New York City Mayor Eric Adams has cut school spending over the past three years, and students’ test scores have risen dramatically. One big reason is that he abandoned the progressive educational theories of recent decades and insisted on old-fashioned phonics and vocabulary lessons.
There are a lot of moving parts and question marks here, and it’s too early to declare the spending cuts or the reading gains real. At a minimum, though, everyone should take a good look at Adams’s educational reforms and think about how so many school systems were led astray for so long on how to teach students to read.
The story tells us about more than just reading lessons and educational fads. It also tells us about multiculturalism run amok, family collapse, and modern progressive Democrats’ efforts to formalize into government programs what needs to be done informally at the family and community level.
Adams’s reforms
A year ago, most New York City public school students in third through eighth grade couldn’t read at grade level: Only 49% scored “proficient” in standardized tests. The latest test results show the balance has flipped, and now 57% can read proficiently, according to new test results.
Adams and his administration attribute the success to the new reading curriculum, and there’s some evidence to back this up: Reading gains were most dramatic among the younger grades — those using the new reading curriculum.
“There was an 11.6 percentage point jump in reading proficiency among students in grades 3-5 who were in the first phase of schools that started using the new curriculums two years ago,” the education news site Chalkbeat reported. “Among the second phase of schools, which implemented the curriculum changes last year, reading scores increased 10.4 percentage points.”
(Also, black and Hispanic students had much larger gains from 2024 than white or Asian students.)
These test scores could boost Adams in his reelection bid. He faces an uphill battle, running as an independent while socialist millennial Zohran Mamdani carries the Democratic Party mantle. The rising scores are a rebuke to Adams’s critics in the progressive establishment.
The New York Civil Liberties Union, for instance, attacked Adams for endangering “students’ futures” by proposing spending cuts a few years back.
“The sweeping cuts — estimated to top $300 million across 1,200 schools — demonstrate plainly the dangers of giving near total control over education to a mayor who does not value education.”
“It just shows how little the City Council Members and Mayor Adams care about our schools and the well-being of students,” one NYCLU “youth organizer” said.
Adams walked back some of his proposed cuts, but even so, per-pupil spending was lower this year than when Adams came to power. The fiscal 2022 per-pupil spending in New York City Public Schools was nearly $36,000, adjusted for inflation, compared to $32,000 in fiscal 2025.
Clearly, these spending cuts did not translate into learning loss.
Caution is in order when celebrating these scores, of course. The jump in reading is large enough to wonder if there is some sort of other explanation besides improved instruction. Also, one year of improvement could be statistical noise.
But it’s worth considering whether New York students can read better because the schools abandoned trendy progressive reading programs for good old-fashioned phonics and vocabulary drills.
Progressive education
In the 1970s, education theorists denigrated systemic, direct instruction, especially “drilling” and memorizing.
When it came to reading and writing, they argued that vocabulary drills and phonics (learning which letters make which sounds) were deadening to students. “Whole Language” education was the new approach. Teachers were supposed to help immerse students in texts and words and let children take a more active approach to learning language.
This student-centric, as opposed to teacher-centric, instruction became very popular in the 1990s, championed by Lucy Calkins of Columbia University. She sprinkled a bit of phonics into the Whole Language stew, called it “Balanced Literacy,” and convinced school systems across the country to adopt it.
One New York Times writer noted of Calkins that when it came to teaching children to read and write, “she never once used the words ‘vocabulary,’ ‘knowledge,’ or ‘analysis.’”
The Whole Language and Balanced Literacy approaches were considered enlightened and progressive. They were feted by educational elites and some in the media. The emphasis on self-directed reading was seen as “freeing children from mass instruction.”
Brooklyn College, a New York teaching school, was one hub of Whole Language. The dean of the school bragged in the pages of the New York Times that the Balanced Literacy approach was “research-based.”
The city pushed Balanced Literacy on all the schools in the school district, backed by big bucks from liberal foundations.
Eli and Edythe Broad, prominent Democratic donors, ran the Broad Foundation and backed school districts around the country that pushed the Balanced Literacy approach.
Balanced Literacy appealed to progressive Democrats on many grounds. “Drilling” — that is, practicing and memorizing — grammar and vocabulary was seen as old-fashioned. It was the sort of stuff that nuns used to do before rapping your knuckles with a ruler.
Multiculturalism and racial politics also played a role. Black and Hispanic students regularly tested worse than white and Asian students. Whole Language and Balanced Literacy provided an excuse and a supposed solution: Black kids had a harder time learning to read, the argument went, because they weren’t being presented with “culturally relevant” texts.
“Related to multicultural education,” one academic study stated, “culturally relevant pedagogy seeks to include groups that have been previously excluded by traditional approaches within the educational system, especially within the curriculum.”
Also, simple partisanship played a role. When George W. Bush came into office in 2001, his No Child Left Behind Act was derided by liberal commentators as pushing hoary, old methods.
The Washington Post relayed the attack that NCLB “pushes onto the nation’s schools certain commercial programs,” meaning phonics.
The Washington Post argued, in language now very familiar, that the progressive approach was endorsed by the experts.
“Experts say the key to teaching vocabulary is creating an environment rich in words — in school and at home — where definitions of words are discussed in the context of their use.”
But since the early 2000s, nearly all the science has shown the opposite: Phonics and direct instruction help kids learn to read, and Whole Language and Balanced Literacy leave them behind.
Adams, following the science, has tried to turn around the ship of New York schools. That’s good news. Hopefully, other school systems follow. But there’s still a deeper lesson here.
You cannot replace the home
Some of the reasoning behind Whole Language and Balanced Literacy instruction rests on real wisdom and solid observations.
When it comes to literacy, what matters far more than the classroom environment is the home environment. Children do best when they are raised in stable homes, with loaded bookshelves, parents who read to them, and lots of adult vocabulary as part of the everyday environment.
This all points to immersion and environment mattering more than lectures. It’s obvious that children need to love reading and to take it up themselves to become good readers and writers.
Whole Language and Balanced Literacy were attempts to import the conditions of a literate home into the classroom.
Put more starkly: Calkins and other progressive educators wanted to create a classroom that could replace the home. While this might sound absurd, it’s actually just a specific instance of a broader progressive project: replacing the organic, local, communal, and familial with formal government programs.
Consider Democrats’ answer to the baby bust: universal day care. That is, they want as many children as possible in government-funded and regulated formal child care centers. It’s an extension of their fight for universal pre-K.
For children being raised by single mothers, particularly those without a strong network of familial or community support, such programs fill a massive gap. But in trying to make it universal, whether in pursuit of equality or some other aim, they are trying to formalize the natural, organic systems of support. Universal day care and pre-K could even say they are trying to create a formal, universal replacement for the parent-child relationship.
Ross Douthat put it well in an essay for Plough a few years back. “Families … supply goods that few alternative arrangements can hope to match. No public program could have replaced the network of relatives that helped my grandfather live independently until his death. … No classroom is likely to supply the education in living intimately with other human beings that my children gain from growing up together — even if the virtue of forbearance is not always perfectly manifest in their interactions.”
Much of the liberal project is an attempt to make public the privilege of an intact family or a tight-knit community.
Ironically, it’s Democrats and liberals who argue this most forcefully when it comes to policing.
“The best way you can actually address public safety is [having] a community that knows each other, have a community that fights for each other,” as Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) put it.
Nothing can replace a good home and a tight-knit community — not even $30,000 per student. Understanding that, Adams has decided the school system should stick to what it can do and drill the basics. That common sense seems to be paying off.