For all its affluence, cultural influence and all-round iconic status, New York City doesn’t have the strongest record on literacy. The NYC Reads Initiative aims to change that, and transform reading instruction from Kindergarten upwards with a set of reforms and new resource allocations designed to kickstart reading across the city in a big way. But what level of challenge are we actually dealing with when it comes to overall student literacy?
Hard data represents a good starting point to our analysis, and from there, we’ll dive into the reasons behind NYC’s widening literacy gap—as well as how we can turn things around for those young readers, and what the aims of the NYC Reads Initiative are all about.
The big news on literacy in NYC...
🗽 51% of NYC’s kids don’t read at grade level. That’s well below the national average, even after reading levels slumped post-pandemic.
🗽 The problem gets deeper when we look into it at a demographic level: 63% of Latino students don’t read at grade level, and 64% of Black students don’t read at grade level.
🗽 New York City is ranked joint 32nd out of the fifty states on student reading performance, despite being the richest city in the US, as well as the largest.
New York City is only the 47th most literate city in the US.
About 18% of adult NYC residents (1.6 million adults) do not read in English proficiently, meaning that they lack the literacy skills required to go about their daily lives with ease. This includes things like finding employment opportunities, socializing and building community bonds, and supporting the children and young people in their households with their education.
According to a study by the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater(UWW), New York City actually comes in at 47th in a ranking of most to least literate cities in the US. Above it on the chart are cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington, and Pittsburgh, as well as some mid-table shock contenders where statewide literacy levels are low, but individual cities have exceeded NYC’s ranking, such as the cases of Arlington and Texas City.
Every city is made up of different demographics, and has different forces acting upon it at any one time. And when every setting represents a unique ecosystem in this way, it makes it harder to compare things like which historic approaches to teaching literacy have been the most functional, and yield the most confident readers. That said, demographic analysis is still useful if we change our direction and reverse the question: if we can interrogate the reasons behind a city’s low literacy, it makes it easier to create a solution approach that’s adapted to the needs of the setting, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to literacy instruction.
Considering the impacts of pandemic school closures
If we’re discussing the literacy slump then we need to address the elephant in the room long before we start breaking things down at a citywide level.
The Covid-19 pandemic changed education forever in the states. The shift to extended remote learning left schools and millions of children and young people lost, cut off from educational support networks and unable to access the resources, motivation and care that they benefitted from in a classroom setting. It took its toll: although commentators were already describing the US as being in reading crisis, the aftermath of the pandemic saw skill levels and test scores slump on a dramatic curve, and we’ve not seen as much of a recovery as we’d hoped.
But it’s not just about the logistics of imparting an education. The pandemic also saw historic declines in student mental health and stress-related illnesses, which hugely impact learning potential. And the isolation element of social distancing advice saw our youngest students being exposed to far less communication in general, limiting their language-learning opportunities, meaning that the learners entering Kindergarten in 2022, 2023 and 2024 missed out on a vital part of language development.
The inequalities model of reading potential
But pandemic learning loss isn’t specific to NYC. There’s another major reason why there are so many children and young people who aren’t meeting the minimum grade standard for literacy, and that’s based in the environments that they experience as learners.
More than half of NYC’s population lives in poverty or on a low income, and faces challenges to make ends meet. 1 in 4 children live in poverty, and these are households where there’s likely to be much lower access to things like grade-relevant reading materials and support. It goes deeper: households experiencing material deprivation tend to get caught up in a cycle of low literacy and deprivation, as parents who themselves left school with low literacy are…
🗽 Less likely to have a wide range of books in the home. Reading materials are expensive, especially at the rate at which learners develop.
🗽Less likely or able to read themselves, and establish good reading habits for the children and young people in their households
🗽Less likely or able to read with children in early years stages, i.e. bedtime stories
🗽 Less likely to engage with reading-led activities like word games or board games
🗽 More likely to be on a low income, and struggle to support children and young people with material elements of reading i.e. books, magazines, and extra-curricular tuition when problems crop up
🗽 …And are therefore more likely to raise learners leave school with similarly low reading proficiency, and struggle to provide similar elements of reading culture to children of their own.
