cost of airfare charged to the district for seven of the eight district employees was $6,068.65. One other employee booked his or her own flight, but it is unknown how much that ticket cost.

The conference fee was $1,000 per person in 2024. An upcoming conference with the same name is posted on Mossflower’s website. The site states that lodging is not included in the cost, and the company’s website refers attendees to nearby hotels.

The FOIA response did not include receipts for lodging associated with the conference.

The district did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The once widely used Mossflower curriculum has come under criticism nationwide from education experts.

Mossflower founding director Lucy Calkins is a tenured professor at The Teachers College at Columbia University. Calkins published her Units of Study in Reading curriculum in 2003 and founded Columbia’s Teachers Reading and Writing Project. The curriculum was taught by more than 67,000 elementary schools, according to a 2022 New York Times article.

In this decade, however, educators and parents have rejected the “balanced literacy” or “whole language” method, citing years of research showing that phonics is a more effective way to teach children to read and write.

Columbia dissolved The Teachers Reading and Writing Project in 2023.

Mossflower did not provide a comment.

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, memorably described the closure of the Teachers Reading and Writing project as a divorce for the “controversial literacy guru and her cash-cow publishing and consulting empire” in a 2023 New York Post article.

“That seems like an unusually large sum for a district of its size,” Pondiscio told CapCon in response to an email for comment about the district's spending on the Mossflower event. “But more than the cost, parents and taxpayers would be well within their rights to question why the district has adopted and is implementing a literacy program whose methods and results have come under serious scrutiny nationwide.”

In the 2014-15 school year, when Troy began using the Mossflower method in classrooms, 84.6% of the district’s third graders were proficient or advanced in English Language Arts. By the 2023-24 academic year, the percentage of third graders proficient or advanced in English had fallen to 63.2%.

The district paid Mossflower $173,000 in 2023 and 2024 for literacy consulting, CapCon reported in August 2024.