Why Many New York City Children Can’t Read

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at why New York is lagging as states face up to a reading crisis in schools. We’ll also get details about the staggering dollar figure behind Mayor Eric Adams’s latest plea for federal help for the migrant influx.

Across the nation, state officials are taking steps to improve reading instruction for struggling students. Nearly every state has passed laws on reading and literacy. But in New York, there is concern that too little is being done. Lawmakers have pushed for Albany and the state Education Department to meet the moment, but the executive director of one influential education policy group said flatly that compared with other places, “New York is doing nothing.” I asked Troy Closson, who covers education in New York, to discuss the situation.

Fourth-grade reading scores for children in New York dropped 10 points, double the national average, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. That’s the one test that allows for comparisons among states. New York was tied for 32nd in the nation. Are local school districts teaching reading right?

That’s a big, complicated question. New York has more than 700 school districts, and we don’t know exactly what many of them are doing, since not all of them are transparent about their curriculums or approaches. What we do know is that a good number of districts are still using teaching materials that experts say don’t address many students’ needs, or haven’t begun to offer training for teachers and principals that’s rooted in the science of how children learn.

Right now, there’s a huge push across the country for districts to change how they’ve been teaching students to read, and that process will take years. I think the concern here is that there’s a large number of places where a lot of students struggle each year but that haven’t begun to re-evaluate their approaches yet.

What about New York City? How did city schoolchildren do in reading on that test, and what is the city doing to improve scores in the coming years?

State tests show that in New York City, about half of third-through-eighth graders are proficient in reading. But there’s a big gap in the scores for Black and Latino kids, and their white and Asian classmates. This past spring, the chancellor, David Banks, announced an ambitious plan to require schools to make changes. Most schools will have to use one of three curriculums that their superintendents have chosen, and teachers and administrators are also going through training meant to reshape how they think about teaching reading.

It will be a big challenge, and there’s already been concerns from principals over the plan, the curriculum they’ll be using and whether this will ultimately lead to real change. But those changes are what the city will be working on over the next couple of years.

You write that in the last three or four years, other states have focused on teacher training and on improving screenings so they can identify children who might not learn to read and should be given extra help. What about New York?

At the state level, New York’s been pretty quiet on reading in comparison with a lot of other places. We’ve that seen a number of governors elsewhere have made reading a core issue, and a lot of legislatures have taken on the issue in the aftermath of the pandemic. I think it’s worth noting that there are experts who worry that some of those efforts have their own gaps and blind spots.

But here in New York, the conversation as a whole has been quieter.

During the state budget negotiations in the spring, for example, the big issues — at least publicly — were really charter schools and school funding. Reading wasn’t discussed as much as it has been in other states.

At the same time, though, a few lawmakers in Albany are really pushing for change and plan to try to sharpen the political focus on reading over the next year.

New York was once a national leader in education reform. Has the state been effective in putting emphasis on teaching reading?

Well, a lot of reading experts and families would say no. When I was reporting this story, I watched a bunch of recordings of local school board meetings from earlier this year, and in district after district across the state, parents were speaking up about how their kids’ schools were still using strategies that experts have said don’t work, like asking students to use a picture clue to guess a word that they struggle with.

State education officials here have argued that they’ve laid out clear expectations for what skills students should be gaining and have offered districts a lot of resources for help as they make changes. Overall, though, some advocates still want to see a bigger statewide focus on the issue.

Can local districts turn low scores around on their own?

Districts in New York have authority over what curriculum and teaching materials they use — and in some large cities like Buffalo, we’ve seen a big local push to make change and follow the steps taken in other places. And even in places with more formal, top-down mandates, it will still be up to districts — and individual schools — to really embrace a different approach and implement change.

Weather

Prepare for a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon, persisting through the night, with temperatures near the low 80s. In the evening, temps will drop to the high 60s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Tuesday (Feast of the Assumption).

The latest New York news

Mayor Eric Adams made yet another plea for financial help from the federal government to help pay for the influx of migrants as he issued a staggering new cost estimate: $12 billion to house and care for them over three years.

“New Yorkers’ compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not,” the mayor said in a speech at City Hall, adding that the city was running out of “money, appropriate space and personnel” to handle what he has warned was a humanitarian crisis rarely seen before in New York. He asked the Biden administration to declare a state of emergency and create a “decompression” strategy to decelerate the flood of migrants. About 96,000 have arrived since last year, and more than 57,000 are staying in homeless shelters.

The mayor estimated that the city would spend about $5 billion on migrants this year, as much as the annual budgets of the Fire Department, the Parks Department and the Sanitation Department combined. The federal Department of Homeland Security said it had already sent more than $140 million in funding to New York City to help.

More state money may be coming: Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would ask the Legislature to allocate $1 billion in next year’s state budget, noting that the state had already given $1 billion to help with housing and legal services. The state has also worked to find additional places where asylum seekers could stay; Hochul said she had asked the Biden administration for the use of Floyd Bennett Field, a decommissioned airport in Brooklyn that is now controlled by the National Park Service.

METROPOLITAN diary

Buzzing along

Dear Diary:

I was walking home from the subway station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, enjoying the latest in a string of warm, breezy, late-spring days.

As I passed a playground at the edge of Morningside Park, I buzzed my lips — something I had begun to do since deciding to finally pursue a lifelong aspiration of learning to play the trumpet.

The pathway I was walking on was next to a fenced-in basketball court where some children were shooting hoops while others watched. A girl who looked to be 10 or 11 was sitting at the base of the fence with her back to me as I approached and then passed her.

All of a sudden, she started to jerk her head from left to right and back while fanning her ears. As she was making these motions, she looked over her shoulder toward me and discovered where the buzzing sound was coming from.

“I thought it was a mosquito,” she said.

I smiled, apologized and explained that, yes, it was me and that I was “exercising my embouchure.”

As I moved away from her, I continued to buzz, enjoying the splendid day that it was.

— Ozier Muhammad

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

Melissa Guerrero, Kellina Moore and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.

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