Plagiarism by Chaley-Ann Scott

The Unchained Child Paperback – November 1, 2010 (elsewhere it said December 11, 2010)

Label Love: Why The Establishment Wants To Label Our Children and How To Fight Back Paperback– December 8, 2010
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (December 8, 2010)

The Shepherdess [Kindle Edition] C.A., Scott (Author) November 1, 2012

Some of the most blatant examples were framed in falsehood. One said "one of my clients said" and "I responded" and both statements then were cut and pasted from SandraDodd.com/priorities. In one piece of writing, she said "I have often thought..." and then went on with my example of a baby being born with a book of 200 "no" coupons.

I've used this blog because there is an element of mystery in these questions.

This is the most blatant of the examples I scanned today:


On the right, under "Priorities" the author says "One of my clients, when asked…" and "I responded by explaining…"

Otherwise the text is lifted word for word in some places from my priorities page:

Someone in a discussion had been asked to consider which was more important to her, health food or her child's happiness. She wrote:

Health food is not more important to me than my children's happiness. Health food is one way to promote a healthy body and the health of my children is very important to me. So is their happiness. You seem to be saying that the two priorities are mutually exclusive. I would like to find a way to promote their health without sacrificing their happiness and vice versa.

Joyce Fetteroll responded:

When we're trying to achieve two goals there will be times when a decision will lead towards one but away from another.

When conventional parents are faced with deciding between happiness and another goal more often than not the goal of children's happiness becomes secondary.

If you've ever made your child cry because of something else that you wanted, then your child's happiness was secondary.

One time I was upset about a spill or something and my daughter said "It seems like you care more about the rug than you do me." I, of course, said "No, of course not." And yet she was right. For that moment the fact that she was upset was less important than the need to get the spill mopped up.

And with conventional parenting that happens a *lot*.

That text has been on that page since at least April 2005: http://web.archive.org/web/20050426022707/http://sandradodd.com/priorities (though it didn't have Holly's title art at first).

The book was published in 2012 and when I asked the author to contact me, she withdrew the book, and did not respond to me. I asked again, and still didn't get a response.

I think there are things on the lefthand page that are similarly lifted from published unschooling sites, books, or discussions, but in the example above, the plagiarism is compounded by being credited to other people specifically. Changing Joyce's story about her daughter to a story about the author's son makes it twice as dishonest, in my opinion. I had hoped for the author to let me express that to her, in hopes that she would withdraw all of her writings from the internet, and perhaps acknowledge the problem.

Plagiarism 2 Q&A; with suspicious answers / (backup)

Plagiarism 3 / (backup)

Plagiarism 4 abundance and guests / (backup)

Plagiarism #5 Jan Hunt's list / (backup)

There were MANY more pages, and three books of this level of plagiarism. I'm grateful to those (you can see names in the comments at the blogs) who identified sources of just those dozen pages I scanned and shared. Over half a dozen sources were identified, from inside and outside of unschooling discussions.

I used to hide the name of the plagiarizer, and I had this page unlisted and unsearchable, but I won't always be around, and those books cannot all be retrieved. I would very much hate for anyone in the future to think that I, Joyce, Jan Hunt, Deb Lewis or others had plagiarized Chaley-Ann Scott. We, and others, were plagiarized by her, repeatedly, for years.

I am grateful to Jill Parmer for driving from Fort Collins, in northern Colorado, to Albuquerque, to help me look through those books when I was overwhelmed with a couple or three such emergency problems all at once.