Seven members of the State Board of Education have already sued DeWine and the state legislature over the department move, which has resulted in the delay of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce opening.
The lawsuit over cueing and the department was filed by the Reading Recovery Council of North America, a nonprofit based in Columbus. Cueing is a reading strategy that involves children using context, spelling patterns and looking at pictures in books to figure out what the book is trying to say.
The cueing strategy has been determined through decades of scientific research to be less effective in teaching children to read than strategies like phonics, which teaches children the sounds letters on the page make together. But cueing gained a huge amount of popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, which has mostly died down now.
As more focus has been put on the recovery of the youngest learners, state leaders began working on ways to help students. While previously school districts across the state could use any reading curriculum they liked, Ohio’s budget bill passed over the summer did not allow for schools who wanted to use the cueing strategy.
The lawsuit argues that curriculum does not have a place in a budget bill.
“There is no common purpose or relationship between the subject matter of the Literacy Curriculum Statute, which establishes an educational policy mandate, and the subject matter of HB 33, which addresses funding and other fiscal concerns for the state of Ohio,” the lawsuit says. “Instead, the Literacy Curriculum Statute effectively serves as a rider, attaching itself to a substantively different, must-pass budget bill to bypass Ohio’s law-making process.”
The lawsuit additionally argues that the “science of reading” in the curriculum is vague and conflicts with existing law that local school boards set curriculum.
Reading Recovery Council says in the lawsuit that the way in which the Department of Education and Workforce was created was unconstitutional under Ohio law.
The lawsuit further argues that since the budget bill gives the Department of Education and Workforce a mandate to pick which curriculum and instructional materials are aligned with the science of reading, if the Department of Education and Workforce is found to be unconstitutional or unlawfully created, the curriculum referenced in the bill will fail as well.
Reading Recovery is asking for the literacy curriculum statute to be declared void and pay for court fees.
DeWine’s office declined to comment on pending litigation. Reading Recovery did not respond to requests for comment.
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