Lucy Calkins Lawsuit: Deceptive Marketing Claims Dismissed by Judge

The Lucy Calkins lawsuit was a class-action complaint filed in December 2024 by two Massachusetts parents who accused Calkins, fellow literacy specialists Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, publisher Heinemann and its parent HMH, Greenwood Publishing Group, and Columbia University’s Teachers College Board of Trustees of deceptively marketing reading curricula that relied on methods cognitive scientists had discredited. A federal judge dismissed the case, Conley v. Calkins, on May 22, 2025, ruling that courts will not decide disputes over how reading should be taught.¹

Who Filed the Case and Why

The plaintiffs were Karrie Conley of Boxborough, Massachusetts, and Michele Hudak. Both said their children fell years behind in school because their schools used the defendants’ reading programs. Conley said her daughters struggled with simple words in kindergarten, and by third grade her daughter’s reading difficulties had spread into math because she could not comprehend word problems.² She said she paid for private school tuition and reading tutors for two of her children at a combined cost exceeding what she spent sending an older child to college. “I trusted that when I was sending my children off to school, they were getting instruction that had been tested and proven effective,” she said at the press conference announcing the lawsuit. “I trusted that these so-called experts were actually experts.”³

The families were represented by Ben Elga, founding executive director of Justice Law Catalyst, who said this was the first case he was aware of that applied consumer protection laws to educational curricula. “If your car is broken, and it’s the fault of the manufacturer, the manufacturer recalls the part and fixes it,” Elga said. “They do not charge you for their failure. It’s outrageous.”⁴

What the Lawsuit Alleged

The complaint used Massachusetts consumer protection law rather than any theory tied to a school district’s teaching decisions. It made three linked claims:

Deceptive marketing. The defendants promoted their materials as “research-backed” and “data-based” when, the plaintiffs said, they had conducted no rigorous research and collected no data supporting the methods.
Defective product. The authors and publisher continued selling curricula they knew were inadequate.
Failure to warn. Consumers were never told the programs lacked sufficient phonics instruction.

At the center of the case was the “three-cueing” method embedded in the defendants’ curricula, which encouraged students to guess unfamiliar words using pictures, context, or the first letter rather than sounding them out. The complaint said cognitive scientists had discredited the practice and accused the defendants of having “denigrated phonics at worst and paid mere lip service to phonics at best.”²

The plaintiffs sought class-action certification for all Massachusetts students taught with the programs, along with compensatory and punitive damages, reimbursement for tutoring costs, and a court order requiring the defendants to supply Massachusetts schools with a new science-of-reading curriculum at no cost.²

Who Was Sued

Lucy Calkins founded the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University in 1981. Her Units of Study for Teaching Reading became one of the country’s most widely adopted reading curricula; a 2019 survey found 48 percent of 600 New York City schools using it, and by 2015 more than 170,000 teachers had attended weeklong training institutes hosted by her organization.⁵

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell developed the Leveled Literacy Intervention program, a small-group reading system the suit said reinforced the same guessing strategies as Calkins’ curriculum. By 2012 their products generated roughly $60 million a year, about half of Heinemann’s revenue at the time.⁶

Heinemann, now part of HMH, earned at least $1.6 billion in the decade leading up to 2022, and 84 of the 89 largest school districts for which records were available had purchased its materials since 2012.⁶ Columbia’s Teachers College Board of Trustees was named for its role in promoting and spreading the curricula nationally.⁷

Why the Judge Dismissed the Case

The suit was filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in Massachusetts and removed by the defendants to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, where it was docketed on January 2, 2025 as case number 1:25-cv-10007 before Judge Richard G. Stearns.⁸

In their motion to dismiss, the defendants argued the court could not resolve the claims without deciding an unresolved academic dispute. Heinemann’s attorneys said the suit improperly 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.”⁹

