Two Massachusetts women have filed a lawsuit against Heinemann, an educational publisher that allegedly marketed and sold “deceptive” and “defective” products that made it more difficult for children to learn how to read.
According to WBUR, the lawsuit was filed earlier this week on behalf of plaintiffs Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak. Together, the two women claim that Heinemann and three of its authors deliberately and falsely marketed their literacy products as “research-backed” and “data-based,” yet failed to “warn” consumers that that the materials lacked sufficient phonics instruction.
Heinemann, the lawsuit says, knew that its products were inadequate.
But instead of pulling the textbooks or issuing a revision, it continued to sell them.
Conley and Hudak allege that Heinemann and its authors “denigrated phonics at worst and paid mere lip service to phonics at best.” They are now asking a court to order the defendants to repay the money that families spend on tutoring.
Aside from recompense, the women are also seeking punitive damages.
“When there is an injustice going on, I’m not the type of person that can sit back,” Conley told WBUR. “The injustice is going to continue. I don’t want that. We need change.”
Two of Conley’s daughters, notes WBUR, were taught to read with defendant and author Lucy Calkins’ “Units of Study” program. The program includes lessons that ask students to guess words covered by a sticky note using a combination of meaning and syntax derived from the rest of the sentence. But research has shown that students typically learn to read by sounding words out—not by guessing what a hidden word might be.
Although Conley claims that her daughter is “very gifted,” she struggled to learn to read using the “Units of Study” program. One of her teachers went so far as to tell the girl to sit on her hands while reading—avoiding focus on individual words—encouraging her to look instead to 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,” Conley said. “It’s the strategy.”
Ben Elga, the director of Justice Catalyst Law, told the Boston Herald that these kinds of techniques effectively disregarded the results of studies highlighting both the importance of phonics and the failure of their context-based literacy strategies.
“For decades, the defendants’ curricula diminished or outright excluded this basic building block for effectively teaching kids to read,” said Elga, whose organization is representing the families alongside Kaplan & Grady. “Even as it’s been reported that the defendants’ literacy programs have fundamentally failed, the defendants dragged their feet to acknowledge their shortcomings.”
WBUR reports that attorneys and educators have said that Massachusetts courts are an “attractive” venue for the lawsuit, with the state having strong consumer protection laws and a hands-off approach to school curricula.
Nancy Duggan, the executive director of Decoding Dyslexia-MA, told WBUR that parents in her organization have initiated similar special-education claims against their own districts. Of those that were resolved, most resulted in settlements with a non-disclosure agreement.
“If you have thousands of special education decisions and they’re all a secret, it’s like the tree that fell in the forest that 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.”v
Sources
Mass. lawsuit calls reading curriculum ‘deceptive’ and ‘defective’
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