Late in 2024, a group of parents filed a lawsuit against the creators of early literacy programmes, often referred to as ‘whole language’. The suit targets not only literacy specialists Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell but two publishers and the board of trustees of the Teachers College at Columbia University as well.
The basis for the lawsuit is that the programme caused harm and detriment to their children, who then required private tuition and tutoring to compensate for the inadequacies of the literacy program used by the children’s schools.
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They claim that the marketing used to sell the programmes for many decades is both fraudulent and deceptive, by claiming it to be research-based, when it was anything but.
Because the parents are seeking financial restitution, they have filed a class-action, meaning other families from the state of Massachusetts can join the suit and seek compensation.
Importantly, the families are also demanding that the defendants are also required to “warn schools and families of the defects in their literacy product.”
An investigation by the Boston Globe newspaper in 2023 found that one in every three primary schools were using the whole language programmes developed by the plaintiffs, while in the same year, testing showed that less than half of Massachusetts third graders met the state’s literacy benchmarks on standardized tests. Children from marginalised backgrounds fared even worse, with the Globe reporting “roughly 70 percent of Black third graders, 80 percent of Latino students, and 85 percent of children with disabilities did not meet the state’s benchmark.”
Shortcomings ignored
The shortcomings of the whole language approach have been known for years but it has been firmly entrenched in the education system with vocal advocates and backers with deep pockets.
One of the earliest proponents was Marie Clay, who studied both strong and weak readers as part of her doctorate in the 1960s. When comparing the groups, she thought that the strong readers weren’t getting ‘stuck’ on single letters and sounds because they were using the entire text to understand – cues in pictures, looking at the starting letters, seeking clues in the structure of the sentence. The program Clay developed in the mid-1970s was called Reading Recovery and within years it was being used for Grade 1 students across the United States. By the 1990s it was being used by one in five schools.
The Guided Reading programme published in 1996 by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell further developed some of Clays concepts, however it was no longer restricted to Grade 1s, but taught the cueing system for all year levels. Around the same time, Lucy Calkin, a Professor at Columbia, developed the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project which continued Clays ‘visual and contextual cues’ reading approach.
One of the features in common with both systems was the outright and deliberate omission of phonics. Despite research from the early 1990s showing the importance of phonics and teaching the relationship between letters and sounds, the ‘whole language’ and ‘cueing’ literacy products continued to be sold – at great cost – to schools across the globe, including Australia.
Broad Implications
While many schools in Australia and the US have been updating their literacy curricula based on the scientific evidence behind phonics-based programs, it can be prohibitively expensive to train an entire teaching staff and replace texts and resources. Even when Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell were forced to update their curriculum materials in 2022 to place a greater emphasis on phonics, schools in the US were made to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the ‘update’.
While this particular lawsuit is restricted to the US state of Massachusetts, the eyes of the world are watching. At this point, the defendants including Calkins, Fountas, Pinnell as well as the publishers, have not made statements, but it is expected that the case will bring renewed interest and energy to the global fight for strong phonics-based education.
