My impression, albeit from someone who was only vaguely aware of this issue until Emily Hanford's influential podcast Sold a Story, is that "balanced literacy"

My impression, albeit from someone who was only vaguely aware of this issue until Emily Hanford's influential podcast Sold a Story, is that "balanced literacy" is a reasonable-sounding concept that has been so widely used as to become almost meaningless, and, in particular, that there was not much balance in Calkin's method. This opinion is undoubtedly influenced by my skepticism over the reasons offered for substituting exercises like guessing the word for those involving "sounding out' a word. While practiced readers do use context clues a lot (probably too much, IMHO, to the detriment of critical analysis), it does not follow that guessing games will lead to basic competence. As for children stumbling over "spelling out" exercises, that is to be expected. They do the same with arithmetic, so should we be teaching them to guess the answer, and hope that, through doing so, they will infer how to get correct answers? And, as others have pointed out here, the premise that literacy comes as naturally as language itself seems to be empirically false and even self-contradictory (so why, then, do we need to be teaching it in schools?)