(The Lion) — Two Massachusetts moms are suing a coalition of publishers and educators they say ruined literacy instruction in America’s public schools for decades.

Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak filed a class-action lawsuit last week, arguing literacy instruction was purposefully undermined for the sake of profit.

The defendants in the case are literacy “pioneers,” including Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, as well as Heinemann Publishing and other groups affiliated with reading instruction.

The lawsuit claims the defendants are guilty of “unfair and deceptive marketing practices” and negligence for steering reading instruction away from phonics.

“For years, Defendants hawked their defective goods and services to school districts
throughout the country,” the complaint reads. “This fraudulent and deceptive campaign has had devastating consequences.”

Conley’s daughters were so damaged by their public school reading instruction, Conley says, she ended up placing them in private schools as well as paying for years of additional tutoring.

“When there is an injustice going on, I’m not the type of person that can sit back,” Conley said, reported local media. “The injustice is going to continue. I don’t want that. We need change.”

She recalled how the teaching methods peddled by the defendants failed her children.

“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; it’s the strategy,” she explained.

By 4th grade, students are expected to read for comprehension, and those who can’t read proficiently will be at a disadvantage for the rest of their education, studies show.

Reading below grade level is common in public schools. Testing data from 2022 showed 66% of 4th graders in America can’t read at grade level.

Critics of modern reading instruction trace the decline back to the 1980s when the “whole language” approach was introduced.

Whole language taught students to read not by sounding out letters but with techniques like using context to guess what the word might be or looking at just the first letter of the word.

These techniques were called the “three cueing” system.

Using modern technology such as MRIs, education researchers eventually found that whole language and cueing approaches weren’t effective. Instead, phonics – sounding out each letter to form a word – was the best method and was dubbed the “science of reading.”

However, some groups still pushed the unscientific method – and made millions selling related curriculum.

In 2019 alone, school districts nationwide spent over a billion dollars on reading programs for pre-K through 6th graders. Heinemann Publishing, whose curricula was on the forefront of the whole language approach, rakes in millions every year.

In fact, Heinemann made $226 million from just 84 of the nation’s largest school districts over a ten-year period. Those 84 districts account for one-sixth of the nation’s total K-12 public school population.

Many states now mandated phonics curricula be used in public schools.

Conley and Hudak are seeking compensatory damages, and their case has been filed in Massachusetts superior court.