The discussion on NY Inspires, the state’s ambitious plan to overhaul secondary education, centered on the decision to decouple the state’s Regents exams as a graduation requirement, beginning in the 2027-28 school year. Students will still take the exams, administered , to meet federal accountability rules. But graduation will no longer be tied to scores.

While EdTrust-New York supports additional flexibility for graduation requirements, we are deeply concerned the state is moving forward with this change without putting an alternative system in place to measure whether students are ready for success after high school. 

Now is not the time for New York to weaken the state’s only objective measure of high school readiness. Doing so could mask the deep challenges facing our schools and students while making it even harder for parents, employers and colleges to determine whether students have the skills they need to succeed after graduation. 

State, national and international data show that New York students continue to struggle with reading and math. In 2025, the state’s graduation rate reached 85%, yet only 56% of students passed the Algebra 1 Regents Exam. And on the 2024 NAEP, only 31% of 8th graders entering high school were proficient in reading. Just this week, the that U.S. 15-year-olds scored near their lowest levels in reading and math since 2000. 

These numbers reveal a clear disconnect between the assessment data showing a math and literacy crisis, and what the New York State Education Department (NYSED) considers college and career readiness.  

Standardized assessments such as Regents exams are far from perfect. But they are not responsible for New York’s poor reading and math outcomes. Simply changing graduation requirements will not solve the underlying problem: New York is failing to prepare its students — particularly Black and Latinx students, students from low-income households, students with disabilities and multilingual learners — with the foundational skills they need for post-secondary success.  

Even more alarming than the policy itself is the poor roll out of NY Inspires. As the new school year gets underway, schools still face significant confusion and a lack of guidance about how they will measure proficiency in core high school subjects instead of Regents exams for current high school students in less than a year. 

If the state Education Department truly wants to create a new graduation standard and position New York as a national leader preparing students to become 21st Century learners, it should not eliminate Regents exams as a graduation requirement without first establishing a credible alternative. State leaders should provide schools with clear expectations, reliable measures and the resources they need before they weaken an existing statewide standard.  

When state leaders roll out poorly thought-out policies, the students most likely to suffer are those whom our school system already serves least well. New York should also learn from the experiences of states such as Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, which attempted similar competency-based graduation reforms before scaling them back or abandoning them amid concerns about equity, inconsistent definitions of proficiency and an inadequate educator capacity and training. 

The state should pause the implementation of NY Inspires, including the elimination of Regents exams as a graduation requirement. Before moving forward, the department should make a concerted effort to provide schools with the guidance, rubrics, and statewide calibrations they need to implement NY Inspires effectively, equitably and transparently. 

New York can and should rethink how it measures student readiness. But it should not remove the measuring stick before it has built a better one.

New York City is expected to release its school policy for artificial intelligence on Wednesday, with a ban on student-facing AI tools for 2-K through eighth grade, according to four people briefed on the plans and Education Department documents obtained by Chalkbeat.

Under the new rules, the youngest children in the nation’s largest school system — those in its early childhood programs, elementary schools, and middle schools — would not have access to generative AI, including chatbots and AI tutors, sources said.

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The guidelines bar schools from giving individual devices to students in preschools through second grade, though classrooms will be allowed to have smart boards, sources said. For students in grades 3 to 5, the policy recommends limiting screen time on individual devices to 30 minutes and 45 minutes for middle school students.

High schoolers are expected to have restricted access to AI, but might be able to use it for literacy, career readiness programs, and in five pilot programs at an unspecified number of schools, according to the Daily News, . Screen time recommendations depend on subject matter and school approach.

The restrictions would represent a significantly more aggressive stance against AI and screen time in schools than the city had taken. Education leaders across the country are likely to be watching as they also grapple with how students should interact with the fast-changing technology.

“Younger students need hands-on learning, social interaction, play, and teacher-guided instruction,” Education Department officials wrote in a presentation outlining the policy obtained by Chalkbeat. “Routine individual screen use can crowd out those experiences.”

In high school, the presentation continued, “students need guided preparation for a world and economy increasingly driven by AI and new technologies -paired with instruction on how AI works, its biases and risks, and how to evaluate its outputs.”

Teachers will be allowed to use approved AI tools for such instructional tasks as lesson planning, translation, and drafting communications, according to the presentation. They will not be allowed to use the technology for grading, behavior monitoring, counseling, or developing special education plans.

City officials are in the process of creating a task force that will offer input on the policy’s implementation going forward, multiple people briefed on the Education Department’s plans said.

An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Multiple people said there would be some exceptions to the policy to account for regular assessments in reading and math that students typically complete on computers, as well as for some student groups, including English language learners and students with disabilities.

When the city unveiled its preliminary AI guidelines in March, forcing the city to rethink its approach and delay its timeline for a comprehensive policy by about two months, leaving little time for schools to prepare for the change before the first day on Sept. 10. It’s unclear how the Education Department plans to enforce the policy.

The initial guidance used a traffic-light framework to delineate risk levels of different AI uses in the classroom, mainly by teachers. Student AI use — one of the thorniest issues educators and families are currently confronting — got little attention.

The city seemed caught off guard by the momentum of grassroots parent groups calling for an AI moratorium, with thousands of people signing a petition to stop the use of generative AI in schools and scores voicing their concerns at school board meetings.

More than half of City Council members use in schools, citing concerns about learning and mental health. Samuels acknowledged in May that indicating that the final version would have more stringent rules on AI use, especially for younger students.

In July, as the city hashed out its new guidance, until officials released the new policy, who worried they would not have access to key software programs, such as electronic gradebooks and platforms to communicate with families, when welcoming students back to school next week.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

More than a decade ago, Queens teacher Nicole Radosti Pipia’s fifth- and sixth-grade students seemed to love reading novels in school. 

“The Giver” by Lois Lowry was prized for its mystery. â€œWonder” by R.J. Palacio taught them about kindness and acceptance. â€œFreak the Mighty” by Rodman Philbrick showed them the power of friendship. 

Now, she said, they don’t read any. Instead, students often spend class time reading excerpts and short stories to better prepare them for the sorts of questions they’d encounter on standardized exams.

The demands of her school’s reading program leave no room to study novels, the English teacher said.

“We’re told that we cannot deviate from the program, and if you have to do the program, there’s literally no time,” Pipia said. 

Another New York City middle school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said her school taught novels before the pandemic. Now, “it can be done, but not with the constraints placed on us as teachers,” she said. 

For the past few years, her school has required her to have her students — most of whom are English language learners and struggling readers — spend half of each 40-minute class period, four days a week, completing an online targeted reading intervention program, she said. They often end up clicking through the program and visiting Spotify and YouTube instead. The remainder of the period is devoted to the school’s core curriculum, which does not require novel studies. 

The classroom library she spent a decade building has become “purely decorative,” she said. With teachers no longer using books, her school is “literally throwing them away.” Even if she had the time to teach a book, the veteran teacher said, her students either have no interest in reading or barely know how. 

“Half of them have never read a book,” she said. “In 10 years, we went from kids reading multiple novels in class to them having never opened a book.” 

All New York City elementary schools and most middle schools use one of three city-approved reading curricula. Two of them — EL Education and Wit and Wisdom — require full-length books, while HMH Into Reading and Into Literature do not.

In a statement provided to New York Focus, New York City Public Schools Press Secretary Nicole Brownstein emphasized that English class is “not the only time students have access to full texts.” 

“Literacy is foundational for every child’s success and every New York City Public Schools student has access to whole books both in their classrooms and via the citywide digital library,” she said, adding that there was a 14 percent increase in digital book checkouts last school year compared to the year prior. 

There’s limited data on how much students are actually reading in school. In New York state, where districts have significant autonomy over curriculum, reading programs can vary widely depending on the district, campus, and even classroom. 

For more than a decade, classrooms across the state have been shifting away from full-length books and toward shorter literary works, largely to align with state learning standards and assessments. In interviews with New York Focus, English teachers from across the state lamented that teaching novels has also become more challenging because students have less stamina for or interest in reading them anymore — even in districts that still encourage it.

“I teach fewer novels because the kids simply cannot handle it,” said Lori Atkinson, a 37-year high school English teacher at the rural Copenhagen Central School District in the North Country.

Atkinson has seen a slump in endurance and attention span. She cited the impact of the Common Core, a set of academic standards for English and math that most US states, including New York, adopted in the 2010s. It placed a greater emphasis on students’ ability to analyze short, complex passages of text. (In 2017, New York  and adopted a similar state-specific set of standards.) 

“I believe the decline in reading happened when we were forced to excerpt everything, because when you excerpt, you are not building stamina or background knowledge,” Atkinson said. “It became all about standardized tests and trying to get the mark that you were proficient.” 

But Atkinson primarily blames students’ lack of reading skills on technology, social media, and the rise of artificial intelligence. Teenagers addicted to instant gratification do not have the concentration and skills they need to stay engaged through a long novel, she said, and turn to AI to generate summaries for required reading.

When Atkinson taught ninth and 10th grade in the 1990s, she typically taught five novels and a Shakespeare play each year. Now, teaching 11th and 12th grade, she considers herself lucky to get through three books. She said she used to lend out 20 books a week to students, and now lends out one or two a month. 

The challenge extends beyond novels. Atkinson said that when she assigns a two-page article at the beginning of class, she often sees about half the class stop reading within three minutes. 

Even things that were once a treat are now a challenge to their attention spans. Last school year, after her seniors read â€œRemarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt, she showed them a five-minute movie trailer for the Netflix adaptation. She said most of the teenagers stopped paying attention halfway through. 

Saranac Lake Central School District in the Adirondacks, where high school English teacher Kelsey Francis has worked for 26 years, still encourages educators to teach full-length texts. 

In recent years, however, the number of books Francis can get through during the school year has dropped dramatically. She attributes that, in part, to how AI has affected teaching and learning. Francis has largely stopped assigning homework because she expects students will turn to AI to complete it. Instead, students have to do most of their work by hand in class. 

Making those changes has left significantly less class time for reading. 

It also takes students much longer to get through a book. Since the pandemic, Francis said, she’s seen a major decline in student vocabulary skills and stamina. 

“They fatigue after more than a few pages,” she said. “If I were to ask them to independently read for 30 minutes, that is going to be really tough.” 

English teacher and education consultant Emily Aierstok had a similar experience in her Capital Region school district. 

Because students have shorter attention spans, she’s had to slow down the pace of reading assignments. Instead of assigning two chapters of reading for kids to do at home, she now assigns one. And in addition to requiring 20 minutes of independent reading for homework, she now begins each class with five minutes of reading time to support struggling readers. 

But last school year, Aierstok’s seventh graders read eight books through in-class and independent reading — the most in her 26 years of teaching English. She said she’s been able to overcome challenges with student stamina and interest by giving her students agency in choosing which books to read. 

New York state’s English Language Arts standards require that students read “both shorter-text and excerpts, as well as full-length works.” In a statement to New York Focus, State Education Department spokesperson JP O’Hare said the agency is committed to ensuring all students have access to skilled instruction, but also noted that local school boards and districts are responsible for selecting curricula and instructional materials. 

“Exposing all students to grade-level reading materials with age-appropriate complex ideas and language is critical to mastering the learning standards and developing the knowledge and skills necessary for success beyond the classroom,” the statement reads.Ěý

Fewer than half of New York students in grades 3–8 are proficient in reading, according to state data. Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-New York, said students’ lack of exposure to full-length books has contributed to the state’s literacy crisis. 

Smink said it’s important for students to read full-length books to build stamina, learn about context, and develop a love for reading. But he’s also concerned that too many students don’t have the foundational skills to reap the benefits of reading and said that teachers should be focused on building literacy earlier.

“Just giving a book to a kid that doesn’t have those foundational reading skills is also problematic and can lead to disengagement,” he said. 

Atkinson, the Copenhagen teacher, said it’s critical teachers continue teaching students full-length books to “rewire their brain” and show students the rewards of persistence. Younger educators are not being taught the importance of novel studies in college and in teacher preparatory programs, she said, so it’s up to veteran educators to spread awareness. 

“If we never teach them a novel, then shame on us because we’re the ones who are not giving them the opportunity to build those skills,” she said. “If all we expect from them is an excerpt, then all we’re going to get from them is the bare minimum.” 

This was originally published by .

But the “techlash” took a turn last week when seven families in a Philadelphia suburb sued their school district in federal court for not allowing families to opt their children out of using the internet.

The 8,500-student Lower Merion School District adopted a Aug. 17 that limits the use of devices in elementary school and doesn’t assign laptops or iPads to students until they’re in fifth grade. 

The policy tries to strike a balance between recognizing that “families have different perspectives on student access to technology,” while still “maximizing the educational value of technology resources.” But in June, the board repealed a that allowed  parents to refuse internet-connected devices for their kids. 

Citing research on the addictive nature of online sites and the harmful effects of social media, the parents accuse the district, Superintendent Frank Ranelli and seven board members of creating “an environment that is unhealthy, unsafe and invasive for students.” The complaint argues that the policy denies parents’ rights to make decisions about their children’s “upbringing and education” and puts kids at risk of accessing online pornography and violent videos. One child, according to the lawsuit, began “compulsively playing an online poker game on his school device.”

