Title: English Scores Drop For NYC Kids [theme music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More on the speech and the convention coming up later. Reading and math test scores for New York City 3rd through 8th graders came out this week, and we want to touch on this because it's very newsworthy. How did the students do? The short answer is that reading scores dipped and math scores rose, although both by small amounts. It's not just the students being tested, really, it's also the newly established reading curriculum and approach to reading for elementary schools.

Remember that? Eric Adams and Chancellor Banks's priority, going back to the old phonics approach to teaching kids how to read. To dig into the scores, what they tell us, and what they don't. We're joined by Alex Zimmerman, reporter at the education news website Chalkbeat New York. Alex, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Alex Zimmerman: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll open up the phones on this, especially for New York City Public School teachers and principals and parents. How did your class, or your school, or your child do on these tests? 212-433-WNYC. Is there a story to tell here that you think goes beyond your kid as an individual? Are you involved with the new reading curriculum? How is that going, teachers? Are kids catching up from the COVID lockdown gaps? Call us at 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692.

We always like to do call-ins and segments during the summer break. That gives teachers and other educators a particular chance to chime in that you may not have during the school year. Teachers of elementary school reading, in particular, this is for you or anyone else involved, including parents. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Alex, topline reading proficiency slipped below 50% and math moved up to over 53%. Either way, that's roughly half the students who are proficient. It doesn't seem great, but it's also not that much of a change, right?

Alex Zimmerman: Yes, that's right. Obviously, we've seen some fluctuation in scores, particularly, on the math side in the wake of the pandemic. I think one thing that is really worth keeping in mind when you look at these scores, especially when you're comparing the prior years, is the state has been constantly shifting how the exams are scored and they've changed the number of days that students take them over. This year there was a move to have more students take them on computers.

There have been a lot of shifts happening that may seem technical but can make it a little bit challenging to compare year over year. This school year, there wasn't a massive change in the exams compared to the year before. I think these are a little bit more reliable in making a year-over-year comparison. As you said, we saw a little bit of a divergence here in the reading and math scores, which is on reading, we saw a 2.6 decline, and in math, we saw a 3.5% point increase.

Brian Lehrer: On the reading scores, the Department of Education pointed to the change in curriculum from what was called balanced literacy to phonics or science of reading and said other school systems have also seen a drop in scores during the transition, but then long-term goals. We also have the confounding factor in trying to figure out what these scores really reflect that half of the schools made the switch in the last school year, the rest will this year, so there are two different groups of schools. Were the scores broken out to track those two groups separately?

Alex Zimmerman: Yes, they were. We actually did an analysis of our own. Last school year was the first year of this big reading curriculum overhaul. In about 15 of the city's 32 districts, the elementary schools were required to begin transitioning to the new curriculums. That leaves about 17 districts, a little more than half of them that are going to be transitioning this coming school year. When we broke out the 15 districts that used the new curriculums this past school year, they saw their average reading proficiency drop by about 3.5% points. In the districts that weren't covered by the new curriculum mandate, the drop was a little bit smaller at 2.8% points.

There are a couple of different ways you can slice the data. If you look at the school level, you see a similar pattern there, though the numbers are a little bit different, but in general, all the analyses point in the same direction, which is that the schools and districts that implemented the new curriculum saw slightly worse scores or slightly larger drops than the districts that had not yet implemented.

Brian Lehrer: Why would that be the case? Why would changing curriculum lead to lower test scores? Is it that teachers are still learning how to teach it?

Alex Zimmerman: Yes. There are a couple of things I would say to that. First is, I've reported, and other news outlets have, too. The beginning phases of the curriculum overhaul were pretty bumpy. They announced that schools were going to have to change to these new reading curriculums only about two months before the end of the school, so teachers didn't have a ton of time before the following fall to actually learn what these new curriculums look like to get a lot of training.

A lot of teachers, especially last fall, were implementing these new curriculums but hadn't yet gotten a ton of training on them. When I interviewed teachers back last fall, a lot of them were saying, we have these new materials, but we're building the plane as we're flying it and I think that leads to some bumpiness in implementation.

I do also want to make a broader methodological point, which is obviously the city would rather see these test scores increase across the board, but if you talk to experts in testing and assessment, they will tell you that it is really hard to use aggregate test scores to pinpoint the effect of any one particular policy. That's partly because the city didn't randomly assign which districts were going to start with these new curriculums first so there could be other variables in play that would affect those schools other than the curriculums that could be affecting test scores.

