Correction: An earlier version of this story said Andover Public Schools was no longer using Calkins Writing. The district continues to use the curriculum.
An Andover Public Schools curriculum review will include a review of an elementary school reading program at the heart of a lawsuit filed this week in Suffolk Superior Court by two Massachusetts mothers against the program creators.
Karrie Conley of Boxborough and Michele Hudak of Ashland claim their children suffered emotional and developmental injuries and they had to pay for tutoring and private school tuition because creators of the Calkins Literacy Program and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom “deliberately ignored” scientific research by not stressing phonics in early reading.
Andover Public Schools never used the Calkins reading program but continues to use Calkins writing, which is not part of the lawsuit. It also uses Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, along with two other programs, as a curriculum resource for complex reading and reading comprehension in elementary schools, district spokesperson Nicole Kieser said.
The APS curriculum review is already underway and is not in response to the lawsuit. Kieser said the district formed a curriculum council in the 2023-24 school year and is currently undertaking a comprehensive K-8 literacy audit, which will review both Calkins Writing and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom. The council includes the assistant superintendent of Teaching and Learning, executive directors of Elementary and Secondary Instructional Operations, program coordinators, literacy coaches, grade-level, multilingual, and special education teachers.
“The district uses a range of evidence-based materials to approach literacy instruction,” Kieser said. “While we do have Fountas & Pinnell as a curriculum resource, APS is currently engaging in a comprehensive K-8 literacy audit to analyze our current curriculum and determine next steps for literacy instruction across the district.”
When Andover teachers went on strike last November, one of their demands was for more teacher input on curriculum decisionss, said Andover Education Association President Matt Bach.
Calkins writing was “a MAJOR source of complaints from our elementary teachers- especially veteran teachers,” Bach said in an email. “When they questioned the curriculum, they were told to teach it with ‘fidelity,’ which is why we were trying to get stronger language regarding teacher input on curriculum in our last round of negotiations.”
Curriculum creators Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, were named as defendants in the lawsuit along with Calkins’s company, The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower, the board of trustees of Teachers College at Columbia University, where Calkins is a tenured professor, and Fountas and Pinnell LLC. New Hampshire-based Heinemann Publishing and HMH Education Co., a Boston-based publisher, were also named as co-defendants
Plaintiffs are seeking class action status for the lawsuit, which accuses the defendants of “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing by intentionally omitting phonics, or the relationship between letters and sounds.
A 2023 Boson Globe investigation found that more than a third of the state’s school districts were using outmoded curriculums. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has offered up to $200,000 in grants to help districts replace low quality curriculums.
Andover parents were quick to react to the news on social media.
“Andover’s past use of [Calkins writing] still affects students now in the HS. The impact of poor curriculum is both a financial and mental burden,” one mother wrote on Andover Cares About Our Schools and Town, a Facebook group focused on local issues. “For my family, the cost was equivalent to at least one semester of future state college tuition…and resulted in a student that learned to hate school despite individually awesome teachers.”