In a statement, the district said it “denies the allegations and will respond further through the judicial process.” But officials also noted that not all of the parents have students in the district. Of the seven families bringing the lawsuit, just three have students still enrolled. The rest have children described as “eligible to attend” this fall. One family enrolled their kids in a private school, according to the complaint.

An ‘unusual lawsuit’

The case is the latest move by the EdTech Law Center, led by a husband and wife legal team in Texas, to force districts to significantly restrict internet use. Andrew and Julie Liddell, who are working with a representing the parents, also have several active cases against ed tech vendors, including , an online learning platform, and  , a student information system. In a statement, Andrew Liddell said he believes the case “is the first of its kind.” It’s not typical, experts say, for disputes between parents and districts over tech use to end up in court. 

“This is an unusual lawsuit,” said Stacy Hawthorne, board chair for the Consortium for School Networking, a professional organization. It’s difficult, she said, to bring a constitutional challenge over a school board’s policymaking authority. “Courts generally have not given individual families a veto over a district’s instructional or technology policies.”

The lawsuit comes about a week after Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during a CNN interview that to request something different if they think an ed tech tool, especially one using artificial intelligence, is not right for their child. 

In response to parents’ concerns and warnings from researchers about the effects of too much screen time, several states are . Last week, New York lawmakers that would make paper-and-pencil tasks the predominant means of instruction in elementary classrooms. 

Kelly Clancy, a Brooklyn mom of three who serves on a local community education council in the New York City Public Schools, said parents are “really excited” about the bill and that advocacy groups “are planning a major statewide push.” But she thinks most parents are more interested in seeing districts adopt strict screen time policies rather than opting out. 

“Parents want to trust their kids’ schools to put learning first,” she said. “No one wants to reach the point of litigation.” 

Ed tech organizations and the have called for limiting overuse while thoroughly vetting programs to ensure they improve learning.

“Nothing should replace that one-on-one teacher interaction with students,” McMahon said during her CNN spot. “Are we looking at it as recreational screen time or are we looking at it as tutorial screen time? There is a right balance to be used in the classroom.” 

Hawthorne, chair of the Consortium for School Networking, said she doesn’t expect similar lawsuits to become common, and that most disputes over screen time, privacy and AI “will continue to play out through school board deliberations, elections and state policymaking.” 

But she urged districts to take parents’ concerns seriously and to explain how their use of technology supports learning and protects kids online.

‘Teacher-led education’

The debate between Lower Merion district leaders and parents flared up in the spring when, according to the complaint, device use “had grown intolerable to many parents.” 

Yair Lev, the lead plaintiff, has two children at Cynwyd Elementary in the district and helped organize Pencils Over Pixels to advocate in favor of maintaining the opt-out policy. When Ranelli, the superintendent, and local school administrators began telling parents they couldn’t opt out, the conflict escalated.

Lev, a cardiologist and professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, sent numerous emails to board members asking them not to “eliminate parent protections.”

In a July message, he described an earlier conversation in which he said the superintendent told him that parents who object to Chromebooks and online curriculum “were welcome to leave the public school district and go to private school.”

at previous meetings by some parents demanding to opt their children out of using devices, the district ultimately moved the final vote on the policy to Zoom and allowed no public comments. The district is also adopting a new program that allows both to monitor device use.

In a statement shared with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, Lev said he has no plans to pull his kids out of the district.

“We are not willing to sacrifice the public schools and community we love,” he said. “We simply seek to preserve our right as parents to choose a teacher-led education for our children without mandatory technology requirements.”

This year’s startling , followed by last year’s , has some experts asking: Did something go wrong with the test itself?

There is no clear evidence there is a problem, experts emphasize, but the unusually wide swing in scores warrants careful investigation, multiple testing experts told Chalkbeat this week.

“My instinctive reaction is there may have been an issue last year that we missed,” said Marianne Perie, who consults with states on testing. “This kind of big increase followed by a big decrease is surprising.”

Perie co-chairs New York state’s technical advisory committee, a panel of experts paid by the state to oversee the testing process. She spoke to Chalkbeat about the trends in her personal capacity, she said. The committee is set to meet next month to review the results in detail and seek to better understand what might explain the changes, Perie said.

Half of New York City students on last year’s tests, down 6 percentage points from the year before, according to preliminary results released last week. The share of third, fourth, and fifth graders who met grade-level standards in both New York City and state.

The sharp test score swings in those grades immediately sparked theories about what could explain them. Some educators and families if the was a factor. Others pointed to a literacy shakeup in New York City that has been .

Last week, EdTrust-New York, a nonprofit advocacy group, called for an independent audit of the state’s reading tests. Officials “never adequately investigated or explained last year’s dramatic gains, making this year’s reversal difficult to interpret,” the group said in a .

JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York State Education Department, said the agency “takes this decline seriously and will conduct a detailed analysis to better understand where students are experiencing challenges.”

Simona Beattie, a spokesperson for NWEA, the state’s testing vendor, said in a statement, “At this stage, we have not found any anomalies through our standard due diligence process, which includes corroborating results with an external third party.”

“Given this, we have high confidence in the accuracy of the results,” Beattie added.

In New York City, the share of third graders scoring proficiently on the reading test fell by 14 percentage points, after rising by 13 points the year before. There were also substantial shifts in fourth and fifth grade scores on the test in both the city and state. Seventh and eighth grade reading scores essentially held steady. Math scores ticked up across the state but were flat in New York City.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement that the scores merit “rigorous analysis so we can ensure we’re measuring what students are learning.”

The fluctuations in elementary reading scores were quite unusual and surprising, said Benjamin Shear, a testing expert at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It requires further scrutiny, questioning, and digging.”

What’s behind the reading score drop? Experts weigh different theories

City officials and after last year’s dramatic surge in elementary reading scores, arguing that the was paying off.

Now, the teachers union is pointing to the declines as evidence of problems with the city’s curriculum mandate and . But that does not explain the broad test score declines across the state, including districts that have not made similar curriculum changes.

In general, testing experts, known as psychometricians, say that a number of theories are worth considering to explain large shifts in scores: changes in student demographics, , , and .

Figures released by the city indicate there were no major changes in the number of test-takers in early grades. The share of city students considered low-income in elementary grades also held fairly steady. And while the state finished its transition in the spring to computer-based testing, that wouldn’t explain swings in fifth grade, where digital assessments have been .

EdTrust-New York noted that in contrast to state scores, there was steady progress on New York City schools administer at least three times a year.

Emily Oster, a Brown University education economist who has test scores across the country, published a this week questioning the plausibility of New York’s score changes. She suggested that there may have been a technical error in comparing the results year to year.

In an email to Chalkbeat, Oster acknowledged there is no definitive proof for this. But, she said, the reported results are “not consistent with nearly everything else we know about student learning.” She noted that fourth graders’ reading scores had jumped last year, but that same group of students, now fifth graders, have seen scores fall back this year.

Asked about Oster’s post, O’Hare from New York’s education department said: “Speculation is not a substitute for data … Our ongoing review of the preliminary data has not identified any of the issues she outlines in her conjecture.”

An over 200-page documented the process to ensure the accuracy of the 2025 results.

Scott Marion, a testing expert with the Center for Assessment, said he’s naturally suspicious of a large change in scores that doesn’t persist the following year. To him, it’s implausible that the rise and fall of scores represents real differences in achievement or teaching practices.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” he said.

Marion says that perhaps more questions should have been raised about the sharp score increase last year. In his experience, education officials are eager to have testing experts investigate unusual declines, but not unusual increases.

Andrew Ho, a Harvard professor who serves on New York’s technical advisory committee, said he believes the shifts probably point to real changes in student learning, even if the actual swings aren’t as extreme as the exams suggest.

“We should absolutely look at the test, but we should absolutely also look at what the test is likely revealing,” he said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

Schools can’t “implement” those facts any more than auto factories can “implement” climate science or the Detroit Tigers’s general manager can “implement” baseball analytics. 

Put simpler: the science of reading represents what we know about how kids learn to read and what practices — like explicit vocabulary and phonics instruction â€” support that learning. But it is not, in and of itself, a model to simply apply to a classroom. 

This hasn’t stopped some critics from worrying that this research consensus requires a narrow, inflexible teaching approach that is inappropriate for some kids. In particular, advocates for English learner students in have expressed concerns that the science of reading is not suited for these children. Some have worried that reforming literacy instruction in English could distract — or even discourage — schools from supporting English learners as they develop in their home languages as well. 

Fortunately, from Joanna Yip, a policy lead at the Education Trust-New York, an education advocacy organization focused on civil rights in that state, outlines a constructive path forward to “center the needs of multilingual learners as part of a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction for all students.”

Yip’s report provides a series of recommendations for improving literacy for English learners in the state. For instance, it calls for state leaders to overhaul future literacy training with support from experts with knowledge of English learners’ linguistic development pathways. Teachers should leave those training sessions with strategies for advancing English learners’ oral language development, as well as a heightened awareness of the ways that these students’ emerging bilingual abilities can strengthen their literacy skills in both of their languages.

It also suggests they ensure that teachers can provide “evidence-based literacy support across P-12 for students who are new to the country and in the initial stages of literacy development in English.” that these students benefit when teachers help them “bridge” knowledge and skills from their first languages into English. A young student might, for instance, be a confident reader in Spanish or Arabic; effective literacy instruction will help her strengthen those skills and also use them to improve as a reader in English.

It also argues that this greater systemwide commitment to English learners’ literacy should include expanding access to programs that support their bilingualism and biliteracy. Programs that teach English learners in both languages are especially well positioned to help students grasp the core components of language from grammar to syntax and beyond. That is, when English learners are learning to read in multiple languages, they can compare and contrast them to deepen their understanding of each. 

As my co-author and I wrote in an article : “Crucially, these (sorts of) activities extend the core research often cited as Science of Reading, but they do not replace them.” Teachers do not need to avoid, modify or deviate from the consensus on how best to teach English literacy when working with English learners. Just like English-dominant children, these students benefit from the science of reading’s core components, things like the explicit teaching of vocabulary and phonics, as well as instruction that helps children practice smooth, fluent decoding of text. 

For English learners, quality literacy instruction in English means , like supporting their development in their first languages and helping them make connections with elements of the English language. 

Yip’s report credits New York for its “strong history of supporting multilingual learners,” and notes that this “can serve as a foundation for future state policy development.” It is true that New York has been a gateway destination for linguistically and culturally diverse immigrants to the United States since the Colonial Era. As such, its K–12 schools have deep institutional experience providing multilingual children with opportunities to learn English, acclimate to English-dominant U.S. society and .Ěý

In recent years, the state has made considerable efforts to improve how public schools serve these children, most notably through its 2014 and 2025 . The toolkit offers ideas for how teachers can support English learners’ English literacy in multilingual settings. For instance, while English and Spanish do not share perfectly identical phonological structures, there are some points of overlap. Teachers can use these similarities and differences to help students’ literacy in both languages. 

They can, , show students that the letter “f” makes the same sound in English as it does in Spanish, while also instructing students in the many other ways that English spelling can represent that sound (i.e. “ph” as in “phoneme” or “gh” as in “enough”). 

However, the report charges that New York schools have not done enough to incorporate English learners in their recent literacy reforms, relying mostly on voluntary guidance and “uneven implementation” instead of systemic improvements. What’s more, it notes that literacy teaching and instructional materials that are not research- or evidence-based remain too common in New York public education — which harms English learners and English-dominant students alike. 

For instance, in 2024, the state launched a major literacy reform that provided $10 million in funding to the New York State United Teachers, its main teachers union. The funding supported professional development for teachers around literacy instruction— that the resulting training did not align with the research behind the science of reading.

Yip’s recommendations are excellent and would bring New York more fully into alignment with the research on how English learners learn best. While these students’ linguistic development is unique, as they are simultaneously growing language proficiencies in more than one language, the early literacy research that we refer to when we talk about the science of reading is also useful guidance for teaching them to read in English.Ěý

In other words, they should not miss out on the phonics instruction, explicit teaching of vocabulary and other foundational elements of the science of reading that help all students learn to read. If New York is able to systemically advance these priorities in its literacy instruction without abandoning its long and deep commitment to students’ multilingualism and multiliteracy, that would be a model for other states — particularly those blessed with large numbers of English learners — to follow. 

The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’s alone, and do not reflect those of his employer or any other affiliated organizations.

Roughly 2,000 families received offers for a spot in the inaugural year of 2-K, New York City’s new free childcare program for 2-year-olds, officials announced Tuesday.

Around 5,700 families applied for the , which were restricted to priority neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

“Today represents a monumental step on the path to universal childcare here in New York City,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a press conference Tuesday morning in the Bronx. Mamdani made a key campaign pledge.

