NYC Schools Reimagine Reading This Fall to Fix Dismal Literacy Rates

NEW YORK — From Brooklyn to the Bronx, posters encouraging students to “skip the tricky word” or “look at the picture” as they read have been pulled from bulletin boards.

Many elementary school shelves are now stacked with new books that use same-sounding words, emphasizing the repetition of similar letter patterns.

And scores of teachers are about to try out new lesson plans — all part of a massive overhaul of how children in the nation’s largest school system learn to read.

As New York City public school students returned to school Thursday, arguably the most far-reaching policy initiative of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration also began in full. The goal is to boost reading skills in a system where about half of third- to eighth-grade students are not proficient on state tests.

On Thursday, the schools Chancellor David C. Banks called those outcomes “wholly unacceptable,” pointing out that Black and Latino children fare even worse, as he spoke outside of PS 121 Throop in the Bronx. The school is part of a district that will begin using EL Education, one of three city-sanctioned curricula that officials have required schools to choose from as part of the new plan.

This fall, about half of the city’s 700 elementary schools will adopt or continue one of the approved programs. The rest are preparing to make changes next year. The city’s first district school for children with dyslexia will also open after a yearslong push from families, starting with about 70 second- and third-grade students.

“We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation,” Banks said before the first day of school, acknowledging that “we’re absolutely going to have bumps along the way.”

As the system transitions, it will also be dealing with tremendous loss: Some 810,000 K-12 students and 90,000 preschool children are now enrolled, down from more than a million a decade ago, after tens of thousands of pupils left New York City in recent years.

Since the spring, many teachers have spent several days in training preparing for their first units, and are expected to receive coaching two or three times a month this year. Among other things, some will be switching from asking students to choose their own stories for independent reading, a common feature of previous lesson plans, to prioritizing group exercises around a single book or excerpt.

Some schools have had a head start, including PS 132 Ralph Bunche in Queens, which moved to Into Reading — the curriculum that 13 out of 15 districts will adopt this fall — during the pandemic.

April Rose, a longtime teacher at the school, said the transition had been tough. The breadth of material in the curriculum was initially overwhelming for many on staff, and its writing components felt too disjointed, leading the principal to later bring in another program.

Still, Rose said, there have also been reasons for optimism.

“The kids are interested in the stories now,” Rose said. “They’re not tapping out like they used to, and we’re tackling more skills.”

New York City schools will face a host of other challenges this year, including a potential school bus driver strike this fall that could disrupt service for more than 80,000 children. Before Thursday, some families had not received their bus routes, and Banks said officials were working closely with bus companies to minimize problems.

Students are also still recovering from academic and emotional setbacks in the pandemic, and the system has only about one more year before billions in federal pandemic relief dollars end.

And while some 19,000 students in temporary housing — the vast majority of whom are migrant children — have enrolled since last summer, many schools have too few bilingual educators and staff to support them. The city plans to loosen teacher tenure rules to encourage longtime educators to help fill the gaps, Banks said Thursday.

It remains unclear how officials will help the system’s many older students who are behind in reading, a group that is not addressed in the city’s curriculum mandates. When asked Wednesday, Carolyne Quintana, the deputy chancellor of teaching and learning, did not say whether similar requirements would be made for middle or high schools, but said struggling pupils in those grades would still have access to support.

Schools outside the chancellor’s purview are taking steps to improve reading instruction, too.

Ascend, a network of charter schools in eastern Brooklyn, will start new reading curricula this fall for about 6,000 students. This summer, all teachers and school leaders were taught about the brain science of how children learn to read, including the skills — like vocabulary and a broad knowledge of the world — that they need to build.

The network had long used a different approach, known as balanced literacy, that focused on fostering a passion for books but did not always prioritize the decoding of words. Danique Day, the network’s chief schools officer, said some children were lagging behind, and it was tough to track their progress in core skills.

“We taught kids about the love of reading and how great books were. But the two have to go hand in hand,” Day said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/nyregion/nyc-public-schools-reading.html">The New York Times</a>.