I just want to make that point, too. Obviously, in a rough sense, you might be able to make some conclusion here about the bumpiness of the rollout, and certainly, the city is acknowledging that that could be a factor. I do think that broader point about the test scores aren't necessarily totally dispositive on that either.

Brian Lehrer: As we're talking for another few minutes, and we're going to bring in some of your calls now about the new test scores that came out for New York City Public School students, particularly, the reading scores, which went down a little bit compared to the previous years as the new curriculum.

The new old curriculum was being rolled out as they went back to what's considered a more traditional way to teach reading, the phonics method, where you teach kids to sound out each letter or combination of letters as the main way to teach them to read. We're talking with Alex Zimmerman from the education news website Chalkbeat about this. Roberta in Inwood is calling in about this. Roberta, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.

Roberta: Hi there. I'm a speech therapist and I have a real interest in literacy, and I've worked in public schools, and also I'm working in a private school for a long time. There's two things to think about here. The first one is it's not enough to just say, "Okay, here's phonics. Six months later, done." It starts with phonemic awareness when a kid is preschool and you build an awareness of the sounds in the language and being able to discriminate the sounds and the individual sounds, and that translates into matching it to alphabet letters.

Then you're looking at blending letters and forming words and all that. This is a long process, and it doesn't happen the minute you go to phonics. The other thing to think about is they're looking at 3rd graders. If a kid has made it to the 3rd grade with what they call balanced literacy, which I'm also very familiar with, the problem with that program was that no matter what they said, they basically short-changed phonics. They looked at things like, can you figure it out from the picture? Can you figure it out from the context?

If you get a kid who's reached the 3rd grade who's basically been taught to read by guessing or doing free association, they have a set of habits that they have to basically unlearn before they can go back and pick up stuff that they should have been getting when they were three and four and five years old. I think when they turn around and say, "Oh, the ELA test scores, they went down." That's meaningless in the short term, I think. The teachers need to get used to the new curriculum, and it needs to be in place long enough for the kids to pick it up.

Brian Lehrer: I appreciate your clear description of the difference between the two approaches. It sounds like you think if they were measuring, which they don't at this young age, like kindergarten kids or 1st graders who didn't have the other approach before now, being given phonics, they'd probably be finding more success even now. Is that right?

Roberta: Yes, they should and they wouldn't be giving them a 3rd grade reading test. They'd be going like, can you parse out the sounds in a word? Can you figure out? When I say cat, what's in there? Because the way that language works, it goes down. You start with chunks of language, and you break it into sentences, and then you break it into words, and then you break it into individual phonemes, and then you match those phonemes to letters and you go back up to learn reading. This is a long process.

Brian Lehrer: Roberta, thanks. I'm going to leave it there for time. Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. Also point out that when we're talking about this year's 3rd graders, well, they were in pre-K in March of 2020. Remember March of 2020, and what started then? Then they were in kindergarten, the first full pandemic year when they were starting to learn to read. If you learn to read in kindergarten, largely on Zoom and maybe back and forth somewhat still in 1st grade, so there's that context. Here's a principal calling in. Joanna in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling, Joanna. Hi.

Joanna: Yes, hi. Thank you so much for having me on. I just wanted to share that my school in February of 2023 was named one of New York City's structured literacy pilot schools. Actually, we are located in District 15, which is one of the phase 2 schools for NYC reads, which means my district is not implementing the new curriculum until this coming school year, but because my school was named a pilot school, we actually implemented the new curriculum last school year. I just wanted to share a different story than what's being reported. We actually saw quite a dramatic rise in our test scores, our ELA test scores between 2023 and 2024, which was quite affirming to me.

Brian Lehrer: How do you explain it?

Joanna: I think that the new curriculum was, it helped our students, in particular, to develop their vocabulary as well as their writing skills as well as their reading comprehension skills, although it's a bit harder to measure on standardized tests. Our 3rd graders went from 83% proficient to 88% proficient this year. 4th graders went from 79% proficient to 86% proficient. Our 5th graders actually did not start the new curriculum last year, so I can't really speak to that.

As your previous caller was talking about, phonics skills are incredibly important to being able to read and comprehend well. We've had a consistent phonics curriculum for many years. Our last year's 3rd graders had the benefit of that despite being in kindergarten, during hybrid years.

Brian Lehrer: What would your experience tell you about what the previous caller described? Meaning if you don't start a kid out learning phonics, learning how to sound out individual letters and then putting them together with other letters and combinations of letters to read words, if you don't start out with that system, as opposed to the old system, if you start to transition a kid in 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, it's going to be much harder.