“We are writing a better chapter for … the generations of New Yorkers many years from now who will start families here in our city and who will not need to worry about leaving their job or moving out of the neighborhood they love to make it all work,” he said.

The release of the offers comes after city officials spent months spreading the word about the new program with events such as a “ in Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park and a judged by Cardi B and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The initial interest in 2-K comes as welcome news for Mamdani after his administration’s efforts to boost publicity for the city’s 3-K and prekindergarten programs Those programs, while wildly popular and oversubscribed in some neighborhoods, have in other parts of the city.

Officials didn’t share any details about how the initial round of applications and offers were distributed between the priority neighborhoods: Washington Heights and Inwood in Manhattan, Canarsie and Brownsville in Brooklyn, Ozone Park and the Rockaways in Queens, and Fordham, Belmont, Riverdale and other nearby neighborhoods in the Bronx.

Emmy Liss, the executive director of the mayor’s Office for Childcare and Early Childhood Education, said the “majority” of the children who received offers live in the priority districts. Officials prioritized applicants who have siblings at the program they applied to, or were already attending that program, and those who live in the same district, Liss said.

More than 80% of applicants got into one of their top three choices, and more than half got into their first choice, officials said. Families that applied and didn’t get an offer will automatically be added to waitlists.

In a press release Tuesday morning, officials said that the application results from this year would help guide the expansion of the program next year. Mamdani has pledged that the program will grow to 12,000 seats next year and expand citywide by the end of his first term, though Gov. Kathy Hochul has only committed funding for the first two years. A found that it will likely cost around $9 billion to provide free universal childcare for all children under age 5, about $5 billion more than the city is currently spending,

Officials haven’t yet shared where the additional 10,000 2-K seats for next year will be located, except that they will likely add seats in the priority neighborhoods and some of the new seats will be in Staten Island, the only borough not a part of this year’s 2-K rollout.v

Seats are split between center and . Unlike 3-K and pre-K, which mostly follow the K-12 school calendar, .

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When students return to school this fall in the Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York, a new kind of teacher will be ready to greet them. The small, rural district located on the Seneca Nation reservation is set to be one of the first in the country to put a humanoid robot in a classroom. It will not replace the classroom teacher, but is programmed to provide learning support to both students and educators. 

At a board meeting last month, the Cattaraugus County school district agreed to purchase the robot from Realbotix, a tech company, along with an artificial intelligence teacher’s assistant program allowing students to interact with an avatar of the robot on laptops. 

“This deployment in a working school district represents a landmark moment for both AI and humanoid robotics,” said Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Realbotix, which is currently building the robot. “Salamanca marks the beginning of a new era where humanoid robots and intelligent AI assistants become standard tools in STEM ąđťĺłÜłŚ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The female robot, named Sally, will have a “lifelike appearance” with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions.

Students will use a unique identification code when interacting with the robot during class, allowing it to access their learning data and provide personalized support based on their past communication with the avatar, Kiguel said. “They’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I’m student number 1234,’ and then the robot will be like, ‘Hey, we were talking about this yesterday, do you want to continue that conversation?’ ” 

Salamanca plans to introduce the robot and avatar in its high school AI and robotics courses, which use developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs. The district plans to expand it to high school students in other classes if the pilot is successful. 

Salamanca Superintendent Mark Beehler explained the district’s embrace of AI. “Many schools are taking the easy solution of simply banning it, but I have found that students will find a way around most rules that schools put in place,” Beehler said in a written response to questions. “I also believe it is critical for schools to teach proper use of technology, not simply exclude it.” 

During and after school hours, students will be able to use the avatar to receive help with assignments. Kiguel said students could upload photos of homework for feedback, ask the avatar to generate lessons on topics that interest them, or receive real-time translations in over 100 languages. Unlike other Realbotix robots, Salamanca’s robot will not have advanced features such as facial recognition and recording. 

The robot will also serve as a classroom resource. If a teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next, Kiguel said, they can ask the robot for guidance because it has been loaded with the district’s curriculum. 

The products cost the district $57,590, according to  attached to the school board agenda. Kiguel said the price was discounted; the company’s website lists the M-Series robot, the model purchased by the district, at a starting price of $95,000. 

The plan has sparked debate online, with some calling it a forward-looking, innovative step for the district and others expressing concern about the broader implications of further integrating AI into schools, particularly in an underserved area. 

Salamanca is the only incorporated city in the United States located entirely within a Native American reservation. The school district serves roughly 1,300 students, including 32% who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native and 79% who are economically disadvantaged.Ěý

“We already have so many issues in our community, including environmental issues. I just don’t understand the concept of adding AI onto that,” said local parent Sierra Abrams, who learned about the technology in a . “Bringing it into the school district is contradicting everything we believe, in my opinion.” 

For the past few months, the company has worked to establish guardrails to ensure student safety. Kiguel said the robot and avatar were trained on the district’s curriculum and will always redirect the conversation back to education. References to suicide, self-harm, or other flagged terms would automatically alert school administrators.

In a demonstration for New York Focus, Kiguel told the avatar that he was being bullied at school and wanted to get revenge on the student. 

“I’m really sorry that happened to you. Being picked on and having rocks thrown at you is not okay, and that must have felt upsetting and maybe even scary,” the avatar responded. “The best next step is to tell a trusted adult at school right away, like a teacher, counselor or principal, and let your parent or guardian know, too.” 

Beehler emphasized the importance of safety and privacy, noting that the robot and avatar operate on a closed system that is not connected to the internet, and that Realbotix will not have access to personally identifiable student information. 

To avoid AI-generated inaccuracies, Beehler said Realbotix trained the robot and avatar to say, “I don’t know,” instead of generating fabricated or misleading responses known as “AI łó˛šąôąôłÜłŚžą˛Ô˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô˛ő.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The Trump administration has promoted the expanded use of AI and technology in education. Early in his second term, President Donald Trump  establishing a taskforce to help integrate AI into curricula and teacher training. In March, First Lady Melania Trump entered a White House technology summit  and invited guests to envision a future where robots educate children in literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history. 

At the same time, there has been  nationwide, with parents forming groups to push for stronger oversight of AI, and clearer guidelines to limit screen time and ensure digital resources are used appropriately in schools. In May, the New York State United Teachers union called for strict  and screen time in schools, and earlier this month, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced  until the school system finalizes guidance on artificial intelligence later this summer. 

The classroom marks a new venture for Realbotix, a Toronto-based robotics company formerly known as Tokens.com, that helped customers use cryptocurrency to rent “digital land” in the Metaverse. In April 2024, the company acquired Simulcra, the Las Vegas parent company behind RealDoll, which has spent decades  and later expanded into sex robots that remain on the market today. 

In a statement to New York Focus, a spokesperson explained that over the past two years, Realbotix has built a new team focused on education, health care, and wellness applications, and that Realbotix and RealDoll do not share employees, payroll, physical locations, or technology. She said Realbotix “is pursuing a transaction with a Nasdaq-listed company that is intended to separate the businesses at the ownership level” with completion expected by September. 

In recent years, Realbotix has worked to expand its presence in commercial settings. Still, it is best known for its “companion robots,” which are different from sex robots and intended to address what it’s described as a “loneliness epidemic.” Kiguel has previously said the company’s goal is to produce robots and AI that are “indistinguishable from humans.” 

Beehler, Salamanca’s superintendent, said the partnership with Realbotix began after a former colleague met an investor at a dinner and discussed the possibility of bringing the company’s robots into the education sector. He was initially cautious about the partnership because it represented uncharted territory for both Realbotix and the school district. But he said the company was receptive to feedback and willing to adapt its products for the unique demands of an educational setting. 

The superintendent acknowledged concerns about students’ increasing screen time and emphasized that AI and robotics should support, not replace, the human connections at the center of education. 

Beehler said the district will measure the success of the program primarily through qualitative feedback from both students and teachers. 

Ryan Schaaf, associate professor of educational technology at Notre Dame of Maryland University, said he was optimistic about the initiative, but cautioned that its success hinges on thoughtful implementation, with teachers actively monitoring and guiding students’ interactions with AI. 

Schaaf acknowledged the backlash against AI in education, but said ignoring the technology is a mistake. “It gives students a true disadvantage because once they leave school, they are going to be immersed in AI technologies.” Instead, he argued that schools should balance AI-assisted learning with traditional instruction to prepare students for life after high school.

State Senator George Borrello, who represents Salamanca and surrounding areas of Western New York, said the program could help level the playing field for students by providing tutoring access to those who might not be able to afford private options and sparking greater interest in STEM. 

Borrello said local leaders have long struggled with keeping young people from leaving Upstate New York after high school. He said investments in technology and STEM education could help show students they can pursue fulfilling, high-paying careers in tech while still building their futures in rural communities like Salamanca.

“One of the biggest things we see right now in technology is people fearing what the future will be with AI. Will it replace the workforce? Will it grow out of control?” he said. “I think this is a great way to get not just the kids but the teachers and the parents more comfortable with what the future may hold.”

This was originally published on .

So I asked the members of my what they wanted to say to this administration. They responded with recommendations for curriculum, discipline, technology, afterschool programming and teacher quality. 

Maria K. spoke for hundreds when she wrote, “I’d strongly urge to reconsider eliminating G&T programs for grades K-2. … If the objective is equality, then programs should be expanded, and underprivileged groups should be given wider access.”

“Create more of what is in demand rather than redistributing what already exists among different socioeconomic and ethnic groups,” Adam C. concurred. “Reinvest resources in schools that provide what families are specifically looking for: specialized high schools, academically screened middle and high schools, and high-performing zoned middle and high schools.”

“Everyone should have a default, large zoned high school that provides tracking by academic subject,” former Citywide Council on High Schools member Rachel Fremmer said. 

Regarding the quality of educators, one parent wished, “I would LOVE for all teachers to have education on how to recognize when a child is bored or struggling in school.” S. Meng from Queens suggested, “Survey which districts have higher percentages of lower-level students and employ better teachers with higher pay for that district to bring up the overall level average.”

“We need highly qualified teachers who hold themselves to the same academic standards we expect our children to meet,” agreed Natalie Iarko. “Teachers should model strong writing, communication and subject knowledge. My son’s pre-K teacher wrote in all lowercase with no punctuation. We need higher expectations for those entrusted with educating our children.”

“Teachers have given up on chaotic classrooms,” lamented CN. “Kids do whatever they want while the teacher attempts to teach until they all give up and watch cartoons together. I’ve spoken to many parents, and we are uniformly disappointed in the lack of discipline in school. It is basically low-value childcare. I went to low-ranking public schools in Queens, and even we got yelled at for clowning around in the classroom. Why won’t teachers discipline anymore?”

“Parents should be given the ability to formally evaluate teacher and administrator performance annually,” a Manhattan mom proposed. “These evaluations should be part of broader performance evaluations for school faculty and officials, tied to compensation and career advancement.”

“Strengthen discipline for both teachers and students,” Acel M. contributed. “If a teacher is not performing, make it easier to replace or downgrade or terminate them. Bad behaving kids should be disciplined and be expelled as a last measure.”

“Safety is important,” J.C. stressed. “In my son’s elementary school, there were children who were violent (repeatedly starting fights, etc.) and were simply moved to another classroom instead of detention or expulsion. As my son was the victim of this, I would like to see safety/protection measures for the victims of school violence, especially at the middle and high school levels.”

But families weren’t merely concerned with what happens during the school day.

“Every elementary school should offer afterschool programs such that parents don’t have to pay extra for childcare coverage until 5 p.m. every day,” one mom chimed in. “Working parents need this essential support.”

“Our kids need to have opportunities to be creative, work with adults and other kids and heck — PLAY,” Helen K., Queens mom of two, insisted. “NYC schools need to admit that the adoption of individual devices and online learning platforms for students is a failed experiment. In our middle school, there is rampant non-educational use of their devices. Let parents opt out of devices and online platforms!”

H.D. suggested: “Bring back pen and paper coursework and tests!” Then, on another note, offered, “Share resources among neighborhood schools such as for music. Third Street Music School has partnerships with some schools. A more citywide effort would be great.”

Finally, “A Black mother from District 9, Bronx,” summarized, “Schools don’t need blame — they need thoughtful, targeted investment. If children face more obstacles outside the classroom, then inside the classroom they should have the city’s strongest teachers, experienced principals, enrichment programs, arts, music, science, tutoring, counseling and the resources that help children thrive. Retain experienced teachers, support school leaders, expand tutoring and enrichment, and focus on long-term student success.”

The parents have spoken. The mayor and chancellor have promised to listen. Will they follow through?

Mom Carin Rosenfeld already has concerns. “I would like transparency regarding the process itself. How were [working group] participants selected? How were families and educators notified? What efforts were made to ensure broad representation rather than participation by only those already connected to political or educational networks? If City Hall and the chancellor truly want to hear from constituents, the process must be open, widely publicized, accessible and transparent from the beginning, not limited to a select group of stakeholders whose identities and selection criteria are unknown to the broader public. Public engagement in NYC education feels performative rather than substantive. If more parents truly knew what was happening in our schools, there might be a full-scale parent uprising!”

