Literacy materials being withdrawn from many schools are facing new pressure from parents of children with reading difficulties

A lawsuit filed by two Massachusetts families deepens opposition to an approach to teaching reading that some schools proceed to make use of despite evidence that it will not be probably the most effective.

States across the country were modernization of reading programs for research-based strategies, generally known as “learning to read”, including an emphasis on sounding out words.

This week’s lawsuit takes aim at an approach that does not try this emphasize phonics. These include the time-tested “three clues” strategy, which inspires students to make use of images and context to predict words by asking questions comparable to: “What happens next?”, “What is the first letter of the word? ” or “What clues do the photos give?”

The families of the Massachusetts students who did this it was hard to read filed a lawsuit against authors and publishers who supported this approach, including Lucy Calkins, a lecturer at Teachers College at Columbia University. He is demanding compensation for the families allegedly harmed by the fabric.

Thousands of schools once used the three-signal approach as part of the “balanced literacy” approach advocated by Calkins and others, which focused, for instance, on having children read books they liked independently and spend less time on phonics or letter relationships and sounds. Over the past few years, greater than 40 states have passed laws emphasizing evidence-based and research-based materials, in keeping with the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute.

It’s unknown how many school districts still use the programs at issue since the numbers aren’t monitored — but there are many, in keeping with Timothy Shanahan, professor emeritus of education on the University of Illinois at Chicago. Many teachers have been trained to show the three-pointer, so it could actually be used even in classrooms where it will not be part of the curriculum, he said.

He said research does show the advantages of teaching phonics, but there may be less information in regards to the three-cue method.

“There is no research that isolates the practice of teaching three-pointers – so we don’t know if it helps, hurts, or is just a waste of time (although logically it would seem to conflict with phonics, which may or may not be the case when teaching children),” he wrote in an email.

A key part of the sport is the tricue Reading the recovery programwhich was utilized in over 2,400 US elementary schools. In 2023, the Reading Recovery Council of North America filed a lawsuit alleging that Ohio lawmakers violated the authority of state and native boards of education through the use of a budget bill banning the three-pointer.

The new lawsuit accuses Calkins and other outstanding figures in the sphere of childhood literacy of using fraud to trick schools into purchasing and using flawed methods. The parents who sued alleged that their children had difficulty reading after studying in public schools in Massachusetts, where a 2023 Boston Globe study found that almost half of schools used materials that the state Department of Education deemed to be of low quality.

The lawsuit asks the court to order authors, their corporations and publishers to supply an early literacy program that features reading instruction for gratis.

One plaintiff, Michele Hudak of Ashland, said she thought her son was reading at an elementary level until fourth grade, when he had difficulty reading his assigned textbooks. By then, tests showed he was reading at an elementary level, the lawsuit said, “solely because he could successfully guess the words from the pictures.”

Calkins didn’t reply to an email looking for comment. It has maintained its approach, even adding more phonics to its literacy curricula, called units of study.

But last 12 months Teachers College announced it was closing the Reading and Writing Project, which Calkins founded, saying it desired to foster more conversation and collaboration between different approaches to literacy. Calkins has since founded the Reading and Writing Project in Mossflower to proceed her work.

“Teachers must use the best approach and differentiate their instruction depending on the specific child they are working with,” Calkins said in a video posted on the new project’s website.

Michael Kamil, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, said that although Calkins dropped phonics, it is just one component of teaching children to read.

“There are lots of reasons why students don’t learn to read, and the reading program is very rarely the main reason,” Kamil said.