Twenty-five state legislatures and countless school boards have acted over the past two years to move schools away from the discredited approach to teaching reading investigated in the APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. Now, two mothers in Massachusetts are taking the issue to court.

Karrie Conley (pictured above) and Michele Hudak filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that the educational publisher Heinemann and three of its best-selling authors promoted “deceptive” and “defective” products that made it harder for their children to learn to read. The suit, filed in Suffolk County Superior Court, seeks class-action status on behalf of schoolchildren in Massachusetts who were taught to read with Heinemann products.

The lawsuit alleges that the defendants falsely marketed their literacy products as “research-backed” and “data-based,” failed to “warn” consumers that the products lacked sufficient phonics instruction and continued to sell those products even when they should have known they were inadequate. It claims that Heinemann and its authors “denigrated phonics at worst and paid mere lip service to phonics at best.”