Preschoolers with disabilities in New York City will gain access to an unprecedented set of programs and services thanks to a major expansion in special education announced Tuesday by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels.

The nation’s largest school system is investing $67.5 million in special education as families across the country fear the needs of their children with disabilities will go unmet amid the federal Department of Education’s continued dismantling.

In New York City, young learners will be able to participate in three programs designed specifically for students with autism that were previously only available to K-12 students. They will also have access to initiatives for students with emotional disabilities or in need of adapted academics and life-skills training. The programs will be available starting in the fall in 14 of the city’s 32 community school districts. The majority of them are located in areas with some of the highest concentrations of working-class and immigrant families in the city. 

“Children with disabilities should not be forced to travel across the city just to get the education they deserve,” Mamdani said in a statement. “That’s why we’re bringing those classrooms closer to home and taking another critical step toward making Pre-K truly universal. Every child deserves to learn and grow in their community, and every family deserves a public education system that meets them exactly where they are.”

The specificity of the investment is unprecedented in New York City, where . 

“For the first time, we’re giving young children with autism and other disabilities the same high-quality, specialized instruction that has delivered real results for our older students,” Samuels said in a statement. “This investment is about strengthening the foundation and when we get early childhood education right, we set children up for a lifetime of success.”

To expand special education services to the city’s youngest learners, New York City Public Schools will hire hundreds of staffers to help lower evaluation delays; assist families through the process of creating a legally binding personalized school roadmap for children with special needs, known as Individualized Education Program (IEP); and provide more bilingual assessment options. Overall, more than half of all children in New York City come from homes where a language other than English is spoken and in the majority of those homes, that language is Spanish. Among the new hires will be 35 psychologists, social workers, speech evaluators and occupational therapists across 10 additional Preschool Regional Assessment Centers, or city-run evaluation hubs that identify children ages 3 to 5 who qualify for special education services.

The Special Education Itinerant Teacher program will also grow, with an additional 29 therapists and specialists to support children attending community-based 3-K and pre-K programs. According to city officials, the placement of more special education teachers in general education preschool classes will help boost the number of small children with IEPs in inclusive learning environments.

In June, the Trump administration announced that the and rehabilitative services — a move that advocates and parents said will make it more challenging for millions of students to access services and for their families to appeal for help when needed. 

The transitions at the federal level concern Chris Treiber, vice president of advocacy services for AHRC New York City, which serves individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

“When you move services out of the U.S. Department of Education and start to put them in other places like the Department of Health and Human Services and then also into the Justice Department, you kind of lose all of the expertise and the specialized support that the U.S. DOE provided for so many years to so many states,” Treiber said. “It’s all going to be basically evaporated.”

In a statement, State Sen. Robert Jackson, a Democrat whose district includes several Black and immigrant neighborhoods in Manhattan, pointed out how families with disabled children have long had to fight simply to get basic support, a concern often raised by critics of the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal Education Department.

“For generations, families of children with disabilities have been asked to navigate systems that too often made support feel distant, delayed, or conditional,” Jackson said. “This investment reflects a different promise: that the doors of public education must open early, fully, and with dignity.”

Maria Odom, executive director of Advocates for Children of New York, drew a connection between special education for preschool children and universal childcare, which Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul launched in January.

“Child care can only truly be universal if every child has access to a program that meets their needs,” Odom said in a statement. “We thank Mayor Mamdani for making this important investment, which will help ensure more preschoolers with disabilities receive needed, legally required support. Access to high-quality specialized programs during these critical early years can have a lasting impact on children’s development while helping make New York City a more affordable and appealing place to raise a family.”

Advocates like Treiber and Jenn Choi of Jenn Choi Advocates LLC, which provides parents with support through the IEP process, told The 19th they welcomed the preschool special education expansion. Still, both raised concerns about the logistics and reach of the new effort. 

Choi hopes it gives economically disadvantaged families greater access to services. “There’s a lot of parents in the city who know how great these programs are,” she said. “These programs are very popular in neighborhoods like District 15 where the income is higher, but maybe they’re not as popular in other areas where there isn’t a cultural history of how important these programs are within the community.”

Choi also would like officials to work toward making these specialized programs available to all students who need them; one student she advocated for went without speech, occupational and physical therapy for two consecutive years, she said.

Treiber, for his part, wondered how the city plans to adapt programs designed for older kids to the preschool set. He also noted that many children in pre-K did not receive the early intervention services they needed from ages 0-3 and as a result, they might need even more intense support in preschool.

Most importantly, he wants officials to communicate effectively with families about the new programs. 

“They have to be able to provide some concrete information to families so they understand either the parameters of what’s being offered here or maybe the limitations,” Treiber said. “Like if I put my kid in this program, a parent should understand that they may not have a program for my child the following September when they turn 5 and go into kindergarten. It’s just important for parents to be as informed as possible so they can make really smart, informed decisions about their kids’ education.”

was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of . .

New York school districts will soon begin revamping math instruction under a new law aimed at improving test scores — but the effort comes amid sharp debate over how math should be taught. 

“,” passed as part of the state budget last month, requires school districts to use “evidence-based” methods in elementary school math classrooms. 

It directs the State Education Department to develop best practices for teaching math in grades K-5 by January, and requires that school districts complete a survey verifying their alignment with those standards by September 2027. The budget also sets aside $2 million for the teachers’ union to administer a training course and another $2 million for regional pilots supporting districts with low math performance.

The structure mirrors Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature literacy initiative, which  as having weak accountability measures and using a questionable union-developed training course. 

Transforming math education could be even more challenging. 

Unlike “the science of reading,” which relies on a widely embraced framework, educators and researchers are less aligned on what counts as evidence-based instruction in math. While most states have adopted laws or policies related to the science of reading,  have done so with math, leaving New York with few models to draw from. 

Advocates say those ongoing debates over math instruction, coupled with the state’s decision to model the initiative on its literacy reform, could hamper progress. For state leaders, the effort’s success could help transform New York from one of the Northeast’s lowest-performing states in math into a model for improvement. For students, it could shape their access to higher education and high-paying jobs. 

But only if it’s implemented properly. “I think there’s a big lack of understanding of what proper instruction is, and there’s a really big disconnect between ‘evidence-based practices’ and teacher training programs,” said Erica Fanning, math researcher and school psychologist at the City School District of Albany. 

As with reading, the stakes are high. Research shows that math proficiency is one of the strongest predictors of future adult earnings, high school graduation, and college enrollment. 

Improving math education is also key to reducing educational inequities: On the 2024 NAEP eighth-grade math exam, Black and Latino New York students scored below white students by 26 and 30 points, respectively. New York was ranked 38th in the nation for fourth-grade math, behind all other Northeastern states besides Maine, and 17 points below top-ranked Massachusetts. 

Hochul said the initiative aims to ensure New York students are “the most academically prepared in the country.” If the effort fails, advocates say, students of color and those from low-income backgrounds have the most to lose.

Across the country, schools have seen a decade-long  in reading and math performance that was exacerbated by the pandemic. That’s spurred a wave of reform, including a high-profile push based on the science of reading. This phonics-based approach is grounded in the idea that reading isn’t innate and must be explicitly taught through skills like sounding out words. When New York enacted its Back to Basics plan in 2024, it joined at least  that had implemented similar policies. 

Math instruction, by contrast, has received relatively little attention. The push to change how children learn math is still in its infancy. That’s in part because there’s little agreement on the best approach.Ěý

On one side of the so-called “math wars” are advocates of more explicit, teacher-led instruction who argue that students should first build fluency in foundational skills — such as memorizing multiplication tables or working through a math problem step by step — before they can understand deeper concepts. On the other are proponents of inquiry-based instruction, which emphasizes student problem-solving and exploration of mathematical ideas before formal procedures are introduced. 

Many New York schools use curricula that align with the latter. But critics, including special education researchers, say it can reduce student confidence, hinder learning of foundational skills, and cause struggling students to fall further behind. Ben Solomon, a math researcher and associate professor of school psychology at the University of Albany, said there’s a time and place for both pedagogies — but he and other “science of math” advocates believe students should primarily receive explicit instruction before moving on to more conceptual lessons.

The lack of consensus makes it difficult to know what the law counts as “evidence-based teaching techniques and materials.” The clearest indication so far came last year, when NYSED released eight briefs outlining “best practices” in numeracy and math instruction. Written by Deborah Loewenberg Ball, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, and TeachingWorks, a project at the university, the briefs take the more conceptual approach, arguing that explicit instruction should “be grounded in meaning and understanding of why the procedures work.” 

Solomon is among a group of over 200 math researchers, educators, and parents who signed a petition describing the briefs as full of factual inaccuracies and 

In an October response, the state agency doubled down on the guidance, and Loewenberg Ball argued that Solomon cited only a narrow segment of research that was not broad enough â€œto address the complexity of mathematics teaching and learning.” The guidance is still in place.

Solomon said he worries the agency’s response to his criticisms reflects a reluctance to draw on the expertise of a broad range of math researchers when deciding on what counts as evidence-based math instruction. 

“We’re trying to turn around a huge ship that’s been cruising for a long time,” Solomon said. “That takes deep structural change that will be very challenging in New York.” 

Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-NY, shares that concern, though he noted that the math debate is more nuanced than literacy, and effective instruction likely falls somewhere between the petitioners’ and the state’s positions. 

In a statement provided to New York Focus, NYSED spokesperson Karen Male said the briefs are “grounded in research,” and underwent external review to support high-quality P-12 math instruction. She added that while NYSED shares Solomon’s dedication to improving math outcomes for students, the department “will not be swayed by misinformation or efforts to undermine our work to advance equity and excellence in education.”

Some advocates worry the math law’s structural similarities to the reading initiative portend difficulties down the line. 

As part of the new law, school districts will have to report the curricula and instructional materials they’re using in K-5 classrooms and verify that they align with state-developed standards, but it’s largely up to individual districts to make the transition and self-certify.

The reading initiative also tasked school districts with completing an alignment survey:  of their responses found that more than 130 school districts reported using curricula that researchers criticized as inconsistent with the science of reading — including dozens that claimed that their materials aligned with all recommended best practices. 

In New York, most decisions about public schools, from curricula to school spending, are determined at the district level, posing obstacles to successful education reform, Solomon said. 

“If you create objectives and goals and then let it work its way through the system, it’s going to mutate based on everyone’s individual philosophies,” he said. 

In order for the math initiative to be more successful than the reading effort, Smink said the state must increase transparency regarding the curricula and instructional materials in use, and hold districts accountable if they are out of alignment with best practices. (The Education Department said it would follow up with school districts that had failed to comply with the literacy law, but did not specify when districts must achieve full compliance.)

As with the reading initiative, the state budget sets aside money — $2 million — for the teachers’ union to administer a training course. A  found that the $10 million union-developed training course for the Back to Basics in reading effort featured some of the instructional methods Hochul set out to replace. 

The union has defended the program and refuted the idea that it promoted discredited strategies. Elizabeth Bird, Hochul’s assistant secretary for K-12 education, told New York Focus the criticism was “instructive,” and that the governor’s office is asking the union to review training materials “to make sure they are guided in evidence-based practices.” 

Finding the right curricula could also be a challenge. There are few evidence-based math curricula readily available for districts to use, said Lynn Gaffney, an assistant superintendent at Watertown City School District. That’s in part because publishers tend to design materials aimed at satisfying school districts’ broad range of instructional approaches, rather than adhering to national standards.

When Gaffney transitioned into a new role overseeing curriculum and instruction at the Jefferson County district, she faced a troubling reality: Fewer than one in three students in grades 3 through 8 were meeting math proficiency standards. The district was relying on outdated instructional programs that failed to reflect research on how students best learn math, she said.

For the past three years, Gaffney has been leading an effort to implement evidence-based math. But when it came time to implement a new curriculum, Gaffney said the district was unable to find one that aligned with both the science of learning and New York state standards, prompting district leaders to develop their own. 

Gaffney is excited by the state’s attention to math instruction, but like Solomon, she said she needs to see the state’s guidance before determining its potential impact on student outcomes.

“We’re not an evidence-based profession traditionally, we’re more of an ideology-based, philosophy-based profession, and that works to some degree, but it’s not working for most of our kids,” Gaffney said. “So we need to move away from that towards the evidence.” 

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I taught math in a New York City public high school before I read a single study about how children learn. I was equipped with some basics, like making sure I checked if my students had understood the day’s lesson. At the end of every class, they would answer a few questions on paper while I moved around the room, reading over their shoulders to see what had landed and what had not.

Back then, blended learning was the hot thing: putting kids on screens for personalized instruction while I was supposed to circulate and answer questions. It did not work for my students, so I abandoned it and built my own lessons instead.

Fast forward to now, and the fight playing out in city councils and statehouses over . But that is the wrong battle. Screens are not the enemy of learning. The real enemy is older than any device: a classroom where students sit isolated and a teacher is too swamped with grading and paperwork to notice who is falling behind until it is too late to help. Technology can deepen that problem or solve it. It depends entirely on who you build it for.

