New York City reforms reading curriculum as students fail assessments

New York City is overhauling its approach to reading instruction in response to worrying data that showed half of students in third through eighth grade cannot pass a reading assessment. Education officials in the city have said the current curriculum failed to follow the science of how students learn to read.

As a result, the old methods of teaching are now being scrapped, with schools adopting one of three new curriculums based on phonics learning, which educates children on how to correlate sounds with letters. This marks a departure from more traditional strategies such as teaching children to use picture clues to guess words.

New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks, alongside Mayor Eric Adams, announced the changes Tuesday, May 9, stating that the public school system has been teaching reading the wrong way for the last two decades, calling it “fundamentally flawed.”

“‘New York City Reads’ is a historic curriculum shift in the largest school district in the nation that will bring proven science-of-reading and phonics-based methods to all of our public-school students, starting with our early childhood programs and our elementary schools,” Adams said in a statement released ahead of Tuesday’s rollout. “We owe it to our young people, and we owe it to our educators who have been working hard to teach without access to the right tools. Through this campaign, New York City is finally setting up our students and teachers for success.”

Half of all districts will start the new instruction methods in the upcoming school year, while others have until the following year. Teachers will begin training this week and into the summer.

“We are supportive of this idea,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said. “But there will be pessimism throughout schools.”

Banks acknowledged the struggles of parents and children within the school system, stating that “it’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault. This is the beginning of a massive turnaround. I’m staking my entire chancellorship on this body of work.”

This represents the most significant reading overhaul in New York City since the early 2000s and comes as there’s a national push for school reform.

Nationwide, reading levels have fallen to a 30-year low since the pandemic, with math scores and history scores also declining, according to a report released the week of May 7. The new approach to reading instruction in New York City has been seen as a significant step towards addressing this issue.

“I’m thrilled,” Susan Neuman, an early literacy development expert and a former U.S. assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, said of the plans. “This is a bold effort and I think it’s very much the right way to go.”