Mayor’s regressive school reform plans
Certain aspects of Eric Adams’ education agenda are racially regressive and demeaning to our most vulnerable children, and I can no longer hold my peace. I realize I am swimming against the tide. The administration has been lauded for recent reform moves, including expanding rather than rethinking gifted-and-talented programs and a supposed overdue embrace of the science of reading. But there’s less to these and other policies than meets the eye.
A return to phonics-based instruction is not in itself egregious. However, once you ask what the policy is responding to — a so-called “reading crisis” in the city — one quickly understands that the administration’s policy pivot is not the right answer.
The Adams administration’s presumption that “we’ve been teaching reading all wrong” is based on the fallacy that the city’s chronic struggle to close social and racial gaps in literacy proficiency is about instruction and, therefore, ultimately about teachers not doing their jobs well enough. While there is good research behind the science of reading, most of this research deals with teaching reading to students who are engaged or otherwise present for instruction.
So what are we missing? We’re missing the fact that reading instruction in New York City is not just about reading instruction. It’s about politics. Instead of submitting to the political moment and effectively throwing its teachers under the bus, the Adams administration might get better educational results by focusing on things such as student attendance and the other key systemic issues that have led to chronic disengagement.
That is, a more relevant reading policy for New York City might be an attendance policy that focuses on responding to the actual human needs of students pushed away from the system to get them back into classrooms or on other social equity policies that create conditions that foster care and deeper academic engagement.
The administration’s backward thinking on reading instruction is but one instance in a pattern of policy faux pas that few are critiquing.
Another issue is the administration’s plan to expand on a movement to provide separate programs and schools for dyslexic youngsters. As both history and research have shown, the idea of segregating our most vulnerable students from the supports and services offered to other students has never been a good idea. In previous iterations of this idea, the creation of separate schools robbed our most vulnerable students of rich opportunities to learn and grow in inclusive and less-restrictive education environments.
Separate schooling for the vulnerable has also proven to be a key tactic driving institutional racism.
History suggests that such schools become dumping grounds for displaced students of color, mostly boys and young men (but not exclusively).
We also know that the rate at which we misdiagnose disabilities or learning differences leaves ample room for concern. There is a history of herding Black and Brown students into such settings, concentrating their vulnerability instead of offering the resources necessary to interrupt it. We know that the students most likely to be harmed in such settings are those who come from homes that speak languages other than English, students who live in precarious housing situations, economically less advantaged students, and students who suffer post-traumatic episodes due to the intensity and regularity of social injustices littered throughout their lives. Each of these groups of students tends to be predominantly of color.
This isn’t it, though.
The administration has also doubled down on its commitment to separate and unequal education with respect to its position on the city’s specialized high schools and gifted and talented programs. Both Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks are on the record saying that the administration plans to make more of these schools and programs — a far cry from progressive advocates’ pleas to the administration to replace them with something better.
The administration’s argument is that expanding the current flawed and deeply inequitable system will somehow magically fix it. However, if you expand specialized high schools or gifted and talented programs without fixing the underlying issues of racial and social bias, you simply enlarge the problem. The plan the administration proposes will create more segregation and greater stratification in New York City, not less.
The education policy agenda of the administration is more about politics and optics, than about enhancing education and delivering more equitable results. What the administration’s policy agenda boils down to is fixing vulnerable people as opposed to fixing systems that leave people vulnerable. There is a difference.
Why should the city further invest in a series of throwback ideas of an imperfect policy past; we’ve done phonics-based reading instruction along with segregated schooling in the past, and in the past, our most vulnerable children have suffered? Why, then, if these policies didn’t work yesterday, should we be confident that they will today?