Over the last two years New York City has done something rare: it told every public school exactly how to teach reading and math, ending decades of letting schools pick their own approach. Then last summer the scores went up, and the city claimed the win. The researchers are not so sure it earned it.
The mandates are sweeping. NYC Reads requires every elementary school to use one of three city-chosen reading curriculums built on phonics and the science of reading. NYC Solves forces a single math curriculum, Illustrative Mathematics, on 420 high schools, with dozens of middle schools also adopting it, backed by $34 million, a response to an achievement gap in which barely a third of Black and Latino students were proficient against more than two-thirds of white students.
Then came the scoreboard. After the first full year, 2025 state test scores rose, to about 56 percent proficient in reading and 57 percent in math, and the Adams administration treated it as proof the mandates worked. The problem is that the gains are hard to pin on the curriculum: scores rose across the whole state by a similar amount, and the city ran an aggressive test-prep push aimed at students just below the passing line.
Outside experts have said as much. Reading researcher Timothy Shanahan warned the early gains may be meaningless, noting scores were already climbing before the changes and that it is far too soon to credit the mandates. The math rollout, meanwhile, drew an open revolt: UFT President Michael Mulgrew said the city has a mess on its hands and that teachers across the city expect the curriculum to hurt students.
None of that means the mandates are failing, and standardizing instruction has real arguments behind it. But the gap between the claim and the evidence is the story: a city declared a curriculum victory on the back of a one-year score bump that statewide trends, test prep and the experts all suggest it cannot yet take credit for. And it is doubling down, extending the mandate this year to require a reading-intervention program in every school.
If you want to judge it for your own kid rather than from a press release, the state posts test results school by school, and the city posts which curriculum each school uses. Those two together let you see whether your school’s scores actually moved, and whether the change tracks the new curriculum or just the citywide tide.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
