In just a few weeks, classroom doors will reopen across New York City.
Yet, during a time that should be marked by energy and excitement, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew made headlines in sending a disappointing message to educators, advocates, and families. He threatened to withdraw the union’s support for NYC Reads, perhaps the city’s most promising education initiative in decades.
Fortunately, Chancellor Kamar Samuels responded by saying he’s doubling down on NYC Reads. And he’s right to do so. The city needs leaders who will commit to building on NYC Reads and doing the hard work of improving student reading outcomes and strengthening the tools and support educators receive.
For years, New York City teachers navigated a broken and fragmented instructional system. Curricula varied from school to school. Assessments weren’t necessarily connected to what teachers were teaching. Intervention systems for students who needed additional support were inconsistent. And professional learning too often sat apart from the materials educators actually used in their classrooms.
NYC Reads is an effort to address that fragmentation and improve student reading outcomes by building a more coherent system around what research has shown works: high-quality curriculum with aligned professional learning, assessments, and interventions.
That work isn’t finished, but the evidence suggests that meaningful progress has been made since NYC Reads was first adopted three years ago. At Educators for Excellence, we have surveyed educators throughout the implementation of NYC Reads. In our latest pulse check, 75% said the implementation support they received from their district was effective. Teacher confidence has increased as they spend more time with their curriculum.
The city’s own 2026 teacher survey data indicates that 95% of principals said their district had established a coherent strategy for literacy instruction. This collectively explains why educators have met with the chancellor and explicitly called to keep, improve, sustain, and grow the initiative. They’re seeing encouraging signs of progress.
Critics might dismiss this evidence and instead point to recent headlines, which focused on the six-point decline in this year’s state ELA scores. But as researcher Emily Oster has argued, the extraordinary statewide spike in 2025 and its immediate reversal this year raise serious questions about whether those results accurately reflected changes in student learning. And it makes a single-year change a shaky basis for judging a three-year initiative that is still being phased in.
Examine the full three-year trends, and the picture looks quite different. Across grades 3-8, 50.3% of city students were proficient in ELA this year, compared with 49.1% in 2024. And the city’s literacy screener data, a separate measure of student proficiency, showed the share of students meeting benchmarks rose steadily from 40.6% in 2024, to 42.7% in 2025, to 45.6% this year.
Teachers need stronger supplemental materials, particularly for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Assessments and interventions should become even more streamlined and coherent. And the city must continue investing in professional learning and implementation support. But those are arguments for doubling down on NYC Reads, improving implementation, and permanently funding this critical effort, not abandoning or withdrawing from it.
Before classroom doors reopen, it’s noteworthy that the chancellor has already committed to giving teachers what they need, fixing what is not working, and continuing the hard work until every child can read. Other leaders would be wise to follow. The UFT helped make this shift possible. Now it should work alongside the city to make it better.
Stone is co–founder and CEO of Educators for Excellence.