After decades of dueling approaches to literacy, New York City launched a sweeping plan Tuesday that will require schools teach reading with an emphasis on phonics.
Mayor Eric Adams and his schools Chancellor David Banks — who has described an overhaul of literacy instruction as “the legacy work for this administration” — announced elementary school teachers will have to implement one of three comprehensive reading programs over the next couple of years.
If effective, the new policy could mark a seismic shift in a city where less than half of 3rd through 8th graders scored proficient on state reading exams last year. More than 63% of Black and Hispanic test-takers did not make the grade.
“I’m staking my entire chancellorship on this body of work,” Banks said in the weeks leading up to the announcement.
Schools across the five boroughs under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg promoted a ubiquitous — but controversial — curriculum from Columbia University’s Teachers College that critics charge devalues the relationships between sounds and letters, in favor of developing a love of books and their meaning.
Some strategies have been compared to guesswork with a reliance on memorization and pictures for comprehension.
Before the pandemic, hundreds of the city’s elementary schools reported using the approach from the reading curriculum Units of Study by Lucy Calkins, according to an investigation by the education news source Chalkbeat.
The so-called “reading wars” between approaches to literacy escalated as schools and families looked to catch kids up on missed classroom time since the virus began to spread.
Fewer than 4 in 10 of last year’s fifth graders were proficient readers last year, state data show. Those students were in third grade when school buildings shuttered — a school year repeatedly cited as pivotal for students to learn how to read or face an uphill battle to academic success.
Banks has decried the program since he was the…
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