NYC Schools Chancellor says students need more phonics in order to read

Chancellor David Banks is calling for an overhaul of how children learn to read in the city’s public schools, saying the approach many schools use isn’t working. 

In an interview with Gothamist, Banks said he wants to move toward what experts call “the science of reading” which focuses on the rigorous teaching of phonics. 

He also plans to replace a popular curriculum from Columbia University’s Teachers College that critics argue is not sufficiently based on evidence, fails to adequately teach phonics and can create bad habits by encouraging students to guess words by using pictures, patterns and memorization. 

“Far too many of our kids do not have a solid, foundational core in literacy,” Banks said. “We’ve got to do things differently than we’ve been doing them because we’re not getting the results that we need.” 

Banks frequently notes that around 65% of Black and Latino students did not score proficient in reading on the grades 3-8 state tests leading up to the pandemic. 

Now, after a year and a half of disrupted learning, national data from standardized tests and assessments indicate children have fallen even farther behind. 

“It’s a crisis,” said Katharine Pace Miles, a professor of Early Literacy Development at Brooklyn College. 

A popular but “not as impactful” curriculum

There is no required or universal curriculum in the city’s public schools; different schools, and sometimes different teachers within schools, use different strategies. 

Banks has said he believes schools, especially successful ones, should have some autonomy over how they educate students. But when it comes to literacy, he said he wants to phase out the very popular Units of Study curriculum developed by Lucy Calkins, the founding director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. The think-tank developed Units of Study, which is widely used in the U.S. and beyond, and offers professional development for educators. During the Bloomberg Administration, thousands of city teachers were trained in the approach.

“Lucy Calkins’ work, if you will, has not been as impactful as we had expected and thought and hoped that it would have been,” Banks said. He added the education department will not ask schools to pull the Calkins curriculum or any other before they offer a replacement. 

As Chalkbeat NY reported this week, some schools have already moved to replace that curriculum, citing concerns about its efficacy, but doing so requires retraining teachers in addition to purchasing new materials. 

In recent years, academics and education journalists have increasingly raised alarms about some of the most widely-used strategies to teach children to read, including the Calkins program. The critics argue these curricula, sometimes referred to as “balanced literacy,” do not provide ample opportunity to practice letter-sound relationships, especially now that brain scans have confirmed that decoding words – sounding them out – is the essential building block of reading. 

Balanced literacy programs do include some phonics, but critics say the balance of balanced literacy is off. For example, Calkins’…