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In every state in America, lemon laws protect consumers if they’re sold a new car that turns out to be grossly defective.
Big pharma companies and the entire tobacco industry whose false advertisements caused harm get punished with huge fines and penalties.
In sports, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed a lawsuit against the National Collegiate Athletics Association for deceptively designating events that include biological males as “women’s sports,” causing devastating impacts on women.
What about America’s public education?
With precious few exceptions, American schools are graduating more and more students who are illiterate, innumerable, illogical, and ignorant.
International assessments like TIMSS and PISA expose how atrociously American students lag behind, despite high, and still-skyrocketing, public spending.
Two Massachusetts families decided they had finally suffered enough. They took action — with a potentially trailblazing lawsuit.
On Dec. 4, parents Karrie Conley and Michele Hudak filed a state class-action lawsuit against “the creators, publishers, and promoters” of Lucy Calkins’ Reading and Writing Project and of the Classroom curriculum by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell.
Named as defendants alongside these author-educators are Heinemann Publishing, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Previous education-related lawsuits, which have met with mixed outcomes, have hinged on the state’s obligation to provide basic education.
This one is different: It’s the first case filed against Big Education for “deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services” — products that allegedly caused developmental, emotional, and financial injuries.
This complaint goes straight to the heart of the matter: Big Education provides a glaringly defective product that causes undeniable harm and is demonstrably fraudulent — and its consumers, America’s families, are entitled to protection under existing consumer-protection laws.
Founded in 1981 at Columbia University, Lucy Calkins’ now-debunked reading program deservedly plays a major role in 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. About the same proportion of Massachusetts schools use Calkins or the similar Fountas-Pinnell curriculum.
Calkins’ “vibes-based literacy,” as critics have called it, rejected generations of teaching experience, disparaging the hard work of learning phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension in favor of a “balanced” approach to literacy including workshops, “sharing,” “liv[ing] as a character” and “inhabit[ing] the world of the book.”
Decades later, it turns out, 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.
How is guessing from pictures useful beyond simple nouns, let alone for abstractions and paragraphs?
No surprise, then, that 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 — but a win could allow the families’ consumer-protection argument to be deployed more widely.
Take Jo Boaler of Stanford University, whose fraudulent “research” has helped equity warriors around the country dumb down mathematics.
Boaler’s conclusions have led to bans of middle-school algebra courses with “inequitable” enrollment and high-school calculus classes deemed “non-inclusive.”
Her work has claimed mathematics as an instrument of capitalism, imperialism, and racism, leading some proponents to push ethnomathematics instead of regular math, or even a bizarre method called “subitizing” — that’s teaching numbers without counting.
As a result, American college students today are stumped by simple questions like “Which of a/5 or a/8 is bigger” (don’t they ever eat pizza?).
The logic of the Massachusetts lawsuit could even be used against damaging 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.
Yet systematic meta-analyses of data, capped by a widely cited study from Rutgers University, confirm that DEI has in fact the opposite effect, aggravating overall racial bias and hostility.
Big Education’s multibillion-dollar DEI fraud is ripe for consumer-protection accountability.
Likewise, social-emotional learning is a framework that’s become ubiquitous in America’s schools.
SEL, including such concepts as “restorative justice,” promises to decrease emotional distress, enhance coping skills and resiliency, and increase students’ sense of safety.
But hysterical campus protests and the hypersensitive snowflakeism that makes young Americans unemployable demonstrate exactly the opposite: SEL indoctrination makes our kids fragile, insecure, needy, and angry.
Fraudulent and harmful SEL programs are another potential consumer-protection liability for Big Education.
Then there’s the multibillion-dollar scam of “gender affirmation”: From mandatory pronouns to transition-grooming readings to gender-violating bathrooms and sports, Big Education plays a key role in incubating this irreversible harm to ever-increasing numbers of families.
It’s time to hold the pushers of this contagion to account.
For America’s future, Massachusetts families and all families must get consumer protection in education — and get the lemons out of our schools.
Wai Wah Chin is an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.