December 4, 2024, two Massachusetts parents filed a lawsuit against literacy experts Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell; Board of Trustees of Teachers College, Columbia University; Heinemann Publishing; HMH Education Company; Fountas and Pinnell, LLC; and The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower, LLC.    

The parents allege that the defendants “peddled” and “hawked” a “raft of products” and “defective goods and services” that were based on “unreliable, methodologically flawed” research, that they “attempted to boost their credibility by selling literacy assessments created to “validate” their own products.” 

A class-action status is being pursued by the parents to represent elementary school students in Massachusetts who currently attend or were enrolled in schools that “purchased, licensed, reproduced, or otherwise employed any Heinemann or HMH early-literacy products marketed under the Fountas & Pinnell, Units of Study, Teachers College Reading & Writing Project, or Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower trade names, and who reached (or will reach) the age of majority on or after December 4, 2020.”

Literacy Crisis: Echoes of Big Pharma

For years, parents nationwide and organizations such as Decoding Dyslexia have raised concerns about students’ struggles and lack of progress in reading. Before COVID and reading wars started making headlines—with parents and school boards pitted against each other—parents of students who have Dyslexia knew there was a growing problem with literacy instruction. 

However, they faced teachers who had been trained a certain way, who believed in how they were trained, and/or who followed leadership directives in their school divisions. The school divisions bought certain programs, trained their staff to implement the reading programs, and told their staff these were the programs that would help the children. And yet . . .  

Students struggled while their parents complained to schools, cried to each other, struggled to understand reading and Dyslexia, paid for tutoring, provided tutoring themselves, gave up or changed their careers to homeschool their kids, fought with teachers, experienced gaslighting from school divisions, and stretched every resource possible in the name of helping their kids—and/or they didn’t know better, believed the school, believed the problem to be with their kids, thought the schools knew best and that there was no recourse, didn’t understand that they could question their kids’ educations and educators, and/or watched their kids fail, and drop out, and/or end up in jail and/or on drugs and/or in emergency rooms and/or holed up in depressing states that were later supersized by COVID. 

Meanwhile, publishers throughout the United States continued to make money. Selling programs to schools is a big business. Struggling students are money makers for publishing houses, curriculum creators, and educational experts—there’s literally a new market born daily. 

Reading struggles are similar to ailments for which drug manufacturers are always pushing pills. The ailments never go away because children who will struggle to read are born every day. There’s a constant regeneration of new markets ready and waiting to be sold a cure for what ails them—and there are experts and creators and publishers and industries there to make money and push their cures. 

How Far Does It Go?

The defendants named in the lawsuit aren’t the only individuals who might be examined here. 

October 20, 2022, in the first episode of her podcast “Sold a Story”, Emily Hanaford reflected on the years of radio documentaries and articles she produced about reading, and the response she received: 

“... the response was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my career. Thousands of emails and messages and posts on social media. And there were basically two kinds of things people were saying. The first was: I know. I know. I’ve been trying to tell people this for years. The other response was: I had no idea. This is what I heard from lots of teachers. They had no idea they weren’t teaching kids how to read.What I’ve been trying to figure out it is — why? Why didn’t they know? Why haven’t schools been teaching children how to read?”

One answer to consider is the one that emerged during COVID: Teachers received training that wasn’t in the best interest of students and then engaged in discrimination against entire school divisions of children, denying students special education services they required. This is supported by U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) 2022 findings against both Los Angeles Unified School District and Fairfax County Public Schools. 

Although these teachers allegedly had been trained to implement IEPs and 504 Plans, and to know what defined a free appropriate public education (FAPE), they followed the schools divisions’ choices to do otherwise. Why? In addition, given so many parents spoke out, why didn’t teachers listen to them? Why did they refuse to consider there might be something to what parents were saying?

Perhaps some didn’t know better. But, if they didn’t know better, why? Why hadn’t they received the training that would lead them to know that what they were engaging in was discrimination? 

Perhaps some were scared. But, if they were scared, why? What kind of culture is a school division in which a teacher is scared to speak up for the best interests of students? 