Judge Stearns agreed. He wrote that “the court begins (and ends) its analysis with the educational malpractice bar,” a doctrine under which courts have almost uniformly refused to hear claims requiring them to evaluate the quality of educational methods. Although the plaintiffs framed their claims around marketing rather than educational quality, Stearns concluded that testing the marketing would still force the court to weigh the research behind the curricula, which would mean “delving into the merits of defendants’ approaches to literacy education.”¹

Courts have historically rejected educational malpractice claims because they find no workable standard of care for educational professionals and consider such subjective assessments beyond judicial competence.¹⁰ Available reporting does not specify whether the dismissal was with or without prejudice.¹¹

Reactions

Calkins said she was “thrilled” by the dismissal. “The court rightly recognized that decisions about how best to teach reading should be made by educators,” she said in an emailed statement on May 23, 2025. “I’m glad that the lawsuit has been dismissed so we can all turn our attention to the urgent work of teaching America’s children to read.”¹²

Fountas and Pinnell did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Heinemann had previously defended its products and all three authors, citing company-funded studies as evidence of positive impact.² Elga did not immediately respond after the ruling.¹¹

Legal experts called the suit unusual. Stuart Rossman, who oversaw litigation at the National Consumer Law Center for 25 years, said he knew of no previous class-action lawsuits over literacy curricula. Timothy Shanahan, a retired professor who studies the history of reading instruction, said he could not think of anything like it dating back to at least the 1970s.²

The Backdrop That Made the Suit Possible

Even though it lost in court, the case landed in the middle of a national shift already underway. A major catalyst was Sold a Story, an APM Reports investigative podcast that premiered in 2022 and examined how Calkins, Fountas, Pinnell, and Heinemann promoted reading methods that contradicted decades of cognitive science. The series ranked among the most shared programs on Apple Podcasts in 2023, 2024, and 2025.¹³

Since the podcast’s release, at least 26 states have passed laws aligning reading instruction with cognitive science, and at least 15 have banned the cueing method outright.¹⁴ Heinemann’s revenue fell roughly 75 percent from $234 million in 2019 to $58 million in 2023, and districts including New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Louisville moved to replace its curricula.¹⁵

Calkins herself made changes before the suit was filed. In 2022, Heinemann released a revised version of her curriculum that removed three-cueing and added explicit phonics and decodable books. Calkins told Education Week her earlier materials contained strategies that “no longer represent the latest and most current thinking.”¹⁶ Critics said the revisions did not go far enough.⁴

In September 2023, Teachers College disbanded the Reading and Writing Project. New York City public schools had officially dropped Calkins’ curriculum earlier that year, at a time when less than half of the city’s roughly one million students were reading at grade level.⁵ Calkins took a sabbatical for the 2023–24 school year and founded a new organization, Mossflower, where she continues to sell the Units of Study curriculum along with decodable texts and professional development.¹⁷

1
APM Reports. Judge Scuttles Lawsuit Over Massachusetts Reading Curriculum
2
APM Reports. Lawsuit Calls Heinemann Reading Curriculum Deceptive, Defective
3
The 74. Lawsuit Accuses Famous Literacy Specialists of Deceptive Marketing
4
Chalkbeat. Lawsuit Accuses Reading Curriculum and Literacy Specialists of Deception
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Columbia Daily Spectator. Teachers College Parts Ways With Calkins, Controversial Reading Curriculum; Transitions to New Initiative
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APM Reports. Heinemann Sales by School District
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Education Next. Reading Wars Go to Court
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PACER Monitor. SC et al v. Calkins et al
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WBUR. Mass Lawsuit Reading Curriculum Court Dismissal
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American University Law Review. Educational Malpractice
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Education Week. Court Dismisses Reading Lawsuit Against Lucy Calkins, Other Balanced Literacy Proponents
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K-12 Dive. Lawsuit Lucy Calkins Dismissed, Literacy Science of Reading
13
APM Reports. Sold a Story
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APM Reports. Legislators, Reading Laws, Sold a Story
15
APM Reports. Publisher Heinemann Financial Trouble, Science of Reading
16
Education Week. As Revised Lucy Calkins Curriculum Launches, Educators Debate if Changes Are Sufficient
17
Mossflower. Our Story