After decades of turning Americans into illiterates and giving young people artificially induced reading disabilities, lawsuits against purveyors of the quackery masquerading as “literacy education” are flying. In the crosshairs are “defective” and “deceptive” programs and self-proclaimed experts responsible for crippling millions of children.
Perhaps the most significant legal action so far involves two Massachusetts mothers who just filed suit against education publisher Heinemann, some of its top authors, and the board of Teachers College at Columbia University. The suit alleges that they all harmed children by peddling discredited resources that they knew or should have known were bad.
Filed in Suffolk County Superior Court, the plaintiffs are hoping to achieve class-action status on behalf of schoolchildren harmed by the quack reading programs. They are seeking money to compensate families for necessary tutoring as well as “punitive” damages to punish the peddlers of quackery. It is reportedly the first suit of its kind.
Bizarrely, the lawsuit is asking the defendants to provide government schools in Massachusetts with a new reading program without cost. The demand: the new program must incorporate the so-called “science of reading,” which includes a stronger emphasis on phonics but has still been criticized by leading experts.
The plaintiffs are being represented by Justice Catalyst Law, a New York-based nonprofit that engages in public-interest litigation. “I wish I had been educated about this issue 20 years ago and had been able to pitch in then,” said Executive Director Benjamin Elga, adding that the reading quackery was “an injustice that cried out for redress.”
There have been multiple lawsuits against states and school districts over the years, including several involving districts in Massachusetts that were settled out of court with non-disclosure agreements. Those lawsuits have targeted education authorities that knew or should have known about the catastrophic damage the quackery was doing to children.
In 2017, The Newman Report highlighted a lawsuit against California. Children in the Golden State may be able to recite all the latest dogma on gender theory or “climate change,” but official numbers show most of them cannot read or do math at even a basic level. Less than one in four black boys was even proficient in reading.
As such, a coalition of attorneys representing victims of public “education” filed a lawsuit against the state for failing to provide adequate literacy instruction. The state government’s own numbers showed more than half of California children in government school did not meet even the dumbed-down Common Core literacy standards.
This writer and Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld called for legal action against the purveyors of this quackery over a decade ago in the best-selling book “Crimes of the Educators.” Arguing that crippling children should be treated as a crime, the book even suggested criminal prosecutions of those who knowingly destroyed children’s ability to read.
Last year, The Newman Report documented the attempt by Columbia’s Teachers College to quietly sideline the infamous “Reading and Writing Project.” As part of that, the college even put the program’s tenured ringleader, “Literacy Professor” Lucy Calkins, on an indefinite sabbatical as school districts across America were dropping her programs.
“Moving forward, TC wants to foster more conversations and collaboration among different evidence-based approaches to literacy, and ensure our programs are aligned with the needs of teachers and school districts looking to partner,” Teachers College said in its announcement that four decades of pushing the quacker was winding down.
The trustees of Teachers College and Calkins herself are all named in the new lawsuit in Massachusetts. The lawsuit describes how otherwise smart children were unable to learn how to read using their quack programs — programs using methods that were first debunked in the 1840s after being imposed by Horace Mann in the state.
In short, the quack methodologies peddled by Calkins and her cohorts — memorizing words and guessing at unfamiliar ones — have literally been debunked for over 150 years. But after Mann’s demands were rejected, the quackery was resurrected by Rockefeller-funded “progressive” education godfather John Dewey in the early 1900s.
One of the lead parent plaintiffs, Karrie Conley, explained that she spent more on tutors and private schools to help her two children with reading than she spent on college for them. And it was all because the district schools they attended used Calkins’ quack “Units of Study” curriculum.
“Nothing is more painful than trying to help them, but not knowing how,” she said in a press conference. “So many times I’ve asked myself, ‘How did it get like this?’ I trusted that when I was sending my children off to school, they were getting instruction that had been tested and proven effective. I trusted that these so-called ‘experts’ were actually experts.”
As long as systematic and intensive phonics training is used, teaching children to read is a relatively simple matter. Numerous programs including Alpha Phonics by Dr. Blumenfeld can be accessed for low cost or even free. As such, it should be an easy matter for educators to ensure that their students learn to read properly.
An enormous amount of evidence suggests that Dewey and others responsible for destroying literacy instruction across the United States did so with malice aforethought. Columbia’s Teachers College—the home of Dewey and many of his disciples—has been the key force behind the agenda ever since. Hopefully this lawsuit will bring it all to light.
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