Score one huge win for Chancellor David Banks and Mayor Eric Adams: The city Department of Education is at long last insisting that schools use phonics and other proven strategies to teach kids to read.
Too bad about all the kids who for decades wound up illiterate because the DOE trusted utterly misguided “education experts.”
Banks, to his credit, aimed to do this from the start. It’s a grim sign of how dysfunctional the system is that it’s taken this long
And still is: The new New York City Reads program will roll out in just 15 of the city’s 32 community districts this fall, reaching all of the city’s 700 elementary schools only in September 2024.
Roughly half of all NYC public school children in grades 3-8 are behind in reading; it’s worse for kids from low-income families, as well as black and Hispanic students.
And two decades of relying on phonics-denying approaches are a big reason why.
Indeed, the “balanced literacy” program from Columbia’s Lucy Calkins was inferior on multiple fronts, as Robert Pondiscio explained last year in The Post after Banks first announced he meant to abandon it.
The shift means overriding DOE’s practice of leaving literacy-curriculum decisions to principals, but that’s necessary in fighting decades of inertia, especially since some teachers will want to resist the shift to evidence-based instruction.
And it’s the first strong sign that Banks is standing by his pledge to transform the DOE. “I didn’t come here to play at being chancellor. I came here to make a real difference,” he said in March 2022.
As we’ve warned, the state education establishment is now thoroughly devoted to undermining excellence.
We’re beyond overjoyed to see that Banks (with Adams’ strong support) is proving the champion that city children and their families have long needed.