Frustrated Parents’ Education Lawsuit May Save Our Schools

In every U.S. state, lemon laws safeguard consumers who purchase new vehicles that turn out to be severely defective.

Pharmaceutical giants and the tobacco industry face substantial fines and penalties for misleading advertisements that cause harm.

In the realm of sports, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently launched a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletics Association for misleadingly categorizing events that feature biological males as “women’s sports,” adversely affecting female athletes.

What about the public education system in America?

With very few exceptions, American schools are increasingly graduating students who struggle with literacy, numeracy, logical reasoning, and general knowledge.

International assessments like TIMSS and PISA reveal the shocking extent to which American students are falling behind, despite significant increases in public spending that continues to rise dramatically.

Two families from Massachusetts felt they could no longer tolerate the situation. They took action by initiating a potentially groundbreaking lawsuit.

On December 4, parents Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak filed a class-action lawsuit against “the creators, publishers, and promoters” of Lucy Calkins’ Reading and Writing Project as well as the Classroom curriculum designed by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell.

Also named as defendants are Heinemann Publishing, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Teachers College at Columbia University.

Unlike previous education-related lawsuits, which have yielded mixed results, this case uniquely targets Big Education for “deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services” — products that are claimed to have inflicted developmental, emotional, and financial damage.

This lawsuit directly addresses a critical issue: Big Education is providing a profoundly defective product that causes significant harm and can be shown to be fraudulent — and its customers, American families, deserve legal protection under established consumer protection laws.

Founded in 1981 at Columbia University, Lucy Calkins’ now-discredited reading program plays a significant role in this litigation.

By 2022, Calkins estimated that approximately 25% of elementary schools in the U.S. mandated her curriculum, including nearly half of those in New York City, the nation’s largest school district. About the same percentage of schools in Massachusetts utilize Calkins or the Fountas-Pinnell curriculum.

Calkins’ “vibes-based literacy,” as critics have dubbed it, has dismissed generations of effective teaching methods, insulting the diligent efforts put into phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension, in favor of a “balanced” literacy approach that relies on workshops, “sharing,” “living as a character,” and “inhabiting the world of the book.”

Decades later, evidence shows that students are not well-equipped when they are taught to overlook letters and vocabulary in favor of “picture power” to guess the words on the page.

How effective is inferring from pictures beyond basic nouns, especially regarding complex ideas and paragraphs?

It’s no wonder that less than half of the fourth graders in Massachusetts and New York City are reading at grade level.

The Massachusetts lawsuit emphasizes reading and literacy, arguing that the plaintiffs have suffered significant harm due to these curricula — but a victory in this case could expand the applicability of their consumer-protection claims to a broader context.

Take Jo Boaler of Stanford University, whose dubious research has assisted proponents of equity initiatives in diluting mathematics education across the country.

Boaler’s findings have led to the banning of middle-school algebra courses with “unequal” enrollment and high school calculus classes being labeled “non-inclusive.”

She claims that mathematics serves as an agent of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, prompting some advocates to favor ethnomathematics over standard math, or even embrace an unusual approach known as “subitizing” — teaching counting without numbers.

As a result, American college students today struggle with basic questions like “Which is larger: a/5 or a/8?” (don’t they eat pizza?).

The rationale behind the Massachusetts lawsuit could also be applied to harmful social and disciplinary policies in our schools.

For years, Big Education has been incorporating principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion into every aspect of the educational framework, promising it would foster racial harmony.

However, systematic meta-analyses of data, crowned by a well-known study from Rutgers University, indicate that DEI has actually exacerbated overall racial bias and animosity.

Big Education’s multibillion-dollar DEI deception is due for consumer-protection accountability.

In addition, social-emotional learning (SEL) has become pervasive in American schools.

SEL, which promotes concepts such as “restorative justice,” pledges to ease emotional distress, bolster coping skills and resilience, and enhance students’ feelings of safety.

Yet fervent campus protests and the rise of overly sensitive attitudes render young Americans less employable, demonstrating that SEL indoctrination is making our children fragile, insecure, dependent, and angry.

Fraudulent and harmful SEL initiatives could pose additional consumer-protection risks for Big Education.

Then there’s the extensive scam known as “gender affirmation”: Ranging from compulsory pronouns to transition-related readings and gender-specific bathrooms and sports, Big Education plays a significant role in fostering this irreversible harm to an ever-growing number of families.

It’s high time that the advocates of this contagion are held accountable.

For the future of America, families in Massachusetts and all families must receive consumer protection in education — ensuring that the lemons are eliminated from our schools.

Wai Wah Chin is an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.