There is a better way. I watched it this past school year in the Bronx.

At P.S. 83, a middle school in District 11, technology barely appears until the final minutes of math class. A lesson is projected at the front of the room, and students work through problems together on paper, talking and arguing as they go. Then, with a few minutes left, they open their school laptops and answer a short set of questions about the day’s work.

As they type, the teacher watches the answers appear, one student at a time, on a dashboard on his or her own screen. Rather than collecting stacks of papers to grade that night, the teacher can see, in real time, who understood the lesson and who did not, and offer help in the moment. By the time class ends, the teacher knows exactly where each student is stuck, and what needs to happen the next day: a quick conversation with one child, a small group lesson for a few others or a separate session for the handful who missed the same step.

That dashboard is part of a tool called , created by the company I co-founded, Kiddom. This past year, in a pilot program, District 11 added Atlas to the curriculum its teachers already used through the math initiative. The partnership became a co-design: District 11’s teachers shaped the tool, and Kiddom is now bringing it to schools nationwide. But the tool is not the point. The point is what it handed back to teachers: time and information early enough to act on. Those are the two things every teacher is short of, and they are essential for catching children before they fall behind.

That is harder than it sounds. American schools are notoriously bad at catching kids up. A student who starts behind usually stays behind, year after year — not because teachers are not good enough, but because no human can grade, diagnose and personalize for 20 or more children every single day. The math defeats them.

The early results from District 11 are worth a look. Across nearly 5,700 students and 179 teachers, Kiddom’s analysis found that children in classrooms using these quick daily checks most consistently outscored other District 11 students whose teachers used them rarely. In seventh grade, for example, District 11 classes scored an average of 68% on these checks, versus 52%. That’s a 16-percentage-point difference, which works out to roughly five additional months of learning in a single year.

District 11’s results were also measured against a demographically comparable district using the same curriculum without the real-time tool. District 11 still came out ahead, by 11 to 13 points in sixth and seventh grades. The effect was smaller in eighth grade, but the pattern still held, and it tracked with how teachers worked. The biggest gains came in classes where teachers returned graded work in under three days. When the tool handled the grading, teachers could respond to students faster than their colleagues elsewhere. 

Word has traveled. Since District 11’s superintendent, Cristine Vaughan, adopted this time-saving tool, senior city schools officials and parent advocates have come to the Bronx to see it for themselves.

Notice what is missing from this story. The children are not on screens all day. District 11 students spend class time talking, reasoning and writing by hand. The technology serves the teaching and finishes the paperwork.

This is what the screen-time debate keeps missing. The is not whether technology belongs in classrooms. It is who the technology is built for. Point it at the child, and you get a generation doing its thinking on a black mirror. Point it at the teacher, and you get educators who know, in real time, what each student will need the next day.

This is not a preview of some distant future. It is a public school district closing gaps right now for students who are behind, with the same children and the same curriculum it already had, because its teachers got their time back.

So keep pencils in children’s hands, but take the paperwork off teachers. It would make a catch-up crisis so often called intractable look a great deal more solvable.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Kiddom Atlas and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Katie Arnold-Ratliff wrote a that lands on a headline claim I think is staggeringly wrong: either there is no such thing as a “gifted” child or else no way of reliably identifying one.

In making her case, she characterizes a as supporting her skepticism of giftedness.

Arnold-Ratliff notes that “” — her word — 12.3% of youth identified as gifted had achieved the standard of eminence used by the researchers. The standard they set for eminence, however, is very high: “full professors at research-intensive universities, Fortune 500 executives, distinguished judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers.”

Twelve percent is obviously a pretty small minority, but that’s still wildly above the baseline level of achievement!

You also have to assume that for every award-winning journalist and writer, there are two or three schlubs like me enjoying decent career success without ever winning an award. Similarly, if you’re the C.F.O. of the 512th largest corporation in the United States or just a normal everyday medical doctor, that’s clearly an above-average level of achievement relative to the whole population.

So I think this critique of gifted and talented is wrong, and, as I’ve written before, the push to is extremely misguided, especially since there are the most valid critiques of how kids are identified for advanced math classes.

At the same time, I do think the NYC gifted and talented programming deserves criticism, though my complaint is roughly the opposite of the one that Arnold-Ratliff offered.

Precisely because you really can identify which kids are the most promising ones in a pretty reliable way, the mere fact that the graduates of a gifted program do well in life does not convey any information at all about whether the program is actually any good.

If you read accounts of what’s happening in G&T, you’ll see that it’s a lot of special activities that have nothing to do with basic principles like “give the smartest kids harder math problems so they learn more.” And the research on the causal impact shows not much is going on.

The level of fighting over who gets into this program and whether it’s unfair is wildly out of proportion to the scrutiny of its actual educational efficacy.

And unfortunately, this is the case almost everywhere in American education, whether it’s the link between “good schools” and property values, the practical operation of charter and public school choice programs, the tuition that people pay for private school, or the battles over who gets into exam schools or gifted programs.

Parents are just massively, massively under-rating the power of selection effects and wasting a lot of time, money and political capital.

Many selective programs have minimal impact

There happens to be a good recent scholarly treatment of the New York City G&T program in Jimmy Chin and Geoffrey Kocks’ paper, “.” They use two different methods (a regression discontinuity design centered on the qualifying exam cutoff and a lottery design) to look at causal impacts of being admitted to the kindergarten G&T program.

What they find is that G&T admits are more likely to end up going to selective middle school programs, so parents who perceive G&T as the first step on a ladder of selective educational experiences in the NYC public school system are onto something.

But do the kids actually learn anything extra? Well, no.

They find that “while G&T markedly changes the classroom environment, there is no impact on achievement using both empirical strategies, with precise and insignificant effects smaller than 0.04σ when pooling the designs.”

How about getting into those good middle schools, though — is that valuable?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a study on that. But back in 2011, Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer looked at the pinnacle of selective public education in New York City, the specialized high schools where admission is based on standardized test results.

The way this works is that there are sharp cut-off points because admission is based purely on the tests. So kids with better test scores end up doing better in life, but we can use discontinuity designs to test whether this is a result of getting into the more selective schools or just a selection effect. “attending an exam school has little impact on Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, college enrollment, or college graduation — casting doubt on their ultimate long-term impact.”

That paper is 15 years old, and at this point I would say it’s made zero impact on the political wrangling over these schools or anything else that’s happening in the city.

What’s interesting is that I don’t think this lack of attention to the question of whether NYC’s selective programs are any good at teaching reflects media bias or short-sightedness. The city’s parents appear to sincerely not care about this and are just desperate to send their kids to schools where the other kids are above average. Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg and Christopher Walters studied this in “” where they looked at how parents ranked high schools in their applications to New York’s public school choice system. The authors find that “preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.”

Education’s Lake Wobegon problem

Unlike in the G&T study or the specialized high schools study, the school choice paper did find that going to school with higher-achieving peers has modest but real benefits for learning.

Similarly, in “” by David Card, Eric Chyn, and Laura Giuliano, they look at an anonymous, large, urban school district that apparently everyone in the know believes to be Broward County in Florida. What they find is that being admitted to this county’s G&T program leads to better middle and high school grades and better odds of going to college — but no increase in standardized test scores. They also find that this effect exists only for boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. So parents are obsessed with peer effects over teaching effectiveness, and the peer effects are real — they’re just small.

What’s perverse about this is that exactly as you would expect, peer effects are most valuable for precisely the kinds of kids whose parents are least likely to be reading New York Magazine or obsessing over school rankings.

I find it puzzling the extent to which quite wealthy people will sometimes try to buy their kids’ way into Ivy League colleges. There is a to attending an elite private school versus a state flagship university that’s probably driven by the networking opportunities. But while I’m happy to believe that going to Harvard helped Ruben Gallego get to the United States Senate — a poor kid from Chicago was able to raise money for his first Arizona State House race in part because he met rich and well-connected people there — it’s obviously not the case that Jared Kushner became a top American diplomatic envoy thanks to his elite educational credentials.

More broadly, though, the promise of education is that it’s positive sum.

At the low end of the achievement spectrum, it would be better for everyone to live in a country where basic literacy and numeracy skills were universal. Obviously the largest benefits of obtaining those skills would accrue to the individuals who acquired them. But it’s broadly better for society to have skilled workers and swift communications. At the high end, if a promising kid is able to learn math and science and become an inventor, then everyone wins.

But we can’t give everyone above-average peers.

And families chasing those above-average peers has a lot of negative impacts. In the traditional public school system, access to specific schools is literally auctioned off via the real estate market. If “good school” in that context meant school that is good at teaching, that could become something that broadly inspired homeowners to care about the quality of their local school, driving big systemic improvement.

But since it just means school with above-average peers, we’re getting a zero-sum shuffle in which the families who would most benefit from higher-achieving peers can’t afford them. The charter school world features some very promising schools, but it also features systematic efforts by many of those schools to game the system and do de facto selection of their students. These violations of the spirit of lottery-based admissions happen because, at the end of the day, parents reward them. And for colleges and private K-12 schools where selection is the norm, that’s basically all that happens.

In the D.C. area, there’s a definite hierarchy of private schools, where Sidwell and Georgetown Day are “the best.” But this literally just means they’re the hardest to get into. The reason they’re hard to get into is they get the most applications and have the highest yield on their acceptance. They’re hard to get into because everyone wants to go there, and everyone wants to go there because they are hard to get into. There is zero evidence that they provide better education on a value-add basis than their “lesser” competitors or than schools you can attend for free.

And I mean literally zero! The parents who pay over $50,000 in tuition for the privilege of sending their kids there are sincerely not interested in this question. If they were, some evidence would exist. Maybe it wouldn’t be persuasive and maybe the studies wouldn’t be well-designed, but genuinely nobody cares!

We should try to teach kids appropriate material

I don’t really know how to get people to care more about the actual quality of education, but this really is something that we ought to care about.

Innate ability is very important, as literally everyone agrees in a non-school context.

My son is a very good swimmer, in large part because he’s very tall and strong for his age and has an impressive wingspan. But instruction and practice are also very important. Learning how to swim a legal butterfly, execute a flip turn or time a relay dive is not genetic. My son inherited many of these physical attributes from his mother, who I think clearly could have been a good swimmer. But she was never interested and never learned how to do any of that stuff.

Outside of formal K-12 schools, nobody thinks the right way to teach is to lump a bunch of people together based on their age and then have one teacher try to deliver a lesson to everyone regardless of what they already know. That’s dumb.

The practice of labeling some kids officially “gifted” invites toxic politics. But I think it’s perverse that progressive ideology has saddled so much of public education with an approach to teaching that nobody uses anywhere else. It’s kind of wild that the teaching profession is so suffused with this ideology that few stakeholders in the system seem to understand how impossible it makes their jobs.

It’s really important for kids to master basic reading skills. When they do that, they ought to be passed on to a new language arts class that focuses more on understanding texts and learning to write. If they haven’t mastered basic reading yet, they should keep being taught it until they know how to do it. At some point in your mathematical education, you’re supposed to learn fractions. You should keep doing fractions until you’ve learned them, but when you’re done, you should move forward. You’d expect to see different kids ready to learn basic algebra at different ages, which is fine — you should teach the material to the kids who are ready to learn it when they’re ready, regardless of their age.

Over the course of a normal education, different people will end up learning different amounts because that’s how life works.

When you’re lifting weights, you try to lift a bit more each week than you did previously. You don’t lift an age-determined average amount of weight regardless of how strong you personally are. And you won’t necessarily progress at the same speed as the person lifting next to you. And you definitely won’t get stronger just by working out in the gym whose clients are strongest on average.

Again, outside the K-12 school context everyone gets all this. Peers aren’t magic. In fact, if you’re a beginner, you probably need a bunch of explicit instruction that the real gym rats would find annoying and pointless — it’s better for everyone to be doing the workouts that are actually appropriate for them.

New York City education officials are hitting pause on releasing comprehensive artificial intelligence guidelines after their draft policy from March sparked .

Officials initially said their final guidance would be released in June, but backed away from that timeline during a Wednesday City Council hearing focused on AI in schools. Instead, the policy guidance will be released sometime this summer, First Deputy Chancellor Danielle Giunta said.

Giunta said the “shifting national conversation, which has really escalated over just the last couple of weeks alone” was one reason for the delay, along with nearly 6,500 comments responding to the March draft. Officials have not released those responses but told City Council members they would do so.

Worries about AI — and education technology in schools more broadly — have increased in recent months. More than half of City Council members urging Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels to pause AI use in schools citing concerns about learning and mental health. A broader petition seeking a moratorium on generative AI use in city schools has received .

The Education Department’s draft policy used a that spelled out various uses of AI and their risk levels. Assessments and grading are not allowed, for instance, but brainstorming lesson plans gets a green light. Student AI use was largely left out, even though it’s one of the most pressing issues schools face. In response to the draft policy, parents and largely criticized the approach.

