A first-of-its-kind lawsuit against three influential reading professors and their controversial literacy curricula has been dismissed, after a U.S. District Court declined to wade into the murky landscape of curriculum quality and education research.
Last year, a group of parents filed the lawsuit, which alleged that the professors and their publishers used “deceptive and fraudulent marketing” to sell their popular reading materials.
The case, brought by two parents from separate families in Massachusetts, centers on two sets of reading programs, one created by Lucy Calkins, an education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the other by reading researchers Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, of Lesley University and The Ohio State University, respectively.
The parents argued that the creators, publishers, and promoters of the curricula—Calkins’ Units of Study for Teaching Reading and a suite of Fountas & Pinnell branded materials—violated consumer protection law in the state by making false claims about the research supporting their programs.
Publishers said that the programs were backed by research even though, the plaintiffs claimed, they omitted or diminished the role of phonics instruction, which decades of reading research has demonstrated is a key component of teaching young children how to decode print.
On Thursday, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts determined that the court could not grant a decision in the case, because it would require passing judgement on the quality of the reading programs in question—a task that the court said it is not equipped to perform.
Because the plaintiffs acknowledge that the authors of these programs have cited some research in support of their programs, “the allegation of misrepresentation is best understood as arising from some purported inadequacy in that research,” wrote Judge Richard G. Stearns, in an order granting the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case.
“The court cannot find defendants’ research inadequate … without delving into the merits of defendants’ approaches to literacy education,” he wrote.
In an emailed statement, Calkins said she was “thrilled” with the decision.
“The court rightly recognized that decisions about how best to teach reading should be made by educators,” she said. “I’m glad that the lawsuit has been dismissed so we can all turn our attention to the urgent work of teaching America’s children to read.”
Fountas and Pinnell did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Ben Elga, the executive director of Catalyst Law, a legal group representing families in the suit, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lawsuit alleged lack of phonics instruction
For decades, these three authors were leaders in the early reading field.
In 2019, at least 59 percent of all K-2 and special education teachers in the country were using either the Units of Study for Teaching Reading or Fountas & Pinnell intervention materials, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey.
But as the “science of reading” movement has gained steam, many reading researchers and some teacher professional organizations have critiqued some of the methods used in the Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell programs.
The materials instructed teachers to present students with multiple options for figuring out tricky words. When students came to a word they didn’t know how to read, they could try one of several options. They could attempt sounding the word out, using their phonics knowledge, but they could also rely on the pictures on the page, the context of the story, or the syntax of the sentence to make a guess about what the word might be.
Researchers have argued that this approach, called three-cueing, can direct students’ focus away from the letters, lowering the chances that they’ll apply their phonics skills, mapping the letter sounds to the word’s spelling. (Calkins removed cueing from her materials in 2022, though schools that purchased materials prior to that change may still use lessons that include the approach.)
In the original lawsuit, the defendants claimed that these curricula “sought to diminish and even exclude systematic and daily phonics instruction,” leading to poor academic outcomes for students.
The court’s disinclination to adjudicate the research backing the curricula, in some sense, reflects the split in the field over which evidence is most valuable for making decisions about how to teach.
For years, education professors have used different methods and published in different journals than those who have studied the cognitive science about how children learn to read. That has been one factor in the longstanding “reading wars” that have pitted proponents of less-structured approaches to beginning reading—like Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell—against those who support an approach that centers systematic, explicit phonics.
