News Brief
Thursday December 5, 2024 9:43 am
Did three famed literacy specialists use “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing, K-12 Dive reports, to push reading curricula that ignored exhaustive research on the need for phonics?
That’s the animating question behind a lawsuit filed by two mothers Wednesday in Massachusetts Superior Court against Lucy Calkins (renowned for “Units of Study”), Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (of “F&P reading levels.”) Also named in the suit, which is seeking class-action status, are Greenwood Publishing Group, Heinemann Publishing, HMH Education Co., and the board of trustees of Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Citing the National Reading Panel’s 1997 finding that “all credible education and literacy research shows that daily phonics instruction is necessary for literacy success,” the lawsuit alleges that the defendants ignored scientific consensus and “peddled a raft of products and curricula that sought to diminish and even exclude systematic and daily phonics instruction.” Phonics, the suit claims, were “paid mere lip service.”
Amid a deepening national literacy crisis, Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak argue in the lawsuit that the curricula, which was sold to schools across the country, led to developmental and emotional injuries for their children, K-12 Dive reports. They also allege financial losses for families, who had to pay for tutoring and private school tuition to compensate for their children’s “literacy deficiencies” and educational delays. Reading is a cornerstone skill, experts say, upon which most academic achievement rests.
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https://edsource.org/updates/amid-literacy-crisis-the-reading-wars-get-their-day-in-court
