‘Science of reading’ movement spells financial trouble for publisher Heinemann

A publisher that once held a commanding share of the market for materials to teach and test reading has seen its sales drop significantly in recent years — a decline its attorney attributes to the 2022 APM Reports podcast Sold a Story.

Heinemann published some of the most widely used programs for teaching reading in U.S. elementary schools. Its roster of authors — including Lucy Calkins, Gay Su Pinnell, Irene Fountas, Jennifer Serravallo and the late Marie Clay — helped to define how literacy was taught to two generations of students. Their work also helped Heinemann rack up higher and higher sales on an unbroken growth streak from 2006 through 2019.

But recent data suggests school districts are turning away from Heinemann. The company’s 2023 sales were down about 75% compared to what they were in 2019, according to current numbers from GovSpend, a database of government spending.

(These are preliminary figures. GovSpend says there can be a six-month lag in obtaining records, so school districts may still report additional purchases for late 2023. That data is unlikely to change the trend, however, because winter is historically the company’s slowest quarter.)

The sales drop comes as some of the nation’s largest school districts are ditching Heinemann for other publishers. New York City; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Louisville; Portland, Oregon; and Loudoun County, Virginia outside Washington, D.C., are all replacing Heinemann reading curricula. Tampa and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Fargo, North Dakota, are also discouraging schools from using Heinemann products to test and remediate beginning readers.

David Banks, New York City’s schools chancellor, offered a “salute” to the reporting in Sold a Story at the start of this school year. He said the district’s previous method of teaching reading did a “disservice” to students.

“We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation, and many of us followed the same prescript of balanced literacy,” Banks said. “And like the dance of the lemmings, we all marched right off the side of the mountain. I intend to get this right and get the kids back on track.”

Change is also happening at the state level, as the newly energized “science of reading” movement sweeps through legislatures. Since 2013, at least 37 states have passed laws requiring research on reading to guide instruction in elementary school classrooms and teacher-preparation programs. Since Sold a Story came out in 2022, several states have passed laws incentivizing or requiring districts to use state-approved programs. And to date, Heinemann’s reading curricula have not been recommended for use in any of those states.

As the market shifts away from Heinemann’s existing products, the company is trying to adapt. Heinemann is issuing new editions of Calkins’s Units of Study curriculum and Fountas and Pinnell’s reading materials for their curriculum. It’s also expanding its offerings in math.

Matthew Mugo Fields, Heinemann’s president, told the Teaching Learning Leading K12 podcast last year that the company is “enhancing some of the materials that we already have out there.” He also told The 74, a news website focused on education, that the company had “clarifying conversations” with several customers about how its programs teach phonics after Sold a Story’s release. 

Market shifting to newcomers

Heinemann, a company founded in Great Britain, began publishing in America in the late 1970s. From a converted factory in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, its small team released books of professional advice for teachers. In the 2000s, as a subsidiary of the company now called Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Heinemann expanded into curricula, tutoring programs, assessments and other instructional materials.

Those items became some of the most popular products in U.S. schools. In 2020, a RAND survey found that 29% of kindergarten, first and second grade teachers used a Heinemann curriculum to teach reading. But the company’s hold on the market now seems to be slipping.

A company spokesperson, Erika McCaffrey, declined to make Mugo Fields available for an interview. “We don’t feel confident that information we share with you is correctly and fairly represented,” McCaffrey wrote in an email. She did not respond to a list of written questions.

But a lawyer representing Heinemann blamed Sold a Story for the company’s revenue loss. In an August 2023 letter, the lawyer, John Cuti, said the podcast caused “enormous financial damage” and “great commercial harm” to the company. “Schools, teachers, parents and caregivers have relied on this false narrative when choosing curricula for their students,” Cuti wrote, demanding that APM Reports retract the podcast.

An attorney for American Public Media replied that the organization stands by its reporting.

Heinemann has also publicly disputed Sold a Story’s findings. On its website, the company said the podcast “radically oversimplifies and misrepresents complex literacy issues.”

While Heinemann’s 2023 sales — $58 million reported so far on GovSpend — are less than half of what it collected just a year ago, it remains a player in elementary reading instruction. But a new group of companies is rapidly picking up market share.

Last year’s sales of the EL Education curriculum, published by both Imagine Learning and OpenUp Resources, were more than 10 times higher than 2019 sales. And sales will likely continue to grow, thanks in part to a big upcoming contract with Philadelphia’s schools.

“Evidence-based practices do not belong in journals, sitting on shelves. They belong in classrooms,” said Nyshawana Francis-Thompson, Philadelphia’s chief of curriculum and instruction.

The publisher Amplify’s Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum saw a nearly eightfold jump in sales over the past four years. And Great Minds’ Wit & Wisdom curriculum also quadrupled sales during the same time.

Nancy Zuckerbrod, a spokesperson for Great Minds, said there’s a “new focus on the science of reading” after Sold a Story, and she said the company’s sales have been helped by the demand for “high-quality curriculum” from nonprofit reviewers and state agencies.

