Lawsuit calls reading curriculum 'deceptive' and 'defective'
A class-action lawsuit filed in Massachusetts claims that the educational publishing company Heinemann falsely advertised its products as “research-backed” and “data-based.”
Twenty-five state legislatures and countless school boards have acted over the past two years to move schools away from the discredited approach to teaching reading investigated in the APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. Now, two mothers in Massachusetts are taking the issue to court.
Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that the educational publisher Heinemann and three of its best-selling authors promoted “deceptive” and “defective” products that made it harder for their children to learn to read. The suit, filed in Suffolk County Superior Court, seeks class-action status on behalf of schoolchildren in Massachusetts who were taught to read with Heinemann products.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants falsely marketed their literacy products as “research-backed” and “data-based,” failed to “warn” consumers that the products lacked sufficient phonics instruction and continued to sell those products even when they should have known they were inadequate. It claims that Heinemann and its authors “denigrated phonics at worst and paid mere lip service to phonics at best.”
The mothers want the defendants to pay back all the money that families such as theirs spent on tutoring, plus punitive damages. They also want the defendants to provide Massachusetts schools that used the allegedly defective literacy products with a reading curriculum “that reflects and incorporates the science of reading,” free of charge.
The defendants include Heinemann’s parent company, HMH, formerly known as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; authors Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell; and several related organizations, including the board of trustees of Teachers College, Columbia University, where Calkins founded a teacher training institute in 1981.
Such lawsuits can take years to resolve, as attorneys argue over whether a class action is appropriate, and if so, who should be part of it. But the sheer number of potential plaintiffs could make the amount of money at stake staggering.
The case could also break new legal ground. Stuart Rossman, who oversaw litigation at the National Consumer Law Center for 25 years, said he wasn’t aware of any previous class-action lawsuits over literacy curricula. Timothy Shanahan, a retired professor who’s studied the history of reading instruction, concurred, saying he couldn’t think of anything like it dating back to at least the 1970s.
One of the attorneys behind the case, Benjamin Elga, said he listened to Sold a Story and immediately saw “an injustice that cried out for redress.”
“I wish I had been educated about this issue 20 years ago and had been able to pitch in then,” said Elga, the executive director at Justice Catalyst Law, a New York nonprofit that files public-interest litigation.
In an interview, Elga said he views Massachusetts as an attractive venue for the case because of its strong consumer protection laws. Massachusetts also takes a largely hands-off approach to how schools teach reading, resisting a national trend toward legislating curricula. In a recent survey conducted by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 24 of the 155 school districts that identified an early elementary literacy curriculum reported using a Heinemann program.
Nancy Duggan, the executive director of Decoding Dyslexia-MA, has been pushing for a lawsuit like this for years. Many parents in her group had initiated special-education cases against their school districts, but those actions were often resolved in settlements that included non-disclosure agreements. Duggan wanted a court case out in the open.
“If you have thousands of special education decisions and they’re all a secret, it’s like the tree that fell in the forest nobody hears. Nobody knows the trees have been falling for decades,” Duggan told APM Reports. “A product-liability case reaches beyond the secrecy of parents doing this over and over — every one of those falling trees — spending their own money, spending their own time, fighting for their kids.”
In August, Duggan encouraged followers of her group’s Facebook page to share their stories with Justice Catalyst Law. Both mothers had joined the group after their children had fallen years behind in school.
“When there is an injustice going on, I’m not the type of person that can sit back,” Conley said in an interview. “The injustice is going to continue. I don’t want that. We need change.”
Two of Conley’s daughters, who are now in middle school and high school, are named in the lawsuit only by their initials. They were both taught with Calkins’ Units of Study curriculum in elementary school. The reading program included lessons inviting students to guess the word covered by a sticky note using the meaning and syntax from the rest of the sentence. But research has shown repeatedly that children best learn how to read by sounding words out, not by relying on context clues to guess.
The lawsuit alleges that those ineffective strategies were reinforced for both of Conley’s daughters by Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention, a small-group program that includes similar prompts.
Conley says her middle daughter, S.C., was “very gifted.” At just 14 months old, she was already speaking in complete sentences. But in kindergarten, she couldn’t read simple words on the page. Conley remembers S.C. bringing home the same book, sometimes for a week straight. Her teacher had told her to sit on her hands while she read so she wouldn’t focus too intensively on each word; instead, she was taught to look to the illustrations for clues.
“When you’re trying to teach a child how to read, and you’re using the same strategy over and over and over again, and it’s not working, clearly it’s not the child; it’s the strategy,” Conley said.
By third grade, S.C.’s reading difficulties were affecting her other subjects, her mother said. The child couldn’t get through word problems in math. Conley transferred her to a private school and paid extra for a year-round tutor.
When Conley’s youngest daughter, K.C., started bringing home the same books, she transferred her to a private school, too, so she could receive systematic phonics instruction.
The cost was substantial, Conley said, and it came at a time when she was already paying for her eldest daughter’s college tuition. But she felt she had no choice.
“A car can’t move without the wheels,” she said.
Heinemann has since revised its programs to include more phonics instruction. But the lawsuit contends that those changes were “far too little and far too late.” It also notes that the updated materials were provided only to schools willing to pay for them, effectively charging schools “for the privilege of having a marginally less defective early-literacy product.”
Elga called it an “attempt to get more money out of a situation that they themselves are responsible for.”
The company and its authors — Calkins, Pinnell and Fountas — did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Last month, those defendants told the mothers’ attorneys that they weren’t liable, according to the legal complaint. Teachers College declined to comment, saying its “standard practice” is not to discuss litigation.
Previously, in a 2022 statement responding to Sold a Story, Heinemann said: “We stand by the quality and efficacy of our literacy materials and fully support our authors and their work.” Pointing to third-party studies, the company said it has “strong evidence” of its programs’ “positive impacts on students’ literacy achievement.” Heinemann itself funded those studies.
This case will affect only Massachusetts families, but other lawyers have been contemplating similar suits elsewhere.
And, while litigation is a notoriously slow process, Duggan wondered if it might have a more immediate impact: making schools less likely to buy the products at the center of a class-action lawsuit.
“I’m not a party to the case, so it certainly isn’t about millions (of dollars) for me,” Duggan said. “It’s about opening the eyes of our local towns, your school committees, all the people that are responsible as adults to educate our children. Hopefully, people will make better decisions.”
Additional reporting by Olivia Chilkoti.
