Judge scuttles lawsuit over Massachusetts reading curriculum
U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled that the lawsuit against educational publisher Heinemann and three of its top authors was invalidated by a legal doctrine that bars claims of “educational malpractice.”
A federal judge on Thursday struck down a lawsuit claiming that “defective” teaching materials had prevented countless students in Massachusetts from learning to read well.
“The court begins (and ends) its analysis with the educational malpractice bar,” Judge Richard G. Stearns wrote in his order dismissing the lawsuit against educational publisher Heinemann, its parent company HMH Publishing and their best-selling authors Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. For nearly five decades, courts nationwide have repeatedly ruled that educational malpractice is impossible to prove.
The suit, filed by Boston-area mothers Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak on behalf of their children, sought class-action status and argued that the defendants misrepresented their instructional materials as “research-backed,” and “data-based,” despite what the mothers argued was insufficient phonics instruction.
The authors and publishers named in the suit were at the center of the 2022 APM Reports podcast Sold a Story, which investigated why so many schools taught reading using methods that had been repeatedly discredited by cognitive scientists. Benjamin Elga, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview last year that the podcast opened his eyes to “an injustice that cried out for redress.”
Heinemann's attorneys successfully argued that the lawsuit asked the court “to wade into a decades-long academic debate, step into the shoes of those educators, and decide whether or the extent to which phonics should dominate early literacy classrooms.”
Lawyers for the students tried to avoid putting the question of education malpractice at the center of the suit. Instead, they claimed that the programs were marketed in a “deceptive” way.
Judge Stearns was “not convinced.” He noted that the plaintiffs acknowledged that there was research that supported the programs, and the suit would require the court to find “some purported inadequacy in that research.” That judgment could not be made “without delving into the merits of defendants' approaches to literacy education,” the judge wrote.
Since the 1970s, courts have generally held that allegations of educational malpractice cannot form the basis of a legal claim.
This stands in contrast to other professions such as medicine. In medical malpractice, the link between a doctor’s actions and a patient’s injuries can be straightforward. For example: a doctor fails to prescribe a widely accepted medication and causes a patient to get sicker. Such links can’t be so easily established in schools, the courts have found. The “standard of care,” or what responsibility a teacher has to their students, is less clear cut, as is the causal relationship between teaching practices and harm to students.
Even in cases where the standard of care can be established, courts have been reluctant to interfere with the discretion of local governments. A 2018 analysis from the Brookings Institution reviewed around 80 cases alleging educational malpractice in the preceding 40 years, and only one had been successful. That suit came down to a Montana law, with the state Supreme Court ruling that a duty of care to students was outlined in the state constitution.
“The court rightly recognized that decisions about how best to teach reading should be made by educators,” Calkins said in a statement about the decision. Representatives for the publishers and other authors had not responded to requests for comment by the time of publication. In recent years, the publishers and authors have updated their programs to include more phonics.
Lawyers for Conley and Hudak did not reply to requests for comment.
