The largest school system in the country enters its second year of an ambitious, multi-year journey to overhaul how it teaches children how to read this fall.
Across New York City, schools have changed curriculum materials and teaching strategies, a significant shift in a system where school leaders have long held autonomy over instructional choices. The mandate has prompted a torrent of debate and discussion—cautious optimism, on the one hand, that a standardized approach will lead to better outcomes; skepticism on the other that new materials will actually meet students’ needs, and fear that implementation challenges could derail the entire project.
So far, there’s not enough evidence to draw firm conclusions about the work’s success. But there are some new wrinkles: Leadership turnover, test scores that don’t yet show improvement, and ongoing discussion over the strength of the reading materials the city has picked.
City schools Chancellor David Banks will leave his position by the end of the year, one of multiple city department leaders departing as New York Mayor Eric Adams faces corruption charges, placing the reading program under a new administration. Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for New York City schools, said there will be no changes to the initiative.
This portrait of a transformation in progress has become familiar as the “science of reading” movement has swept the country over the past five years. Most states have since passed laws mandating changes to reading, and big districts across the United States have initiated system-wide projects to modify classroom practice and replace materials.
The process of institutional change has often been slow and hard. But New York City presents special challenges.
Schools there have been a stronghold for the reading-workshop model, an approach developed at Teachers College, Columbia University, that used discredited methods for teaching students how to sound out words. More generally, principals—and sometimes individual teachers—have traditionally had a lot of leeway in deciding exactly how to teach reading. That flexibility has led to a patchwork of instructional approaches across a massive system serving more than 410,000 students in grades K-5.
“This is the largest school district in the country. You’re changing practices; you’re changing mindsets. You still have a lot of professionals in the building that are kind of waiting to see if it’s a fad,” said Resha Conroy, the executive director of the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children, and a member of the city schools’ 2023-24 Literacy Advisory Council.
After a first set of schools began using the new programs last year, state test scores fell citywide. But those data alone may not mean much about the initiative’s potential.
The project is an “overwhelming transition,” said Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University, whose team at NYU is working with two of the city’s geographic districts on implementation. Neuman also served on the Literacy Advisory Council. “Teachers are just getting going.”
New York City is moving away from balanced literacy
For about the last two decades, an approach to teaching reading known as balanced literacy has been dominant across the country—and especially in New York City.
The model, which prioritizes students reading books of their own choice at a just-right reading level, often includes only incidental instruction in phonics or phonemic awareness. These foundational skills are the building blocks of reading ability, and without explicit teaching, many students won’t develop the basics that they need to move onto more complex texts, experts say.
Exemplifying the model is the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, a curriculum developed by Columbia University professor Lucy Calkins. Then-schools Chancellor Joel Klein required city schools to use the Teachers College approach in the early 2000s.
And though experts have since criticized the program, and Columbia has now distanced itself from Calkins, the materials were still popular in schools as recently as five years ago. In 2019, almost half of city elementary schools in a 600-campus survey reported that they used them, according to reporting from Chalkbeat.
Balanced literacy has been “the predominant way of teaching reading and writing,” said Joanna Cohen, the principal at P.S. 107 in Park Slope.
In 2019, Cohen read “At a Loss for Words,” an article by Emily Hanford of APM Reports that exposed some of the ineffective reading strategies embedded in popular curricula.
“It really hit me that this way of teaching reading that I had been taught, that I had been using for 15 years at that point, was not meeting the needs of a very large group of children in New York City,” Cohen said.
Children learn some phonics in most balanced literacy programs. But they also learn that they can use other strategies to identify words they can’t sound out, like making an educated guess from an illustration or predicting the word based on the sentence context. Research has shown that relying on these crutches can make it harder for students to learn the code of English—how written letters represent spoken sounds.
In a balanced literacy method, students also aren’t usually reading a shared text. Instead, they practice reading skills—such as finding the main idea—in books of their choosing. Experts have said that this approach can leave students without the deep content knowledge that a curriculum rich in literature, science, and social studies can provide.
Centralization of curriculum is a ‘really big deal’ in a formerly hands-off city
By the time that New York City started to take aim at balanced literacy curricula, other states had already paved the way. Several states have banned programs that include disproven word-identification strategies. Others mandated that schools select from approved curriculum lists.
In spring of 2023, New York City officials required that schools pick one of three reading curricula: HMH’s nto Reading, Great Minds’ Wit & Wisdom, or EL Education’s eponynous reading curriculum. Schools had to pair it with one of several phonics programs required the previous year.
Providing a list of options ensures schools are picking vetted choices, but it provides other benefits, too, said Sarah Woulfin, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education who studies how teachers and leaders implement education policy.
“If there is one curriculum in place, district leaders can learn a lot about the curriculum and see the curriculum in action,” said Woulfin. “They can start thinking about, what are the supports and resources necessary?”
A lot of school systems take this kind of centralized system for granted, “but in New York, that’s a really big deal,” said Lynette Guastaferro, the CEO of Teaching Matters, a nonprofit that provides professional development for schools as part of the city’s reading initiative.