Samuels, who did not attend Wednesday’s hearing, that the Education Department’s draft policy “missed the mark” that AI “is the most invasive technology that we’ve seen.” He suggested the final guidance would have stricter limits for the city’s youngest students.

Giunta said Wednesday that the city is considering different expectations based on age and grade level and thinking about how to prepare older students “for a world in which AI is already present without allowing AI to replace their own thinking.”

City Council members repeatedly pressed Education Department officials about the extent to which AI tools are already used in classrooms and indicated families should have a greater say over how their children are exposed to it.

“There are huge gaps in our understanding of how the technology is being deployed and when,” said Manhattan council member Carmen De La Rosa, who chairs the technology committee. “We do need the time to be able to wrap our arms around what is happening in our classrooms.”

Education officials said they are working with superintendents and principals to develop a more comprehensive sense of what tools schools are already using.

The Education Department’s stance on AI has whipsawed in recent years. When ChatGPT gained widespread use, city officials . Three months later, they rescinded the ban.

Former schools Chancellor David Banks , saying “AI can revolutionize how we function as a school system” and could be used for everything from college advising to assessing student work. But he never released a clear policy, leaving that task to Mamdani and Samuels to complete. Meanwhile, schools have been left to .

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

At a Board of Regents meeting Monday, state education officials announced that high school graduates in New York could soon start receiving a new type of diploma — one that reflects their skills and knowledge, rather than the number of credits they’ve earned.

The new diploma is a central component of , the State Education Department’s multiyear effort to overhaul graduation requirements to ensure students leave high school ready for modern careers and higher education. If approved by the board, it would replace the current graduation framework, which allows students to earn one of three diplomas depending on how they perform on statewide standardized tests known as Regents exams.

At the meeting, Education Department officials called it the most significant transformation of the state’s graduation system in generations. The plan would direct school districts to shift away from awarding credits based on the time a student spends in a course and instead adopt a “competency-based” model with flexibility in how they develop mastery of specific skills.

“The big idea is that New York is moving away from an outdated factory-style education model toward a model system built for how students actually learn,” said Jeffrey Matteson, the department’s senior deputy commissioner for education policy.

The Education Department has only shared preliminary plans so far, so many implementation details remain unclear. During and after the meeting, some Board of Regents members and education advocates raised concerns about how schools will maintain academic rigor and support teachers as they adopt flexible models, and whether students across the state will have equal access to opportunities.

Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-New York, said New York must strengthen K-8 instruction in order for the initiative to succeed, noting that students can only access opportunities like internships and college courses if they are proficient in reading and math.

The department plans to present the final plan to the board for approval once it’s complete and start a phased rollout in certain grade levels by the end of next school year. Here’s what we know so far.

What is competency-based education?

The Education Department defines competency-based education as a system in which students get closer to graduating after proving they’ve actually learned material instead of just completing required class time.

Students would still enroll in traditional courses, but would also be able to participate in activities outside of the classroom, such as internships, capstone projects, community service and career and technical education programs, to move toward their degrees. Instead of a single exam, students would have different ways to show what they know in each subject, such as assessments, projects, presentations, or portfolios.

In 2024, the Board of Regents announced plans to eliminate the requirement that students pass the Regents exams to receive a diploma. Currently, they can earn one of three diploma designations: a Regents diploma, an advanced Regents diploma for students who pass additional tests, and a local diploma for students who meet testing requirements a different way. On Monday, state officials explained that the exams would be one of many options students can use to qualify for a diploma.

“What will matter moving forward is the quality and substance of the evidence that a student produces, not the particular route that produced it or how long it took,” said Shannon Logan, director of strategic priorities and coordination in the department’s Office of Cultural Education.

What will the new transcript look like?

Current transcripts include a list of classes and assessments with corresponding grades, which do not “adequately reflect what a student knows and what they are able to do,” Angelique Johnson-Dingle, one of the department’s deputy commissioners, said at the meeting. Under the new framework, graduating students would receive a “universal transcript or learner profile.” 

The transcript would document alignment with state learning standards and the six attributes the state outlined in its graduation blueprint, called the . It’s unclear exactly what the transcript would look like.

Will it affect college applications?

There is little evidence that competency-based education disadvantages students in the college admissions process. Many colleges have embraced more holistic admissions practices that consider portfolios and other demonstrations of skills that extend beyond GPA and standardized test scores.

Education Department officials said they are working with colleges and universities to ensure every institution that serves the state’s high school graduates “understands and trusts” the new diploma.

What does this mean for current students?

Students who started ninth grade in 2023 would be the final cohort to graduate under the state’s current requirements.

Students starting high school in 2024, 2025, or 2026 would still have to fulfill current credit requirements and take the Regents exams, but they would not have to pass the exams to graduate. For the 2027 and 2028 cohorts only, the state would impose a yet-to-be-determined credit requirement.

The new flexible system introduced Monday, which would eliminate time-based credits, would be fully implemented for students who enter high school in 2029.

What are the next steps?

The state is currently reworking learning standards, competency rubrics, and the universal transcript and will release them within the next year. The department said it will continue to schedule working groups and advisory panels to gather feedback on the changes, and is updating the state’s data system to track student progress.

The Education Department encouraged school districts to start designing pilot programs for next school year that include hands-on learning outside of traditional classrooms, a wider range of ways to assess student learning beyond standard exams, and expanded career-related opportunities. Schools could hire work-based learning coordinators, for instance, or partner with local employers.

The New York Knicks’ victory this weekend over the San Antonio Spurs, cementing their , brought joy to fans across the five boroughs.

Shortly after their win, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the city will host to honor the team. It will start at 10 a.m. at Battery Park and travel north along Broadway through the Canyon of Heroes before concluding at City Hall for a ceremony where the mayor will give the team the keys to the city.

The only problem: Some parents are mad that the parade is being held on the same day as . The biology and living environment exams are being administered in the morning. The “Earth and Space Sciences” and “Physical Setting/ Earth Science” exams are being administered in the afternoon.

One mom has already started asking city and state officials, as well as the team’s owner, to move the day of the parade. (High school students who aren’t taking Regents exams that day don’t attend school.) And one student started to cancel school altogether on Thursday.

“This scheduling conflict creates a profound issue of equity and fairness,” Michelle Weintraub, a mom of an eighth grader scheduled to take a Regents exam that day, wrote in her petition. “The students most affected are those who have worked tirelessly all year to pass these exams. Depriving them of the chance to celebrate their city’s historic milestone — while adults and non-testing students freely attend — is inherently inequitable.”

, the student who started a petition, played up the feelings of unity the Knicks have brought to the city — and suggested the parade could be a teachable moment.

“The parade is an educational experience in itself, rich with lessons about sportsmanship, history, and the power of dreams coming true,” Cosa wrote in his petition. “By supporting this request, we will allow the next generation of Knicks fans to experience this extraordinary moment, creating lifelong memories and sparking inspiration for future accomplishments in their own lives.”

As mayor, Mamdani has embraced a sense of fun for the city’s school kids, so they could watch the Knicks in the championship games. And of course, many kids were grateful to him for bringing back traditional snow days. But to do that, he had to get a for the day off since students already were at .

Getting a waiver again would likely be a tall order.

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Their bill, titled the , is being framed as a defense of public education. It is actually something else: a revealing glimpse into the mindset that is holding Democrats back.

A decade ago, Democrats were more willing to challenge the status quo. On education, they pushed for higher standards, greater accountability and new models like charter schools. They believed public education wasn’t just something to defend, but something to improve. They were willing to take on districts that weren’t delivering for students, even when it meant challenging teachers unions.

That spirit is hard to find today. 

The federal scholarship tax credit program, enacted last year, lets states direct federal dollars — potentially billions — to a wide range of student needs, including tutoring, afterschool programs, transportation and services for kids with disabilities. In states that opt in, families have the choice to use these scholarships to fill the gaps in their children’s education.Ěý

That is something denied to states that opt out. And yet, the majority of Democrats in the Senate are trying to repeal the program — not because those uses fall outside their priorities, but because the funding flows outside traditional public school systems. 

Even though the tax credit program would provide significant new resources to advance priorities Democrats themselves have championed, its support for private school scholarships crosses a line in the sand for them. To most families, turning down new funding for students doesn’t make sense. But for Democrats, it follows a clear chain of logic, one that prioritizes the preservation of existing school systems over students’ needs, defers to the interests of teachers unions and applies ideological purity tests that treat any nontraditional learning environment as a threat.Ěý

That way of thinking carries real consequences, especially at a moment when students need more support, not less.

The country is in the midst of a decade-long education depression, one marked by historic learning loss, widening achievement gaps and growing disengagement. Families see it, educators feel it and districts, facing acute financial strain, struggle to meet students’ needs.

For years, many on the left have that the United States always finds money for other priorities but refuses to invest meaningfully in education. President Donald Trump’s proposed record-breaking $1.5 trillion defense budget underscores the point. But for the first time in a long while, there is also, finally, new money for education. And Democrats want to turn these dollars away.Ěý

That choice is even harder to justify when you consider the broader fiscal reality. The federal government has run deficits for more than two decades; if lawmakers are going to keep borrowing against the future, the least they can do is invest in the generation who will inherit their debt.

Democrats’ reflexive opposition to the tax credit program reveals how much their policy imagination has narrowed, leaving them unable to see how it helps their constituents and advances their priorities. Some of their critiques are substantive: Questions about accountability, oversight and whether private school scholarships are subject to the same civil rights protections as traditional public schools deserve serious answers. But those are arguments for getting in the room and shaping the program, not walking away. Repealing the program would only ensure that the students who need those dollars most — low- and middle-income families, children with disabilities, communities of color — would end up with nothing. Democrats should be fighting to make this program work for those families, not fighting to take it off the table. 

Democrats long held a clear advantage over Republicans on education. That advantage has in recent years as voters have grown more skeptical that the party is delivering results. Trying to repeal the tax credit program will only make matters worse.

Polling across multiple states shows strong support for participation in the scholarship tax credit program, including among Democratic voters. In many cases, support approaches or exceeds , particularly among working-class families and families of color.

What some Democratic politicians see as an unacceptable departure from orthodoxy, many families see as a practical way to get their children the help they need. At some point, the gap between how policymakers view the issue and how families experience it demands a reckoning. Democrats should focus less on defending what exists and more on exploring what could be. 

When Colorado’s Jared Polis became the first Democratic governor to announce that his state would opt into the scholarship tax credit program, he framed it perfectly: “[I]t’s only our own creativity that can hold us back. Anything we can envision, this is a very powerful funding mechanism.” He called the decision a “no-brainer” and said he “would be crazy not to” participate.

That is the mindset Democrats need right now. Not a defensive posture, but an expansive one — grounded not in scarcity, but in abundance. 

An starts from the premise that the goal is an educated public, not the preservation of any particular school model or the adults employed within it. It recognizes that public funding can support a wide range of tools, strategies and approaches, so long as they serve students well. And it invites educators, families and policymakers to imagine different ways of organizing learning, rather than assuming the century-old model designed for an industrial economy is the only one capable of serving today’s students.

The tax credit program is not a cure-all, but it is a meaningful new investment. At a moment of real need, real disruption and real opportunity, Democrats should not be narrowing the conversation. They should be expanding it.

“We wouldn’t be able to function as an organization without him,” said Superintendent Jennifer Gaffney. “A lot of what students, teachers and our office staff do is centered around the use of technology and data systems. He is the backbone of all that.”

But now Gaffney doesn’t know how much longer she can rely on the federal dollars that pay his salary. The Rural Education Achievement Program is among the 17 funding sources that the Trump administration wants to roll into a . Congress approved $220 million for REAP this year, but under the president’s plan, governors and state education chiefs would decide whether rural districts would get extra money.

Monty Mayer, superintendent of the Velva Public Schools in North Dakota, about 20 miles southeast of Minot, used the $14,000 he received from the program this year to pay teaching assistants to work with students who were behind academically.

“Money rolled into a block grant would be swallowed up by the bigger schools as their needs are much greater than ours,” he said. That would leave “small rural schools looking to find answers in different places without a clear picture as to where those resources would come from.”

During with the Senate appropriations committee in late April, Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced several questions from both Democrats and Republicans about the future of the program. She suggested that REAP was underutilized.

“A lot of rural schools do not have grant writers, cannot bring in the resources other states might have or other cities might have,” she said. “A lot of states never participated in any of the grant funding.”

Under a consolidated program, she said, all states would receive a portion of the block grant and officials would decide “how this money should be spent in their state, where the greatest needs are, whether that’s in rural communities.”

Officials with years of experience in rural education say that isn’t how REAP works. States or districts don’t write grant proposals for the funding, said Steven Johnson, superintendent of the Fort Ransom Public School District, which operates one elementary school in southeast North Dakota. Districts , based on size and location, receive an invitation to apply. And most do, Johnson said.

“It’s rarely about capacity or lack of grant-writing ability. If anything, what we’re seeing is the opposite,” he said. “Rural districts rely on REAP because it is simple, direct and does not require extensive administrative capacity.”