The three biggest educational publishers — Heinemann’s parent company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with McGraw Hill and Savvas — are all now marketing their core reading programs as aligned with the science of reading.

GovSpend also shows revenues accruing for publishers of supplemental programs, which provide additional practice in phonics and other foundational skills. Wilson Language Training, for example, saw revenues at least double in the last four years.

Alex Green, Wilson’s senior vice president of marketing, said the number of companies offering these supplemental programs has exploded. For decades, there were just a handful, but by Green’s count, there are now more than 40 programs on the market. “It’s tough on the business side, but it’s good for the field overall,” she said.

One of those newcomers, Ventris Learning, released teacher manuals for a phonics supplement and sold close to $6 million worth just one year later, according to GovSpend. Ventris’ president, Robert Meyer, said its actual sales are “way higher,” because so many teachers bought the manuals with their own money. Meyer credited social media for driving awareness about reading science, pointing to a 230,000-member Facebook group as one example of the interest in this topic.

Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University in New York, said the shifts in what publishers are selling and schools are buying resemble past cycles in the century-old “reading wars” over the importance of phonics instruction.

Laats predicted that Heinemann-published materials aren’t going to do well amid that shift, because they’re “too closely associated” with the old way of doing things. “Some publishers are more mission-based, and for them, the political winds hit hard,” he said.

But teaching kids to read will take much more than filling out a purchase order for a new textbook, Laats added. He said schools need knowledgeable teachers who can personalize their instruction, solid assessments to track how students are progressing and reading specialists who can help the students who are behind.

“It’s really difficult to make the kind of substantive change that people are actually asking for,” he said.

‘Misery loves company’

Three of Heinemann’s best-known and highest-grossing authors gathered before an online audience of roughly 150 people in March to discuss the sudden shifts in education policy. Over the last few decades, Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell have been some of the most vocal proponents of cueing, the discredited theory investigated in Sold a Story. That method taught children they could use context clues to decipher unfamiliar words.

At the start of the Zoom meeting, Calkins joked that “misery loves company.” She said the three authors have “become fast friends as we live in these difficult times.” Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who published her first book with Heinemann in 1983, described the trio as having long worked “in the same vineyard” of reading instruction. But she suggested that the landscape and their responsibilities have changed.

“Now, it’s the vineyard of how to help teachers who are under assault and who are being pushed to do curriculum that doesn’t allow for observing young readers and teaching responsively,” she said. “If the science of reading had a real contribution to make, to me it was reminding me to screen for dyslexia and to make sure that I'm being more responsive to those kids early on. And the programs that are being mandated do not allow for that.”

Calkins has been the most outspoken about her role in the reading debate. She has also been the most open to changing her curriculum to remove strategies based on the cueing theory. Fountas and Pinnell have said little publicly.  

Fountas, a professor at Lesley University in Massachusetts who created a suite of products for Heinemann with Pinnell in the late 2000s, said at the March event that she stayed “silent” about the issue because she’s become “a lightning rod.” She said she never expected the three of them would become the “poster children” for literacy education. Fountas said the educators she knows have always tried “to do what’s best for children, never being perfect” but “committing every bit of themselves to learning more and serving children better.”

Fountas said it’s been “insulting to the profession” to hear non-educators critiquing what’s happening in classrooms, and she said she was “appalled” that lawmakers seemed to be treating schools like factories, “educating children to read words, not to think,” under new legislative mandates.

Fountas also defended her teaching methods, and she said journalists have focused so narrowly on the cueing theory that they have oversimplified the learning process.

“You take a look at all the media narrative, and those are the things that come up: ‘You teach children to guess,’” Fountas said. “What we can learn from that is we didn’t do a very good job explaining it.” She added: “Anybody who believes that reading is not meaning-driven is missing the whole point of what it means to be literate.”

Pinnell, a retired professor from The Ohio State University, said there are “so many misconceptions” in the current debate over reading instruction. She argued that some of the legislative efforts are going too far, including the reading mandate Ohio legislators passed last year that bans teaching based on the cueing theory.

“I live in a state that, a year ago, made laws against things that they didn't even know what they were,” she said.

Pinnell and Fountas did not respond to emails requesting an interview.

In an email to APM Reports, Calkins said she has mixed views of the legislation that’s being passed across the country. “We oppose legislation that mandates a one-size-fits-all approach to districts, teachers or children,” she wrote, “and support legislation that encourages school districts to adopt practices aligned with the science of reading while still maintaining local control and flexibility.”

Heinemann has another best-selling author, Jennifer Serravallo, who didn’t participate in the discussion. Serravallo, who declined an interview request, has written several books for educators focusing on strategies for reading and writing. She’s now in the process of switching publishers. Serravallo released her first book with Heinemann in 2007, but she’ll publish her next title with Corwin today.

Additional reporting by Emily Hanford and Kate Martin.