Joanna: Yes, I agree. It is going to be much harder. I think those students need intensive intervention if they're not decoding fluently by 3rd, 4th, 5th grade and beyond. I think the challenge is really what is the program that we're using in those grades and even beyond into middle school and high school, where you have lots of students who are not decoding proficiently because they need this intensive, quick intervention that's going to get them up to speed so that they can also work on the comprehension work and the writing work at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: Joanna, thank you so much for calling in. We're going to take one more, and this is a public school parent who apparently does not like the new curriculum. Alina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Alina.

Alina: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Hi, Alex, because I spent a lot of time on the phone with Alex through the past year fighting against this curriculum. He reported on our school, particularly, HMH. Our school was the only school so far to get a waiver from this curriculum. There's so much to be said about this conversation and so I'll try to make my points clear. I think the bigger picture is that the DOE is using the term science of reading to misrepresent a very vast and nuanced body of research that says, "Yes, you absolutely need explicit phonics instruction.

The science of reading is also clear that it is not a curriculum. It is an approach to reading. It is not one curriculum. HMH, for example, doesn't even have phonics in it. You're prescribing the content through these corporate entities that are making a lot of money when you should be training teachers in the actual science of reading and then having them apply that in their classrooms. The other big issue is the data piece. There exist tons of qualitative data, including speeches by our 5th and 6th graders, which I would love to share with your listeners saying, this curriculum is terrible.

We're not reading books. We had 5th and 6th graders at a PEP meeting telling the chancellor, "We'd like to read whole books." HMH does not have whole books. It has excerpts. It's a reader. We have teachers and parents and students, qualitative data saying, "We are not learning, we are bored. We want to read rich literature."

Brian Lehrer: Are you saying that you oppose the return to the phonics-based approach generally and that in your experience, that is paired with the elimination or the marginalization of reading rich literature?

Alina: No. Phonics is important, Brian. What I'm saying, the science of reading says you need responsive curriculum with structured phonics as part of it, but it does not specify content. These packaged curriculums are content. They're saying, what books you can and can't read and this is being used, by the way, in red states. Science of reading legislation is being used in red states to censor curriculum.

It's being used in blue states to clear market share for companies to just walk in and say, "We're based on the science of reading." The other issue is the city's saying these are evidence, facts. There is no research, no controlled studies that support the use. I'm talking about HMH, in particular, that say this works for a population like New York.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Alina, I'm going to have to leave it there because we're running out of time in the segment. Alex from Chalkbeat, of course, I want to give you the floor here to put Alina's critique into context based on your reporting. She said she's spoken to you as a reporter about this.

Alex Zimmerman: Yes. It is definitely true that one challenge for school districts, and making the shift to the science of reading is-- The caller is right. There isn't just a curriculum that is the science of reading and so if school districts just implement that, then they're golden. They have to make some difficult judgments about which curriculums they think line up the best with those practices. There isn't actually an enormous amount of research on which curriculum-- Translating the research to a curriculum and then gauging student outcomes based on that.

That's a squishier thing to do. That is definitely true. As the caller mentioned, there are differences of opinion with the three different curriculums that the city chose into reading, which is the most popular one and also definitely the most controversial among teachers, does have a more traditional approach where students are spending more time reading text excerpts. It's a little bit more densely packed. With some of the other curriculum, students are spending a little bit more time on fuller text. I'm not sure. There's an enormous amount of research that shows that one approach is definitely better than the other, but there are some important and subtle differences between--

Brian Lehrer: We just have 30 seconds. Is there some corporate influence here by companies that just want to sell stuff that link to the phonics curriculum or the phonics approach?

Alex Zimmerman: I do think it is worth noting that obviously curriculum companies do want to sell their curriculums to school districts. Into Reading, which is the most popular one, is created by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which did, I think, deploy a pretty savvy strategy in New York City, which was they made a lot of their materials free to schools during the pandemic. Once the city would begin mandating curriculums, Into Reading looked like a pretty good option because so many schools had been playing around with it a little bit during the pandemic. You could read that cynically or not, but I do think obviously these are companies that are trying to sell their materials, so they are trying to market them as widely as possible.

Brian Lehrer: Well, on to year two of reintegrating phonics into the New York City Public Schools as the main way they teach reading. We thank, Alex Zimmerman, reporter at the education news website Chalkbeat, New York. Alex, thanks a lot.

Alex Zimmerman: Thanks for having me.

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