"Defective" reading programs falsely marketed as "research-based" made it harder for children to learn to read, charges a lawsuit filed by two Massachusetts mothers, reports Christopher Peak of APM Reports. The class-action lawsuit targets the educational publisher Heinemann and three of its best-selling authors, Lucy Calkins, who developed Units of Study, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, who developed Fountas and Pinnell Literacy.
Because the programs did not provide adequate phonics instruction, parents had to pay for tutors and private school, the mothers charge. They blame the publishers, not the school districts that bought the now discredited "balanced literacy" programs.
"I trusted that these so-called experts were actually experts,” said Karrie Conley in a press conference. She ended up spending more on reading tutors and private school for two of her children than she spent to send her oldest to college.
The filing charges the defendants "willfully ignored decades of research into more effective practices and used shoddy studies to prop up their own work, then charged school districts for updates when they were forced to admit their materials were not effective," reports Erica Meltzer on Chalkbeat.
The plaintiffs are seeking class action status and inviting other families to join the lawsuit.
Many states are changing how reading is taught in the early grades to align with research on what works best, writes Meltzer. "What’s known as the science of reading calls for explicit phonics instruction that helps students connect letters and sounds, as well as texts that help students build the background knowledge to understand what they read."
"Balanced literacy" called for "three-cueing, in which students use the first letter of a word and various context clues, including pictures, to guess what a word might be," she writes. "Exposure" to literature and the chance to read independently were supposed to lead to literacy.
“Right to read” lawsuits against states and school districts "have sent millions of dollars to districts with low reading levels but without mandates on how to teach reading," writes Meltzer. This is the first use of consumer law to change reading instruction.
It's not at all clear that it will prevail. Did the defendants know their methods know their methods wouldn't work? "Research-based" can be a fuzzy concept in education, notes Sarah Schwartz in Education Week.
Curricula's "impact is in part a function of how teachers use them, whether those teachers have received training and support on the materials, and the working conditions of the classrooms they’re used in," education experts told her colleague, Evie Blad.
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