After New York City school leaders overhauled literacy instruction, educators had hoped to see the changes reflected in higher test scores. Last year, the scores did improve, jumping seven points on the state’s reading exams.
This year is a different story.
Reading test scores dropped six points for public schoolchildren who took the exams in the spring, nearly erasing the previous gains and representing a stark setback in the city’s efforts to improve literacy by changing how students learn to read. The declines were drastic in some grades: a 14-point decrease among third graders, wiping out the previous year’s increases in that grade, and a 13-point dip for fifth graders.
About half of the students demonstrated proficiency on reading exams, the city’s school system announced on Friday. The drop extended across all parts of New York and underscored the persistent achievement gaps among some demographic groups. About two-thirds of white and Asian test takers were proficient in reading compared with 36 percent of Hispanic students, the school district’s largest racial or ethnic group. About 42 percent of Black students demonstrated proficiency, a drop of five points from last year.
Scores on math tests did not experience similar fluctuations. About 57 percent of children were proficient, a small increase.
Education experts and advocacy groups said that the decline in reading scores among students in America’s largest public school system was concerning and called on school leaders to double down on literacy reforms. They cautioned against drawing conclusions about the reforms based on this year’s results.
Education officials in New York City called the downturn, which mirrored sharp decreases for students statewide, unprecedented and promised a full review. At the same time, city officials pointed to small but consistent improvements in the results from the district’s own reading exams, which are different from the state tests and, they said, offered signs that students were becoming better readers.
“These results raise important questions and deserve careful, rigorous analysis so we can ensure we’re measuring what students are learning,” Kamar Samuels, the city schools chancellor, said in a statement.
Mr. Samuels and Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to stay the course on the district’s new reading program, which had been gradually rolled out to all elementary schools in recent years. It emphasizes phonics and the teaching of other skills, including vocabulary, abandoning outdated strategies such as encouraging students to guess words based on pictures.
“Across the nation, we’ve seen transformative literacy rates using the pedagogy we know works, and we will continue to pursue that same approach,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement.
More than 300,000 students in grades three through eight sit for the state tests, which are taken on a computer.
Arlen Benjamin-Gomez, the executive director of EdTrust-New York, an advocacy group, said that she had been skeptical of the seven-point gain on the reading exams last year and regarded this year’s drop with similar wariness. She said that the changes in literacy instruction would be more likely to produce steady, smaller improvements, not wild fluctuations.
“You usually don’t see such dramatic swings from one year over to the next,” Ms. Benjamin-Gomez said. “This is more of a reflection of something with the state assessment than it’s a reflection of student learning and growth.”
The State Education Department said that while the exam questions had changed from the previous year, the standards of what students should know had not. The agency said that it would conduct an analysis of the reading exam results.
“For years, the department has faced competing accusations that state assessments are intentionally made easier or harder to produce a preferred outcome,” J.P. O’Hare, a department spokesman, said in a statement. “These results demonstrate that the data is just that, data. We report them transparently, whether they reflect progress or setbacks.”
Howard T. Everson, a professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and the former chairman of a committee that advises the state on testing, said the sharp declines could be explained by several factors. The test could have gotten harder, or there could have been a mismatch between what had been taught in class and what was tested.
“It should be investigated for sure,” he said.
Michael J. Kieffer, a professor of literacy education at New York University, said that the city’s school system was moving in the right direction with its reading program. But he said that improving a child’s reading abilities required not just foundational skills such as phonics but also the expansion of a child’s vocabulary and world knowledge.
He noted that the district’s own exams and the state exams assessed different abilities. The district exams measure foundational skills and are used by teachers to adjust instruction. Taken over two days, the state tests evaluate reading comprehension and include multiple-choice questions and writing.
“The efforts have been pretty focused on phonics to a large extent, so I think there’s more to be done in the area of building up rich language and building toward reading comprehension,” Professor Kieffer said. “The city is aware of that and is thinking about that.”
