Thorny questions about research drive the reading wars: What makes a curriculum research-based? Who gets to decide?
Those questions have never been settled in the K-12 education world, where teachers have long been encouraged to create and modify materials—and where publishers have touted their products’ absolute fidelity to research. But now they’re at the heart of a new lawsuit against three of the largest figures in the balanced-literacy world, and the publishers of their products.
The lawsuit, filed by parents in Massachusetts this week, targets reading programs developed by Lucy Calkins, the Columbia University Teachers College professor and creator of the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, as well as Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, reading researchers whose work underpins Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, a suite of classroom lessons, interventions, and assessments.
Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell, along with their publishers, used “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing practices, the lawsuit alleges—claiming that their products were “research-backed” while omitting or de-emphasizing the teaching of foundational skills that research has demonstrated are critical building blocks to successful reading.
The plaintiffs, two Massachusetts parents, claim that the curricula led to reading delays and “damage” for their children. They are pursuing class-action status, which would allow other families to join.
None of the individuals, companies, or institutions named as defendants provided comment by time of publication.
The lawsuit hinges in large part on defendants’ claims that their products are “research-backed”—a term that’s applied readily in education, but not always with the same meaning. For decades, proponents of balanced literacy and advocates for a more structured, systematic approach have both claimed that research supports their positions, citing different kinds of evidence from different academic traditions.
In this lawsuit, parents are alleging that literacy gurus who downplayed phonics instruction shouldn’t be allowed to claim that mantle.
Read on for three questions and answers about what happens from here.
Q: Can parents sue curriculum companies for false advertising?
In Massachusetts, state law prohibits businesses from engaging in “deceptive acts or practices.”
The plaintiffs say that publishers falsely claimed their products were supported by “credible evidence and research,” and failed to provide “adequate or complete disclosures and warnings regarding the deficient reading curricula.”
Calkins, Fountas, Pinnell, and their publishers “knew or should have known that they were committing unfair and deceptive acts,” the lawsuit reads.
This kind of argument is unusual in literacy lawsuits, though. In other states—Michigan and California—parents who have raised concerns about inadequate reading instruction have sued the school systems, arguing that the state didn’t uphold students’ rights to an education.
In these lawsuits, “the inability to read, or poor reading, is really just evidence that the state did not discharge its duty,” said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina, who studies education law and policy.
The Massachusetts lawsuit, though, is about consumer safety, in the context of education.
“We all rely on the fact that if somebody says something about a product openly that that’s going to be true,” said Ben Elga, the executive director of Catalyst Law, a legal group representing families in the suit. “It can be as harmful as buying a defective product directly, to have your government buy a defective product, and then you suffer.”
“We made the choice to focus on the people who are profiting from the problem,” he added.
Still, some publishers say that curriculum providers aren’t the actors ultimately responsible for children’s educational outcomes.
“There’s real accountability from the actual educational experts to have assessed the best curriculum and then provide that to families,” said Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, the president of Mrs. Wordsmith, a provider of game-based literacy resources, and a member of the Boston school board.
Other observers have worried that the lawsuit could invite retaliation against teachers if parents don’t approve of the materials used in classes.
Q: The lawsuit alleges that the products aren’t research-based. How is that defined?
Until early this decade, the lawsuit contends, neither the Units of Study for Teaching Reading—Calkins’ program—nor the Fountas and Pinnell materials had any “rigorous research” to support their methods.
The materials also leave out an important, research-based teaching practice—phonics instruction, according to the lawsuit. Teaching phonics skills is “necessary for literacy success,” the lawsuit reads, and the curricula “sought to diminish and even exclude” this instruction.
Instead, the materials employ cueing—a strategy for word-reading that encourages children to use context clues instead of sound-letter knowledge, which has not been research-validated.
Education Week has covered how strategies included in these programs aren’t aligned with the methods most likely to develop strong readers. External review organizations have criticized both Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell materials, claiming that they don’t follow a research-based sequence for teaching foundational skills.
“There is a reasonable argument that some of these programs include practices for teaching word-reading that are not as strongly based in evidence as others,” said Devin Kearns, a professor of early literacy at North Carolina State University.
Still, it is relatively common for a core curriculum not to have any efficacy studies, he said.
Often, curriculum companies cite observational research—a district that chose to use their materials saw their test scores increase, for example, or rise more than a neighboring district that didn’t use the same product. But studies that randomly assign different schools to either use a specific program or conduct business as usual—studies that could then make causal claims about a curriculum’s effectiveness—are much rarer.
“There are very few cases where that’s done,” said Kearns. “Those evaluations are incredibly expensive, and to really do a thorough evaluation would cost millions of dollars. So it doesn’t happen.”
There are some materials named in the lawsuit that do have evaluations, though. Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention, a small-group tutoring program, saw students grow in reading ability in randomized trials in Georgia and New York.
It’s possible that the intervention, which gives students lots of repeated reading practice, helped some students who had less severe reading difficulties—while still not meeting the needs of the students who were struggling the most, said Kearns.
“If you are a kid who has reading difficulty, and you are being taught in a program that doesn’t have the strongest foundational-skills component, it’s much more likely to create difficulty for that kid,” he said.
The positive results for Leveled Literacy Intervention raise a core question about how “research-based” is defined. Do the improved outcomes mean that the intervention is backed by research? Or does the fact that the intervention doesn’t center explicit, systematic phonics—a research-backed strategy—mean that it isn’t grounded in evidence?
There’s no clear answer because no agency or body has issued a technical, regulatory definition for claiming something is research-based in education, the way there is in the food and drug industry, for example, said Black.
Consumer-protection law employs a “flexible standard,” said Elga. “In consumer protection, the critical question is: Is it misleading?”
Q: Which students and families might be eligible to join the class action lawsuit?
All children, or parents of children, currently or previously enrolled in grades K-3 in a Massachusetts elementary school that used any of the named curricula would be eligible to join the lawsuit, provided that they turned 18 on or after December 4, 2020.
Exactly how many children this might include isn’t clear.
Massachusetts is one of the few states that tracks districts’ curriculum choices, reporting that 39 districts currently use the Units of Study in elementary schools, and nine use Fountas & Pinnell Classroom. Together, these districts serve more than 15,000 students in grades K-5.
But even this information doesn’t provide the whole picture. Schools that aren’t using these programs now may have used them in the past. And individual schools, and even individual teachers, might use supplemental materials outside of what their districts adopt, or quietly avoid the curricula that their districts instruct them to use.
And it’s possible that this lawsuit could open the door to more action across the country.
“We’re open-minded,” said Elga, when asked whether Catalyst Law might pursue similar cases in other states. “We’re happy to hear anyone’s story.”