English Language Learners and English Literacy
Another commonly cited reason behind NYC’s literacy gap and the need for the NYC Reads initiative is the prevalence of learners who have come to English from other language backgrounds (English Language Learners, or ELLs). It’s a broad spectrum term that encompasses every learner for who English is an additional language, from those who have come to school new to English (about 78% of ELLs) to those who are approaching bilingual status, and only need occasional prompting (about 18% of ELLs).
There are a lot of ELLs in NYC: during the school year 2022-3, 160,256 ELLs were enrolled in NYC public schools, predominating in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn. That’s 16.25% of all NYC learners who don’t have English as their first language, and there’s a heavier presence of ELLs in early grades, even accounting for those who lose ELL status as they gain fluency.
It’s always harder to develop English literacy when the English language hasn’t been a large part of a learner’s formative language socialization and early education, and these learners are unfortunately far more likely to struggle with English reading fluency, as well as experience material deprivation in the home that compounds the effects.
Are teacher shortages a relevant issue to consider?
Not as much as they are in other cities.
Pressures on teaching staff tasked with imparting a recovery effort have led to a countrywide recruitment crisis, and many sources are swift to say that we shouldn’t disregard things like large class sizes, inexperienced teachers and long-term supply staff as having an impact on reading progress. NYC, though, hasn’t seen the teacher shortages that are plaguing the rest of the US, with numbers staying stable until very recently—recruitment and retention were largely quite healthy until very recently, when the teaching pool shrunk by around 2,000, mirroring similar trends observed in student enrolment observed by the Education Department.
Is it simply down to instructional strategy?
Some people seem to think so, including the minds behind the NYC Reads Initiative. Chancellor David Banks, head of NYC’s Department of Education has often cited they city’s previous reliance on a ‘Balanced Literacy’-style approach to reading instruction as a large part of the reason why so many learners are struggling. This is where learners develop their understanding of a word using its context, and other cues at their disposal, often without the direct focus on phonics decoding skills that define its alternate approach, the Science of Reading.
In an interview with FOX 5 New York, Banks describes NYC teachers as having been given the ‘wrong playbook’ in the form of balanced literacy, and that kids weren’t developing the foundational decoding skills necessary to progress to literate status. A switch to a phonics-based Science of Reading-based curriculum has been seen by the administration as the right way to remedy this, going back to an ‘old school’ approach to instruction and removing the ability for learners to be ‘promoted without earning it’—i.e. progressing to more intense and involved reading without the solid literacy levels necessary to support that transition.
The Adams-Banks Reforms and NYC Reads Initiative
Under Chancellor David Banks and New York Mayor Eric Adams, the NYC Reads Initiative is a strategy to be implemented in public schools that aims to bolster literacy skills among students, ensuring that they become strong readers who are ready for educational, career and lifelong success.
Starting from the school year 2023-4, the NYC Reads Initiative is being rolled out in 2 phases. In the first phase, early childhood education classrooms will adopt a uniform curriculum called the Creative Curriculum, and as learners move into K5, schools will choose one of three pre-approved, Science of Reading-informed, phonics-based curricula with which to impart literacy instruction.
It’s not been welcomed by all educators and policy groups, and some have challenged its prescriptive approach, but a majority have applauded the intervention as it’s taking a direct, evidence-based approach to solving NYC’s literacy problems and ensuring that more learners can achieve their targets, and leave education destined for future successes.
Resourcing the NYC Reads Initiative
But resourcing reading support on a scale isn’t easy: you know that at one point or another, you’re going to hit a wall somewhere between the amount of support you need, and the financial resources you’ve got left to deliver it with.
And whilst the NYC Reads Initiative does support learners with a whole new way of decoding Abd building words, we’re dealing with pandemic cohorts: they missed out on so much, whether that was early education or pre-educational communicational development. So many of those in the classroom from now on are going to struggle, and more than ever before are going to be turning to their teachers and asking them for a way to hit their targets.
Unlock reading with C-Pen and the NYC Reads initiative!
This is where C-Pen Reader 2 comes in.
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