The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books
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Recently, an old friend of mine from elementary school ran a hand over my bookshelf, stopped, and said, “You stole this.”
“I did not!”
“Yes, you did. You totally stole it from school.”
She pulled out my copy of The Once and Future King, and showed me the inside of the front cover. It was stamped: Board of Education, City of New York.
Okay, so I stole it. But I had a good reason. I loved that book so much; I couldn’t bear to return it to the school library.
My grade-school memories are full of books: bulletin boards that tracked the class read-a-thons, hand-written book reports, summer-reading lists. But a student growing up, as I did, in New York City’s District 20 will have a very different experience today. The city has adopted a new literacy regimen under which many public elementary schools are, in effect, giving up the teaching of books—storybooks, narrative nonfiction books, children’s chapter books—altogether. The curriculum is part of an initiative from Eric Adams’s administration called, ironically, NYC Reads.
[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]
Plummeting reading comprehension is a , but it’s particularly acute in New York City. Half of its third to eighth graders—and 60 percent of those who are Black and Latino—cannot . Although COVID drove those numbers down, a big factor has been the much-lambasted pedagogical method known as balanced literacy, which grew out of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Embraced by the city and then much of the nation back in 2003, balanced literacy attempted to teach kids to read not through
