A group of Massachusetts parents filed a novel consumer protection lawsuit against the publishers and creators of popular reading curricula Wednesday, arguing that the materials were not backed by science and “undermined the future of students across the Commonwealth.”
The suit, filed in the Massachusetts Superior Court by two parents from separate families, alleges that programs based on the research of education professors Lucy Calkins, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, were sold using deceptive and fraudulent marketing that inaccurately labeled them as research-based while ignoring a scientific consensus on the need for step-by-step, explicit phonics instruction to teach students how to read.
The plaintiffs seek class-action status, which would allow other affected Massachusetts families to join. The suit asks for punitive and compensatory compensation and an court order “requiring defendants to warn schools and families of the defects in their literacy product.”
“This isn’t controversial, and this isn’t up for debate,” said Ben Elga, the executive director of Catalyst Law, a legal group representing families in the suit. “For decades, the defendants’ curricula diminished or outright excluded this basic building block to teaching students how to read.”
The curricula, published by Greenwood Publishing Group, Heinemann Publishing, and HMH (formerly Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) caused significant harm to generations of students by emphasizing techniques like cueing, which ask students to “guess” words based on context, the lawsuit says.
The suit cites the conclusions of the National Reading Panel commissioned by Congress in 1997, which in a 2000 report asserted that evidence-based reading programs should be centered on systematic, explicit phonics instruction alongside developing children’s vocabulary and comprehension abilities.
“Defendants denigrated phonics at worst and paid mere lip service to phonics at best,” the suit says. “In all events, defendants failed to warn parents or school districts that their alleged literacy training products did not include meaningful phonics instruction, the one thing essential to literacy success.”
Literacy lawsuits evolve to focus on curriculum
Other literacy lawsuits have targeted school systems in places like Detroit and California, arguing that Michigan and California’s failure to teach some students to read violated their constitutional rights. In 2020, California agreed to a $53 million settlement in such a case, and Michigan agreed to provide Detroit schools with $94.4 million in aid for literacy programs.
Unlike those suits, the apparent first-of-its kind filing in Massachusetts targets the curricula itself.
The publishers are listed as defendants alongside Calkins, Fountas, Pinnell, and Teachers College at Columbia University, where Calkins developed her approach. None of the researchers, publishers, or universities named in the lawsuit responded to requests for comment Wednesday by press time.
The legal action comes amid a nationwide push to reform literacy instruction and an accompanying storm of media scrutiny of the programs named in the suit. According to an Education Week analysis, 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction since 2013.
Massachusetts is one of the 10 states that has not taken such an action, said Elga, who left the door open to filing similar actions in other states.
Forty-four percent of Massachusetts 3rd graders met or exceeded English-language arts expectations on state tests in 2023, state data show.
Students from low-income families fared even worse because they could not afford things like supplemental tutoring and out-of-school supports needed to bolster their reading abilities, the plaintiffs said.
“This isn’t some luxury we are asking for,” said Karrie Conley, one of the parent plaintiffs. “This is reading. This is the skill that unlocks the entire world for our children.”
Conley transferred her two children to private schools and sought private tutoring after they were taught cueing through Heinemann’s Units of Study in their public school, resulting in delays that “went unnoticed for years,” the suit says.
While Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell have revised their curriculum, some educators have said that the changes are not sufficient. Teachers College cut ties with Calkins’ Reading and Writing Workshop in 2023, and Calkins began a new similarly themed literacy center, the Reading and Writing Project at Mossflower.
Calkins argued in a 2022 Education Week opinion essay that, while phonics is important, it is not a panacea.
“It can be tempting to cast blame rather than to focus on the real work that needs to be done to advance children’s learning,” she wrote. “The message that has been pushed out by some phonics advocates, and that has trickled down to parents and even some educators, is an oversimplified one: If only teachers would teach phonics exclusively, then presto, all the reading problems in the world would vanish.”
That essay was met with a flood of criticism from skeptical readers.
“I trusted that these so-called experts were actually experts,” Conley said Wednesday. “There have been too many tears and too many restless nights, but I am proud to be here today to do something about it.”
What will the lawsuit mean for the ‘science of reading’ movement?
Both Calkins’ curriculum and those created by Fountas and Pinnell were the focus of “Sold A Story,” the award-winning podcast by APM Reports that detailed the genesis of the cueing method—in which students were sometimes prompted to read from context or picture clues, not always from sounds and letters.
But many of the teaching principles that undergird those materials have a much longer history. The grew out of the 1960s-born whole-language movement, a philosophy that emphasized meaning but in practice subordinated the teaching of sound-letter relationships.
Those ideas were carried on not only through curricula, but also through formal and informal professional development programs and have long been taught in teacher-preparation programs. They even appeared on teachers’ licensing exams.
Several of the reading laws that states have passed in recent years explicitly banned the use of cueing as a method for learning to read—a prohibition that itself faces a legal challenge in at least one state, Ohio.
Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education who has studied curriculum, said in a Bluesky social media posting that he worried that the lawsuit could lead to “terrible unintended consequences.”
The lawsuit relies on the idea of research-based curriculum, but the differences in how evidence develops in medicine and education “is pretty stark,” he said. “I picture lots of individual teachers getting sued because kids’ outcomes aren’t good / parents don’t like what schools and teachers did.”
And one reading researcher, Claude Goldenberg, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University, worried that the lawsuit could undo opportunities to come to agreement on the factors that matter for student success in reading.
“Although I can understand parents feeling they’ve been duped by publishers and authors, I worry that these lawsuits will make partisans in the never-ending and despicable reading wars dig in further,” he said. “The only real solution is for the education profession, particularly those who profess expertise in reading education, to call out the misinformation and downright falsehoods—which by the way exist on many sides of the wars, not just the one this suit is aimed at.”