Abigail Swisher, who previously worked on the REAP program at the department, said where rural districts struggle is applying for large, competitive grant programs.

“Applying for competitive federal grants is time-consuming and complex. Larger districts are hiring grant writers who have the specialized expertise and who have time,” she said. “That’s exactly why we have the REAP program. It was designed by Congress to help fill that gap.”

There were efforts to help rural districts access those other programs, she said, but those ended with the new administration.

‘Testing and reporting standards’ 

Districts that for Small, Rural School Achievement funding, one of the two REAP programs, have fewer than 600 students and are located in an area their state defines as rural. Others, with 20% of students who live below the poverty line, qualify for the Rural and Low-Income School program, and some are eligible for both. This year, 17,873 were eligible for one or both programs.

Last week, Kirstin Baesler, the assistant secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, that they have considerable leeway to use federal funds for programs like tutoring or after-school programs.Ěý

But Johnson said that flexibility was “one of the original core concepts behind REAP.” His district, for example, didn’t have enough poor students to qualify for Title I funding, but under existing law, he was able to use federal funds to provide students with reading and math tutoring.

Congress created REAP as part of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal accountability law that set strict expectations for school improvement, and reauthorized the program as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Despite their small size, rural districts were not exempt from NCLB’s mandates, Johnson said. 

“Small, rural schools were expected to meet the same testing and reporting standards as larger systems but often lacked the staffing and resources to do so,” he said.

A from AASA, the School Superintendents Association, showed that districts most commonly used the funds for technology, followed by staff training, compensation and expanding programs like STEM and arts for students. When Johnson asked other administrators across the country, they listed bullying prevention, special education assistants and support to help students graduate among the ways they use the funds.

“Rural districts piece together budgets with many smaller sources,” said Margaret Buckton, a school finance consultant in Iowa. Although REAP “isn’t a huge sum, when combined with other small grants, it likely makes a difference.”

Questions of ‘efficacy’

In her exchanges with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who has made rural schools a priority, McMahon questioned whether the program has a positive impact.

“Many of these programs have lost their efficacy and they really are not returning, giving the returns that we hope to see for rural schools,” McMahon said.

The Department of Education did not respond to questions about what data McMahon was referring to when she said the program wasn’t effective. But Melissa Sadorf, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, said because districts can use the funds in a variety of ways, the department looks primarily at compliance issues rather than impact on students.

“There is no single, consistent student outcome measure applied across grantees,” she said. “The program has not been the subject of a comprehensive federal evaluation in close to a decade, which makes any sweeping claim about effectiveness difficult to substantiate from the data.”

That was mostly a summary of the challenges facing rural schools, like transportation and teacher recruitment, and what the department was doing to support them.

The department also tracks whether districts comply with the rules for using the funds.

A in the Custer County, Colorado, district, for example, discovered an accounting error because a staff member entered data using hand-written notes. The same issue came up in Indiana’s in 2022. The department’s website doesn’t list any reports conducted since McMahon took office.

The administration pitched the same block grant idea last year, and Congress ultimately rejected it. With the appropriations process likely to drag out for months, it’s unclear whether lawmakers will be more receptive this year. 

But for rural districts like Sackets Harbor, the site of an important naval base during the war of 1812, the continued uncertainty over federal funding is “unnerving,” said Gaffney, the superintendent. 

The district’s annual , in which students fanned out across the historic town for service projects, like gardening and polishing headstones, is popular with local residents. The school board asked voters to approve a nearly 8% tax increase, which they did. But with increases in English learners and students with disabilities, Gaffney said the district is still under “a great deal of financial pressure.”

“That is precisely why every dollar matters to us, including REAP funding,” she said. “These resources are vital in helping us maintain programs, services and opportunities for our students.”

By the end of 2027, New York state is planning to completely phase out Regents exams and, instead, implement a new framework. This approach emphasizes not only content knowledge, but the development of skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication and the ability to navigate an increasingly complex world.Ěý

The shift away from Regents exams and toward a more holistic framework like one that Portrait of a Graduate represents presents a genuine opportunity. Not just to change how students are assessed, but to rethink what New York’s public education system prioritizes — real-world skills and holistic development over test scores.

For decades, education policy focused heavily on measurement. From No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, the dominant theory of education reform has been to define measurable standards, test consistently and hold schools accountable for results. The intention was serious: raise achievement and close persistent gaps. But after nearly 25 years, outcomes remain uneven. In many places, proficiency has barely moved, even as educators and parents confront rising levels of student anxiety, disengagement and mental health challenges.

Now, as the state moves away from the Regents and begins building toward the Portrait of a Graduate, the question is no longer only what is measured, but whether educators can build a curriculum that actually helps students develop the skills the framework demands.

These are not developed in typical classroom settings alone. They are built through experience: sustained practice, collaboration, feedback and the opportunity to perform and communicate in real time. Some of the most powerful environments available for developing these capacities already exist, though they are too often pushed to the margins of the school day.

They exist in music and the arts.

In a music classroom, students learn to listen deeply, adjust in real time and collaborate toward a shared goal. They develop discipline through practice and resilience through repetition, and they learn to manage pressure while communicating something meaningful in front of others. These are not simply artistic experiences; they are cognitive and human ones.

Music doesn’t just engage the brain, it changes it. In just a few years, children who study music show in the regions responsible for processing complexity and in the pathways that connect the entire brain. This is not enrichment, this is development. And the evidence goes further: Research has consistently shown that structured music training strengthens — the very capacities that support the skills included in the Portrait of a Graduate framework.Ěý

But beyond the research, children’s experiences are just as compelling. Students who have music classes daily develop not only skill, but , focus and a sense of agency. They begin to see themselves differently — not just as learners, but as contributors and creators.

For more than a century, the Regents exams signaled what New York’s education system valued. Now, the Portrait of a Graduate is redefining what student success looks like, shifting the focus toward the capacities young people need to thrive in the world beyond school. It’s up to educators to build a curriculum that genuinely develops them.

The Portrait of a Graduate asks schools to develop students who can think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate under pressure and navigate ambiguity with confidence. Music education has been doing exactly that in classrooms across the state for generations. The research confirms it. The students who have lived it demonstrate it.

As New York moves away from the Regents exams and redefines what it means to graduate, music education may be the most important curriculum for achieving the student success New York state is after.

Despite having room to serve more children, Middletown day care owner Peggy Fuentes often has to turn away families in desperate need of care. Each of her toddler classrooms has 10 students — the state caps class sizes for that age group at 12 — but to fill the remaining seats, she’d have to hire another employee. That’s because a decades-old state regulation says day care classrooms have to have one adult for every five children between 18 and 36 months old.

With operating costs climbing across the board, , Fuentes said it simply isn’t feasible to pay another salary to accommodate just two more children.

“I have an inventory of childcare spots that I’m reluctant to use because it is cost prohibitive,” said Fuentes, owner of On My Way Early Learning and Childcare Center, which serves around 240 children under 13.

New York state has some of the strictest staffing requirements in the country — stricter, in fact, than New York City’s. As state leaders allocate billions of dollars to address the childcare shortage in this year’s budget, a new state law could ease those requirements and unlock new day care seats at no additional cost to providers — but only if the state agency that oversees childcare decides to act on it.  

In December, Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation eliminating a provision that has prohibited the state Office of Children and Family Services from relaxing childcare staffing ratios. The new law leaves it to the agency to actually change the ratios; if it did so, the same number of workers could care for more children.  

State Senator James Skoufis, who introduced the bill in 2024, told New York Focus that adjusting the ratios is “more critical than ever” amid the state’s ongoing efforts to scale up its childcare sector and provide more affordable care to working parents.

Childcare advocates who oppose the change are concerned having the same number of staff supervising more children would increase the risk of accidents and injuries and fail to address a root cause of the state’s childcare crisis: low wages for workers.

Supporters counter that looser ratios are consistent with set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a professional membership organization that promotes high-quality early childhood education, and that alignment with the group’s guidance would offer flexibility to providers who already operate with razor-thin profit margins.

So far, OCFS has not indicated whether it plans to update the regulations. In a statement provided to New York Focus, OCFS spokesperson Daniel Marans said the agency is “currently assessing the viability of the requested ratio change, with the goal of supporting childcare providers without compromising our commitment to child safety.” The law does not impose a deadline for OCFS to make the switch.

More than 60 percent of New York’s census tracts are classified as a “childcare desert,” meaning that there are three or more children under 5 waiting for every available slot, according to the . Meanwhile, more than 16,000 children are specifically as a result of staffing shortages that have led programs to operate under capacity. While that’s not necessarily related to staffing ratios, some think easing them could help address the shortage.

“We can provide more resources to counties and to providers all we want, but if we don’t provide the very common sense flexibility that these providers require in order to effectuate creating more seats, then the money is only going to go so far,” said Skoufis.

Skoufis introduced the bill after providers, including Fuentes, expressed their frustrations to lawmakers over being held to tougher ratios than their counterparts in New York City, where staffing requirements are set by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Day care providers in the five boroughs must have one staff member for every five children between 12 and 18 months and one for every six children who are 2 years old. In the rest of the state, it’s 1–4 and 1–5, respectively. The discrepancies are even wider for older children.

Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who sponsored the bill, believes aligning ratios with New York City could help thousands of those families access a seat without burdening providers or taxpayers with additional costs.

“Childcare providers are operating on such slim margins that they frequently worry about going out of business,” Hevesi said. “We were looking for a way to give them some breathing room in an incredibly difficult climate without costing anybody any money.”

Dede Hill, vice president of policy at the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, a social policy and advocacy organization, has a different perspective. “One thing that makes childcare in New York state so high quality is because we have low ratios — and that’s certainly not something we want to step away from,” she said. Hill is a member of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, which advocates for universal childcare.

“I don’t think staffing ratios are the solution to the tremendous issues we have related to supply,” said Hill. The key is more investment in the workforce, including higher pay for childcare workers, she said.

One reason providers are facing significant financial strain is that the state’s reimbursement level for its , which covers nearly all of the cost of childcare for low- and middle-income families, isn’t enough to provide high quality care, Hill said. With providers forced to absorb the shortfall, many are unable to offer adequate wages: In 2025, the annual average salary for childcare workers in New York , lower than 96 percent of other jobs.

Fuentes, who has owned her day care center in Orange County for 17 years, said she currently has to choose between raising tuition for all children in order to pay another employee and waitlisting families even though there is ample space to serve them. If OCFS chose to align statewide staffing ratios with New York City, she said, she could enroll around 15 more children without hiring additional staff.

“There’s a childcare crisis in New York,” she said. “If we can’t use our full supply of seats, then that crisis is just going to continue.”

For Heidi-Jo Brandt, president of a union representing more than 8,800 providers outside New York City, the flexibility doesn’t seem worth it. Some revisions to standards may be appropriate, such as the current 1–2 ratio for children under 2 in home-based care, she said, but a broader relaxing of staffing ratios could put children at risk. Research shows inadequate supervision is the main cause of injuries in childcare settings, including , , and from bottle warmers.

“While it could have a tremendous impact statewide, our concern is always for the safety of children,” said Brandt.

Some research indicates that high staff-to-child ratios and smaller group sizes are critical for children’s health, safety, and development, but data on the safety outcome of ratios like New York City’s is limited.

In recent years, as the childcare industry has reeled from a pandemic-driven dip in enrollment and rise in operating costs, have proposed loosening their childcare staffing ratios, increasing maximum group sizes, and relaxing other regulations to meet demand. Many states set ratios based on guidance from the National Association for the Education of Young Children; New York City’s ratios are roughly in line with the group’s recommendations.

Meanwhile, New York state has some of the most stringent ratios nationwide. It is that uses the restrictive ratios recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. Even New York City’s staffing ratios remain stricter than those in many other states.

Skoufis first introduced the bill after then-OCFS Commissioner Suzanne Miles-Gustave informed him that aligning statewide ratios with New York City would require legislation. At the time, he said, OCFS officials “made it crystal clear” they wanted to pursue the changes, though he’s less clear on their position today.

In a January letter to current OCFS Commissioner DaMia Harris-Madden, Skoufis argued that it is “financially unreasonable” to require a 1–5 staff-to-child ratio for 18- to 36-month-olds with a maximum group size of 12.

Hevesi said that he believes the agency should “act sooner rather than later” given the potential benefits.

“My instinct is that there’s going to be support to look at this and see what’s appropriate — but my role was just to take the handcuffs off and now they are free to do whatever they feel is appropriate,” he said.

Buffalo day care owner Emily Thrasher pointed out that New York City and state regulations differ on other aspects of childcare: The city also has more lenient classroom space requirements than the rest of the state, as well as different age group definitions that determine other regulations. For example, New York City defines a toddler as a child between 12 and 24 months old, while New York state’s definition is 18 to 36 months.

Thrasher said full alignment with New York City’s standards would allow her small business to generate hundreds of thousands of additional dollars annually. That, in turn, would enable her to serve more families.