Still, the rollout has had rocky moments. The first cohort of schools started with new curricula at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, just months after the change was announced. Now, weeks into the 2024-25 school year, some of the second cohort schools have gotten off to a slow start, too.
“Just unpacking all of these materials is an enormous task,” said Neuman, who is supporting some schools implementing Wit & Wisdom. “We go into the school, and the boxes are still there. They’re piled up.”
How the three reading curricula differ
Of the three curricula the city’s geographic districts can select, one has emerged as by far the most popular: Into Reading, from publisher HMH.
The program is structured around themes, like inventors, or the lives of animals. Lessons for each week contain separate activities that cover different reading skills, such as oral language development, concepts of print, and comprehension. The program includes some hallmarks of evidence-based materials—for example, a systematic phonics sequence. But until recently, it also includes some practices that researchers have cautioned against, like providing struggling readers with lower-level text.
“We can compare Into Reading to a buffet,” said Nicole Dominique, the associate director of programs at Teaching Matters. “They give teachers a lot of options, because they want to make sure that the needs of the classroom can be met no matter what.”
The program also relies heavily on text excerpts, rather than whole novels—a feature some teachers have criticized.
The other two curricula—Wit & Wisdom and EL Education—are more similar to each other than they are to Into Reading, said David Liben of Reading Done Right, a group that consults with schools on literacy instruction.
In both, students read full-length books, with more of an emphasis on learning subject area content than on building reading skills and strategies. Each curriculum has a different focus, though, Liben said. EL Education is heavier on science content, he said, while Wit & Wisdom has a more traditional humanities approach.
Implementation hinges on buy-in, support, and clear expectations
Just as important—if not more so—than the materials themselves is how the city supports teachers in using them, experts have said. Teachers need to be able to see how their school’s foundational-skills program and reading curriculum work together, and how both connect to intervention for struggling students.
And crucially, school leaders need to communicate why this change is happening, said Sherri Miller, the former director of literacy in Wake County schools in North Carolina. Miller helped lead the school system, the biggest in the state, through a shift to evidence-based reading approaches.
“If you don’t get the buy-in, it’s that much harder to get it off the ground,” Miller said.
Marissa Bateman, a 2nd grade teacher at P.S. 107, credits training she took as part of the city initiative with helping her understand the rationale behind the curriculum change. P.S. 107 uses Wit & Wisdom.
“It really clicked in terms of understanding how kids learn to read and how explicit you have to be, and how reading and writing are so connected,” Bateman said. “After that course, I kind of took a step back and said, ‘Okay, let’s look at this new curriculum and see how it works.’”
Teachers also need ongoing professional-learning opportunities to troubleshoot issues that come up in their classes, said Woulfin. Such support needs to be highly responsive to teachers’ specific situations, she said, not general advice from the publisher. (The school system has contracted with several professional learning organizations to provide coaching for teachers.)
As part of the reading initiative, the city now screens students on foundational skills three times a year. But Conroy, of the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children, said there’s still work to do to ensure all schools know how to serve students who are flagged on tests that screen for reading difficulties.
After a student is identified, school staff need to figure out how, when, and from whom they will receive support, something that isn’t always clear now, said Conroy. “In the school buildings there are still some questions about who’s doing what,” she said. “I think right now there’s still a very heavy weight that rests on parents in advocating for their children.”
NYCPS has provided guidance and professional learning on how to review screener data, Brownstein said in an email. She also noted that school-based intervention teachers monitor the progress of students who are below grade level.
Educators are seeking signs of progress after a year of work
At the beginning of the reading initiative’s second year, educators are looking for signs that it’s working—or not.
State test scores are down. At the end of the 2023-24 school year, 49.1 percent of students in grades 3-8 were at or above proficient in reading, compared to 51.7 percent the year prior. But Cohen, the Park Slope principal, cautioned in June that test scores could take a while to move.
“You can look at states like Mississippi,” she said. The Magnolia State began sweeping reforms to reading instruction in 2013, but didn’t see gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress for six years, she said.
Bateman, the 2nd grade teacher using Wit & Wisdom, has noticed that her students’ writing—and desire to write—has grown. “With this program that we’re doing, it’s all content-based, and I feel like it’s very purposeful for them,” she said. “They understand why they’re doing it, and it’s meaningful to them.”
Improvements on interim assessments given periodically would be another sign that students are making progress, said Neuman. Scores on basic tests of reading ability—like how many nonsense words children can read in a minute—should ideally increase, she said.
Seeing large-scale, systemwide change will likely take longer, at least 3-5 years, said Miller, the former Wake County administrator.
For one Manhattan kindergarten teacher, that seems like an ambitiously long time for one initiative to take priority, and the history of past efforts isn’t promising.
“The way school politics tend to work is, one person comes in, they do their one big thing, then they leave and we never talk about it again,” said the teacher, who asked that her name be withheld.
Still, she thinks the science of reading seems stickier. “The whole country thinks it’s important,” she said. “Phonics is a nationwide issue.”