Perhaps they didn’t care and were just doing the job for the sake of a paycheck. But if this is the case, why? How can a division of such individuals be charged with educating children? 

In 2017 I found out my own student, who has Dyslexia, had not progressed while taking the year-long reading program Language Live, which had been administered by Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). The school insisted the program provided was appropriate, and proposed taking another elective from my student so he could take another year-long reading program during the next school year. 

I said no and filed a FOIA request. The result? Emails that raised more flags.  

At the start of the 2017-18 school year, a FCPS teacher emailed Theresa McKee, a Voyager Sopris account rep (see e-mail below). She asked:

"We are having training tomorrow and I want to make sure we are using the correct placement chart. The new teacher guide placement chart (page 142) is different from the placement recommendations chart you gave via email. We assume the one you gave via email trumps the one in the book, correct? The difference is that the newest doesn’t ever place students in to Level 2 Unit 7. Do you have an understanding of why? Teachers are asking…"

Theresa replied as follows:

"From editorials: After we got some initial feedback and data from past implementations, it became clear that if students needed Level 2, they needed all of it. Those students who would have placed in the second part of the level really didn’t need an intervention like LL and could perform pretty well in their core. Thus, we now only have 3 entry points for new students: L1U1, L1U5 and L2U1."

My student started Language Live at level two, and his data shows he regressed during the full school year he was administered the program. Yet, according to Voyager Sopris’ messaging to FCPS, he either should have been enrolled in the entire program or not at all. Hence, he wasted a year he didn’t have and gave up an elective he wanted to take, just to take a program that didn’t address his needs.

FCPS never advised me that it knew an issue had been identified with the placement of my student. It continued to insist it was providing FAPE and pushed back when I refused its future reading program proposals. In later meetings, FCPS admitted it wouldn't count the Language Live data, even though it used that very data to attempt to identify progress on progress reports. 

In any other organization, if a vendor told a customer—after the fact—that the product bought didn’t actually work as advised it would, that something needed to be changed, should have been given differently, and so on, it would be expected that the customer would request a refund and/or credit of some sort. In this case, we’re talking about children, not toasters. If I bought a toaster and it didn’t work, I’d return it and ask for another toaster or my money back. Doesn’t work that way for a student.

In 2020, a series of emails (which weren't made public until 2023) indicated FCPS special education leadership and lawyers knew that yet another reading program FCPS pushed for years onto students who have Dyslexia wasn’t appropriate for them, and that the publisher of the program itself didn’t endorse the program for students who have Dyslexia. A Dyslexia expert admitted during one IEP meeting that she knew the program wasn’t working for students and that she had doubts about teachers in the county, but in a due process hearing that same year had a faulty memory and insisted the program was appropriate. 

FCPS pushed it onto students anyways and attempted to lead due process hearing officers to believe that the program was appropriate for students who have Dyslexia. 

In 2022 and 2023, following OCR’s investigation into FCPS, it continued to maintain that reading programs it proposed provided FAPE. 

Why? 

Why continue to insist that programs are right when data proves otherwise?

System failure.

Struggling students fuel the need for employment of teachers and tutors, experts and education curriculum creators, publishers, and so on.

For years reports have been published about the high number of individuals in prison who have Dyslexia and/or can't read for other reasons. Illiteracy isn't new.

The only thing new is parents have an ability to connect in ways they were never able to previously. They talk. They connect. They know—and they're scared for their kids. Educators and parents are pitted against each other because one received training it believed to be right and the other—who became an expert by way of parenting—now knows somethings amiss.

This is about more than reading. This is about the breaking of the public school system. It is about teachers who aren't trained and/or empowered to speak up, teachers who are too tired and/or who aren't receiving the support they need to help their students; divisions that continue to invest in programs that aren't working and/or chose to implement programs in manners that defy fidelity of implementation; divisions that dig in instead of admitting fault, who chose lawfare and reputation over what's best for the students; divisions whose actions pit educators and parents against each other; parents who are struggling and angry; and about students who are riding the school to prison pipeline instead of traveling along the road to success.