NYC Reads! (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)

I spent most of my kindergarten year envious of Gina and Adam. These classmates had found the holy grail of learning: they could read.

Our teacher continually praised them for their intelligence — and dismissed mine. I remember thinking, “If someone would just show me how, I could read, too.”

Thankfully, my first-grade teacher helped me unlock the magic code by explaining that letters stood for sounds that then blended together into words.

Year after year, hundreds of thousands of students in our city’s public schools experience the same frustration I felt decades ago in kindergarten. They want to learn how to read. But many do not get the instruction they need.

Fewer than half of New York City kids are proficient readers, and the percentage dips as low as one in five in some schools. But we finally have a mayor, Eric Adams, and a city schools chancellor, David Banks, with the courage to acknowledge that the city’s reading instruction has been failing for decades. Even better, they plan to fix it. Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks recently announced they will require all but a handful of schools to use one of three reading curricula that the Department of Education has vetted — all of which include phonics instruction.

Banks is doing what others have been afraid to do, and the city’s young people will benefit, hopefully for decades to come.

That said, although phonics instruction is necessary to teach reading, it alone is not sufficient to develop proficient and engaged readers. 

A decade ago, The New York Community Trust began distributing approximately $35 million from Brooke Astor’s estate to improve reading instruction in early grades. Our investments demonstrated that the city’s teachers can provide excellent reading instruction and that students who are often wrongly written off as incapable can become proficient readers. 

We funded 18 city nonprofits that worked with teachers to improve reading instruction in more than 200 schools and early childhood centers across all five boroughs. An extensive external evaluation by Metis Associates found that, on average, the portion of students reading on grade level in participating schools increased 15 percentage points.

Beyond phonics instruction, several factors contributed to the success of the reading instruction supported by our grants.

First, high-quality reading instruction expands students’ background knowledge (what they know about the world around them), vocabulary (words and their meaning), and oral language skills (speaking and listening). After all, sounding out the word “emergency” does not do much good if you do not know what it means. 

Every person in a child’s life can contribute to these skills.The Trust helped after-school programs provide enriching experiences that improved students’ knowledge and vocabularies.

In the “Ready Readers” program for early elementary students, after-school staff learned to read aloud for at least two hours a week using proven techniques to build students’ skills. They then reinforced students’ knowledge and vocabularies with art, games, and field trips. ReadWorks and New York University developed materials for teachers and students that incorporated rich vocabulary and built students’ knowledge of the world. Fixing reading instruction in our city is an all-hands-on-deck endeavor that should involve every one of the city’s programs for kids. 

Second, reading instruction is a science. We saw success where teachers had opportunities to work together and with expert coaches to learn more about the science and get feedback on what was happening in their classrooms.

Just like any other scientific endeavor, teachers benefitted from resources that allowed them to collect and analyze data about students’ progress. Teaching Matters and New Visions for Public Schools worked together to build a system to help teachers assess students’ progress and figure out where early readers were getting stuck. Regular student assessments, digital tools to track and analyze results, and professional development resources helped teachers design instruction to meet the specific needs of their students.

Finally, nonprofits incorporated the assets that multilingual learners brought to the classroom. And several grantees incorporated literature that reflected the racial and cultural diversity of the city’s public school students. If the city’s chosen curricula do not address the diversity of its students, supplemental programs developed by nonprofit groups and academic experts can help fill the gap.

The Department of Education has started on a systemic path to making sure the city’s kids can read. Ensuring adequate phonics instruction is the first and right step. If the city incorporates phonics into a more comprehensive effort that expands students’ background knowledge, vocabulary, and oral language skills, and gives teachers the time and tools they need to monitor and understand their students’ progress, it will finally prove that all New York’s kids can learn to read well.

We just need to show them how.

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Shawn V. Morehead is vice president for grants at The New York Community Trust. On Twitter @NYCommTrust.