A child follows along with a bookmark as he reads during an after-school literacy program in Atlanta on April 6, 2023. (AP photo)

A lawsuit filed by a pair of Massachusetts families is adding to the backlash against an approach to reading instruction that some schools still use despite evidence that it’s not the most effective.

States around the country have been overhauling reading curricula in favor of research-based strategies known as the ” science of reading,” including an emphasis on sounding out words.

The lawsuit this week takes aim at approaches that do not emphasize phonics. Among them is the long-established “three-cueing” strategy, which encourages students to use pictures and context to predict words, asking questions like: “What is going to happen next?,” “What is the first letter of the word?” or “What clues do the pictures offer?”

Families of Massachusetts students who have struggled to read filed the lawsuit against authors and publishers endorsing that approach, including Lucy Calkins, a faculty member at Columbia University’s Teachers College. It seeks damages for families allegedly harmed by the material.

Thousands of schools once used three-cueing as part of the “balanced literacy” approach championed by Calkins and others that focused, for example, on having children independently read books they like, while spending less time on phonics, or the relationship between letters and sounds. Over the last several years, more than 40 states have enacted bills emphasizing instead materials grounded in evidence and scientific research, according to the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute.

It’s unknown how many school districts still use the contested programs because the numbers aren’t tracked — but there are many, according to Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Many teachers have been trained to teach three-cueing so it may be used even in classrooms where it’s not part of the curriculum, he said.

He said research does show benefits from teaching phonics, but there is less information about the three-cueing method.

“There are no studies that have isolated the practice of teaching three-cueing — so we don’t know whether it helps, hurts, or is just a waste of time (although logically it seems to be in conflict with phonics, that may or may not be the case when it comes to kids’ learning),” he wrote in an email.

Three-cueing is a key part of the Reading Recovery program, which has been used in more than 2,400 U.S. elementary schools. In 2023, the Reading Recovery Council of North America filed a lawsuit saying Ohio lawmakers infringed on the powers of state and local education boards by using a budget bill to ban three-cueing.

The new lawsuit accuses Calkins and other prominent figures in childhood literacy of using deception to push schools to buy and use faulty methods. The parents who sued said their children struggled to read after learning at public schools in Massachusetts, where a 2023 Boston Globe survey found nearly half of schools used materials the state education department found to be of low quality.

The suit asks the court to order the authors, their companies and publishers to provide an early literacy curriculum that incorporates the science of reading free of charge.

One of the plaintiffs, Michele Hudak of Ashland, said she thought her son was reading at grade level until fourth grade, when he struggled to read chapter books he was assigned. Until then, testing showed him reading at grade level, the lawsuit said, “solely because he could successfully guess words from pictures.”

Calkins did not respond to an emailed message seeking comment. She has stood by her approach even while adding more phonics to her reading and writing curricula, known as Units of Study.

Last year, however, Teachers College announced it was shutting down the Reading and Writing Project that Calkins founded, saying it wanted to foster more conversations and collaboration among different approaches to literacy. Calkins has since founded the Reading and Writing Project at Mossflower to continue her work.

“Teachers need to take the best of every approach and to vary their instruction based on the particular child with whom they’re working,” Calkins said in a video posted on the new project’s website.

Michael Kamil, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, said that while Calkins gave short shrift to phonics, that is only one part of teaching children to read.

“There are myriad reasons why a student doesn’t learn to read and the reading program very rarely is the major cause,” Kamil said.

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