Chancellor Kamar Samuels on Thursday pledged to “double down” on literacy reforms in New York City’s public schools amid falling test scores and union backlash, calling into question whether students are really losing ground in reading.
“We don’t necessarily see that in some of the data that we track,” Samuels said at the annual City & State education summit in Battery Park City. It was the chancellor’s first public comment on data released at the end of last week that showed a troubling six-percentage-point decrease on state English Language Arts exams.
The decline nearly wiped out a seven-percentage-point increase in reading proficiency only a year prior.
“Typically, you see incremental progress or incremental decline,” the chancellor added. “That level of fluctuation is not — well, it’s pretty unprecedented.”
The reading scores are being closely watched as the city’s school system — the largest in the nation — embarks on its fourth year of a major literacy curriculum overhaul, known as NYC Reads. Through the program, superintendents choose a pre-approved course of study rooted in the “science of reading,” a research-backed approach to literacy instruction focused on phonics and comprehension.
As NYC Reads continues to expand to more schools and grade levels, state test results showed that just half of local students in grades 3 through 8 scored as proficient in reading — a drop from about 56% the school year before. Results for the youngest students, third graders, plunged 14 percentage points, with only 44% scoring proficient in the subject.
The data was markedly different from the results of literacy “screeners” used in the city’s classrooms, city education officials said. Those short, regular assessments — captured three times each school year and employed by teachers to help identify struggling readers — showed about three-percentage-point gains last school year, according to data referenced by the chancellor. Third graders even outpaced progress made across all grade levels, with an increase of nearly four percentage points.
Both the city and state education departments have promised to study the results and help students become stronger readers.
“We have a lot of work to do. We continue to have a lot of work to do to make sure that our kids are literate,” Samuels said at Thursday’s professional conference.
“If you know kids, and if you have any, you know that they’re reading less today than they did before. There’s too much going on. There are so many distractions, and we have to make sure that we are — because they’re not reading as much — we are focused in school (on students becoming fluent readers).”
“And so, we’re going to double down on that next year with our New York City Reads program.”
Through NYC Reads, the school system has been phasing in required curriculum over the last few school years at all elementary schools and into middle schools. The initiative is set to launch in some high schools for the first time next school year.
The reforms have so far benefited from the buy-in of the local teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers. But this week, UFT President Michael Mulgrew threatened to yank his support, critiquing not the curriculum mandates themselves, but contradictory supplements and paperwork. He blamed those requirements for the declining test scores.
Other experts have theorized the dramatic swings may have more to do with the state tests themselves than with student performance. New York State Education Department has defended the quality of its assessments.