
As the 2023-2024 school year comes to a close, here in New York City many folks are bracing for big changes to reading curriculum that are coming in the fall. The city’s adoption of “Science of Reading” based curriculum materials have generated fraught headlines around the “pivot to phonics” and away from “balanced literacy.”
As someone coaching teachers on the new approach through NYC Reads, I’d like to assert that we are going to make it through this transition, and that the curriculum details are a minor part of our future success. I believe we will come out better on the other side — because leadership is more important than curriculum.
I’m not trivializing the magnitude of this shift. Chancellor David Banks has identified poor literacy outcomes and major inequities in the system; big changes are needed. But New York City teachers are notorious for expertly managing waves of reform by prioritizing on their students’ needs over changes that can seem like another fad. I’ve heard a fair amount of that talk this year; people aren’t fooled when some of yesterday’s top-down prohibitions have become todays’ mandates, and vice versa.
However, the intentions behind NYC Reads are nuanced and serious, and some elements deserve to stick around. The “Science of Reading” is not a fad. It is a body of reliable academic findings, concerning far more than phonics, assembled over a half century of research. It identifies five key literacy areas, among them phonics. What news stories miss is that research gives equal weight to fluency, comprehension and vocabulary, much more familiar elements of our previously ascendent approach.
It’s hard to improve and align a large system in all these areas at once. The mayor and chancellor had each district choose from among three pre-approved curricula. These tools have predictably become a target of vitriol. But I think that attention is misplaced. We all know what I heard from one of the principals I work with: “If there was a magic curriculum that did it all, we would all be using it and everything would be perfect.”
I started my coaching relationships with teachers by saying, “The textbook writers don’t know your children, so don’t turn their learning over to them. You need to know your students, and then master and make the best use of these tools in accordance with the research.” Still, fear about not following these programs precisely has hung over teachers in some schools like a shadow.
Here’s a middle way of managing this reform. What if school leaders focused on developing teacher understanding of the research, allowing for the use of curriculum tools from a common understanding and the data-driven needs of their own school community, rather than on implementing some publisher’s idea of a good lesson plan with exacting fidelity? I have found some district-mandated definitions of “fidelity,” following teacher guides and curriculum scripts with a rigid pacing and daily structure, to be a major distraction to teachers. When today’s changes are over, and districts inevitably move on from whatever are their initial rules of implementation, what can and should remain is a renewed commitment to research-based instruction at each school, irrespective of curriculum format.
So how do educators build capacity around the research in the pursuit of equity?
Principals can have significant control over this question, by working within and at the edges of their authority. They can establish and support a vision of teachers as mini-instructional leaders in their classrooms. Schools where teachers are merely following directions and scripts graduate students who do the same. Teachers inculcate the higher order thinking that our workforce now requires when they have the end in mind, and, bolstered by a collaborative faculty and staff community, the ability to shift curriculum materials to meet the needs of and to challenge their students.
School leaders ought to take advantage of this shift by applying their knowledge of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion principles and Culturally Responsive and Sustaining practices to literacy work, efforts that are mutually supportive with reading research. For example, the approved HMH Into Reading text sets lack appropriate perspectives, but the DOE has invested millions of dollars in culturally diverse texts through its Mosaic and Hidden Voices initiatives. Teachers must have the guidance and the freedom to replace narrowly focused texts and supplement others with materials that represent the full picture of American history and culture. Familiar ideas of diversity have taken on a new urgency in our city with the influx of migrants hungry for learning from disparate parts of the world.
Principals must navigate guardrails and maximize their autonomy as instructional leaders by giving district leaders what they need. School leaders can provide data and authentic feedback to districts about what’s working and not working, allowing superintendents to channel a synthesis up the ladder of authority to the central offices. With effective capacity building, districts can loosen mandates with confidence, knowing that the exact practices may differ from school to school but that the overall direction will be unified and research-based.
I believe our city’s teachers can fulfill the promise of becoming a high quality professional learning community. By and large sophisticated and experienced with master’s degrees and a well of positive relationships in their school communities, they are prepared to internalize the research base.
The most obvious element, teaching multi-sensory, sequential phonics, may be the low hanging fruit of this whole reform. There is a stereotype that “balanced literacy” omits phonics. However, in a national survey of early childhood instructors, 52% of respondents defined balanced literacy as including phonics, and 21% included phonemic awareness, another essential pillar of the science.
New York State offers a starting point for administrators, teachers and families to prepare for these shifts with a small compendium of easily digestible, focused research briefs that lay out important aspects of this knowledge.
In closing, I am optimistic because I believe in our city’s teachers and school leaders. While districts can guide, teachers can do the research, and family members can ask questions and consume what’s in the news, there is simply no replacement for the most important lever to make the opportunity of the moment outlast the fad: effective, organized and community-minded, building-level leadership.
Steven Evangelista, a lifelong New York City resident and a product of New York City public schools, is a father of two living in Manhattan. He has been a teacher, school leader and adjunct professor of education and is currently coaching public school teachers in literacy and culturally responsive and sustaining education through Teaching Matters.