In the United States, consumer protection laws, colloquially known as "lemon laws," safeguard consumers from the purchase of grossly defective new vehicles.
Similarly, pharmaceutical giants and the tobacco industry have faced significant penalties for their deceptive advertising practices. Recently, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletics Association for misleadingly labeling events that include biological males as "women's sports," causing significant harm to women. However, a critical question arises: Are America's public schools subject to the same accountability?
The quality of American public education has been a matter of grave concern for some time now. With only a handful of exceptions, American schools are churning out graduates who are illiterate, innumerate, illogical, and ignorant. International assessments such as TIMSS and PISA reveal the alarming extent to which American students lag behind their global counterparts, despite the country's high and ever-increasing public spending on education.
According to The New York Post, two Massachusetts families, fed up with the deteriorating state of public education, have taken a bold step. Parents Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak filed a state class-action lawsuit on December 4 against "the creators, publishers, and promoters" of Lucy Calkins' Reading and Writing Project and the Classroom curriculum by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. The lawsuit also names Heinemann Publishing, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Columbia University's Teachers College as defendants.
Unlike previous education-related lawsuits that have centered on the state's obligation to provide basic education, this lawsuit is unique. It is the first case filed against Big Education for "deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services" that have allegedly caused developmental, emotional, and financial harm. The complaint argues that Big Education offers a glaringly defective product that causes undeniable harm and is demonstrably fraudulent. As consumers, America's families are entitled to protection under existing consumer-protection laws.
Lucy Calkins' now-debunked reading program, founded in 1981 at Columbia University, is a significant focus of this lawsuit. By 2022, Calkins estimated that about 25% of US elementary schools mandated her program, including nearly half of those in New York City, the country's largest school district. A similar proportion of Massachusetts schools use Calkins or the similar Fountas-Pinnell curriculum.
Calkins' "vibes-based literacy," as critics have dubbed it, rejected generations of teaching experience. It disparaged the hard work of learning phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension in favor of a "balanced" approach to literacy that included workshops, "sharing," "living as a character," and "inhabiting the world of the book." However, decades later, it has become evident that students are not well-served when they're instructed to ignore letters and vocabulary and taught instead to use "picture power" to guess what the words on the page might be.
Unsurprisingly, fewer than half of Massachusetts' and New York City's fourth graders are reading-proficient. The Massachusetts lawsuit focuses on reading and literacy, charging that the plaintiffs have been materially harmed by these curricula. A victory could potentially pave the way for the families' consumer-protection argument to be applied more broadly.
The lawsuit's logic could also be used against harmful social and disciplinary policies in our schools. For years, Big Education has been pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion principles into every aspect of school life, promising it will bring racial harmony. However, systematic meta-analyses of data, including a widely cited study from Rutgers University, confirm that DEI has the opposite effect, aggravating overall racial bias and hostility.
Similarly, social-emotional learning (SEL), a framework that has become ubiquitous in America's schools, promises to decrease emotional distress, enhance coping skills and resiliency, and increase students' sense of safety. However, the reality is quite the opposite: SEL indoctrination makes our kids fragile, insecure, needy, and angry.
The multibillion-dollar scam of "gender affirmation" is another area where Big Education plays a key role. From mandatory pronouns to transition-grooming readings to gender-violating bathrooms and sports, Big Education is instrumental in causing irreversible harm to an increasing number of families.
The Massachusetts lawsuit represents a crucial step towards holding Big Education accountable. For the sake of America's future, families must demand consumer protection in education and strive to eliminate the "lemons" from our schools.
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