“I can’t even imagine how much that would compound for larger day care centers,” she said. “We could help more families, open more slots, pay our staff more. … The changes seem small, but it would make the biggest difference.”

This story originally appeared in , a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. .

The announcement represents a major win for supporters of private school choice who have been lobbying Democratic governors to participate in the program. However, Hochul’s office said she intends to review the details before making the decision official.

The American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group, said Thursday night that Hochul first made the announcement at a private gathering. , an organization that supports Jewish religious education, according to an Agudath spokesperson.

Emma Wallner, a spokesperson for the governor, confirmed Hochul’s plans to opt in to the tax credit.

“Governor Hochul is supportive of the federal tax credit scholarship and its potential to help New York students and schools,” Wallner wrote in a statement. “Our office awaits information from the federal government on the program and will thoroughly review the details of the policy for poison pills that could harm New York’s education system.”

The , which will clarify, for example, how donated money might benefit public school students or whether states can prevent scholarship-granting organizations from discriminating against certain students.

The tax credit was approved last year as part of the Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It allows taxpayers to get a dollar-for-dollar credit up to $1,700 on their federal taxes if they donate money to an eligible scholarship-granting organization. These organizations could give students money for private school tuition, tutoring, and other educational expenses.

Governors, however, have to opt into the program for students in their state to benefit.

“Finally, school choice is coming to New York, thanks to the courage of Governor Hochul and the tremendous advocacy of countless families, educators, and supporters who have worked for generations to advance options for kids who need them,” American Federation for Children CEO Tommy Schultz said in a press release.

According to a , 29 states, nearly all of them led by Republicans, have opted into the tax credit. That list does not include New York.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is the . Under pressure from Republican lawmakers, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said last year that he .

Some Democratic governors have been strongly opposed. In Wisconsin, which launched one of the nation’s earliest voucher programs, . In a veto statement, he cited the lack of any accountability measures in the federal program.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also , as did , but Republican-controlled legislatures overrode vetoes in both states.

Other Democratic governors are taking a wait-and-see approach. Democratic backers of expanding school choice and that states that don’t opt in risk their own taxpayers donating to scholarship groups in other states. Opponents say the program undermines public education and threatens funding, .

Nationally and in New York, supporters of religious education have lobbied for the tax credit as a way to ease the tuition burden for families.

“This is extraordinary news for Jewish families and for every community across our state,” said Sydney Altfield, the CEO of Teach NYS, an organization that lobbies for public funding for Jewish schools. “Blue states across the country will now be watching closely.”

Hochul has courted the Orthodox Jewish community, an influential voting bloc, as she faces reelection in November. Along with state legislative leaders, she previously oversight of private schools, a measure that would largely benefit certain yeshivas that . The state’s education commissioner, Betty Rosa, called the move a “travesty.”

Hochul has backed other efforts to expand school choice since taking office nearly five years ago, drawing pushback from other New York Democrats. In 2023, she proposed to in New York City, even as the publicly funded yet privately managed schools have fallen out of favor among many left-leaning elected officials. State lawmakers but ultimately approved a more .

Hochul has also touted her commitment to funding traditional public schools and has presided over increases in state spending. State officials indicated Thursday that schools should expect at least a 2% bump in the state’s forthcoming budget, which is more than a month overdue and has .

“I’m proud of the resources we have put into education,” she told reporters Thursday.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

This story originally appeared in , a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. .

When Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled her signature literacy legislation in 2024, she stressed that New York was late to the game — calling it “embarrassing” that Connecticut, New Jersey, and other states had already embraced phonics-based instruction. New York schools had fallen behind the national curve, she said, and had been teaching students how to read the wrong way.

A large reason for that, she emphasized, is that under state law, districts choose their own curricula. The Back to Basics law was supposed to fix that problem, by requiring school districts to align instruction with research on how children best learn to read by September 2025.

Specifically, districts had to start teaching using the “science of reading,” a phonics-based approach grounded in the idea that reading isn’t innate and must be explicitly taught through skills like sounding out words. At the time, it was gaining traction as the policy du jour in literacy instruction as an alternative to “balanced literacy,” an approach long embraced by New York districts that teaches children to instead rely on context clues for reading comprehension.

By passing the Back to Basics plan, New York joined  and the District of Columbia in a nationwide movement fueled in part by results in Mississippi, where rigorous literacy laws  in academic performance over the past 13 years.

But a New York Focus analysis of mandatory school surveys submitted to the state has found that more than 130 school districts are still using “balanced literacy” curricula.

Teachers in those districts, primarily in rural and suburban areas, are often required to use reading programs that advocates say contradict the settled body of research around teaching reading. The misaligned curricula could have an especially profound impact on students of color and those from low-income families, who are already more likely to experience reading difficulties, these advocates say.

New York’s law differs from those of some other states, which require districts to pick from a list of state-approved reading curricula and offer extra funding for districts to purchase them. Others have allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to advance multiyear literacy plans with clear benchmarks.

While New York’s Back to Basics law required the State Education Department to provide best practices to districts, it entrusts school districts with making the switch and measuring their own compliance — leaving in place a discretionary system that advocates argue contributed to New York’s low literacy rates to begin with.

So far, that piecemeal approach has left hundreds of thousands of students learning how to read with widely discredited curricula and instructional materials.

“Our concern is a lack of urgency,” said Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-New York, which recently published  of the survey data submitted to the state in September. “If 400,000 kids aren’t getting evidence-based instruction, that, to us, is a crisis.”

Smink said the law lacks enforcement mechanisms in part because of New York’s deeply embedded culture as a strong local-control state, where most decisions about public schools are determined by districts, school boards, and even individual campuses. He also said the state teachers union wields significant influence and “opposes anything they think threatens teacher autonomy.

The literacy law, which invested $10 million in teacher training and tasked the union with training 20,000 teachers, came under fire after a March  revealed that the training program heavily featured the instructional methods that Hochul set out to replace.

The survey data offers an unprecedented statewide look at how schools are teaching elementary school students how to read and write — and insight into the state’s progress as it gears up to replicate the same approach with .

New York’s reading scores are average at best.ĚýThirty-one percent of New York fourth graders were proficient in reading last year, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress — just slightly above the US average and much lower than similar states like Massachusetts and New Jersey. Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, also outperformed New York, which spends more money per pupil than any other state.

According to education advocates, the Back to Basics is doing little to make up for lost ground. “We are shockingly behind,” said Assemblymember Robert Carroll, a leading literacy advocate. “If we don’t do something, we are on the path to be the last in the nation on this.”

In response to a request for comment, a Hochul spokesperson wrote, “We anticipate continued progress and are working with SED to ensure that all schools are implementing evidence-based literacy instruction.”

The structure of New York’s education system means that students in neighboring districts may be learning with vastly different curricula. Until recently, Celine Schneider’s children attended school in Riverhead Central School District, where last year less than a third of third graders were proficient in reading.

On the literacy curricula survey, Riverhead was one of 16 districts that reported not aligning with the state’s best practices in every category of reading instruction, as well as in writing. The district said it uses a mix of curricula, including some aligned with the science of reading alongside balanced literacy programs critics say fail to teach children how to decode words properly.

Riverhead declined an interview request, but provided a statement through a communications firm verifying that its reading curriculum and instruction “are aligned with the state’s core curriculum standards and teaching practices.”

Schneider said that in Riverhead, students were promoted from one grade to another without gaining basic literacy skills. After watching her daughter fall behind, lose confidence, and endure bullying for not knowing how to read, Schneider said she decided to transfer her children to a nearby district with stronger reading intervention, despite the hefty tuitions required to switch districts. (The district, Quogue Union Free School District, said in its survey response that it uses science of reading curricula and aligns with the state’s best practices, though it did also report using a popular balanced literacy program.)

“It was either let them continue to fail, or struggle financially to make sure my kids are okay in the long run,” she said.Ěý

Schneider asked Quogue to assess her children’s reading abilities, and expected mixed results: Her oldest struggled with dyslexia, and she had just learned her other daughter was going to enter second grade as a nonreader. But the other three seemed to be succeeding in school.

Instead, the results were shockingly similar — all five were at least a grade level behind.

“Not being able to read destroys a child’s future,” she said. “We are setting our kids up to fail.”

Educators and policymakers have long debated how to best teach students how to read. “Balanced literacy” dominated US classrooms for much of the past 20 years, but many schools have moved away from it due to mounting evidence that can lead to poor reading outcomes.

The science of reading, on the other hand, represents a vast body of research emphasizing the importance of phonics — the relationship between letters and sounds — in teaching children how to read. While the approach has some detractors who say it pushes a “one-size-fits-all” approach that may not work for every child, studies show that instruction based on the science of reading improves reading proficiency, especially for children with dyslexia.

But whether it can underpin an effective education policy depends on how it is implemented, and some worry New York’s patchwork approach could limit its potential benefits.

In 2024, 46 percent of New York third graders were below basic proficiency in reading.ĚýThose outcomes could have profound implications: Research shows children who fail to read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school.

Mississippi’s success with the science of reading is hard to ignore. The state was ranked second worst nationwide for fourth-grade reading in 2013 and rose to the top 10 within a decade. Nearby states that followed suit, including Alabama and Louisiana, saw similar gains, a trend referred to as the “Southern surge.” Outcomes in other states have been more mixed, fueling debate between critics who see stalled scores as a cause for concern and proponents who argue the reforms need time to take hold.

Under New York’s Back to Basics plan, all school districts were supposed to confirm in the September survey that they transitioned to the science of reading in their curricula, instruction, and teacher training, and that they’re following best practices in seven literacy and writing categories. As part of the survey, districts submitted the curricula they use.

Most school districts reported meeting best practices, but the results still show areas of concern, especially in writing, fluency, and vocabulary practices; in each of those areas, over 100 school districts and BOCES — regional organizations that provide educational resources to districts — said they were out of alignment. Many also shared plans to improve instruction, including by reviewing curricula, revamping teacher training, and establishing literacy committees to inform programming.

Plattsburgh, Friendship, and Watkins Glen school districts all reported misalignment even though they submitted curricula that align with the science of reading. Superintendents at those school districts said they opted for candor, and that the survey revealed where instruction still needs improvement.

“There was a relatively large learning curve to get a full staff of teachers up to the expectation of Back to Basics,” said Watkins Glen Superintendent Kai D’Alleva.Ěý“But there has been tremendous buy-in, and we’re excited to see the fruits of this labor develop over the next few years.”

Overall, more than 130 of the state’s 713 school districts submitted balanced literacy curricula, with the most popular being Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study, two of the most controversial programs. Scores of districts also created their own curriculum or reported using other programs that have not been reviewed by EdReports, a nonprofit that states and districts use to review the quality of K-12 instructional materials.

Kat Fratticci, co-founder of the Long Island Literacy Coalition, a community-based advocacy group founded in 2024 to promote the science of reading, said some districts are hesitant to revamp reading instruction because they’ve already invested heavily in their current curriculum, instructional materials, and teacher training.

At the same time, the state law does not have any clear enforcement mechanism built in to account for these variations. And the survey results don’t capture the full picture. Districts have to fill out the attestation survey annually, but they’re not required to submit proof that their curricula are aligned, and the state doesn’t provide guidance on what programs districts should steer clear of. Dozens of districts reported using balanced literacy programs despite confirming their alignment with all best practices.

The state shouldn’t tell school districts exactly what to purchase and teach, said Tarja Parssinen, founder of the Western NY Education Alliance, but “there has to be some guidance, some support, and some recommendations about what to stay away from.”

Balanced literacy curricula can mask dyslexia and other learning delays, research shows, because they often encourage students to guess words based on pictures or context clues rather than decode letters and sounds. In Schneider’s case, she said she thought her children were reading at the appropriate level because they would read aloud at home — until she noticed they were just reciting passages they had memorized in class.

Other Riverhead parents told New York Focus how their children who struggled to read were pushed along without proper intervention. One mother, who asked to remain anonymous due to potential litigation, said her son was reading at a kindergarten level in fourth grade before he started receiving one-on-one reading intervention.

“There’s a mantra in New York state: Just wait and see, wait and see if they grow out of it,” said Yolanda Thompson, special education advocate and three-time Riverhead school board candidate. “There needs to be a huge cultural mindset shift. We can’t fix something we don’t understand.”

The students most harmed when districts don’t use best practices are often students of color, those from low-income families, and multilingual learners, said Fratticci. “They don’t necessarily have that safety net of private tutoring or reading specialists outside of school, so when the classroom fails them, there’s no backup.”

That’s true in Riverhead, said Thompson. A majority of students there are from low-income families and around 40 percent are English language learners.

In the survey, Riverhead wrote that many of its teachers are new to the profession and work with high-needs students, and that financial constraints limit access to instructional resources. The district added that it hired three literacy coaches to lead professional development and support implementation of the science of reading, and is evaluating the need to purchase new instructional materials to teach phonics.

Education Department spokesperson Karen Male said in a statement that the agency plans to reach out to noncompliant districts to provide free instructional resources, explore professional development with colleges and universities, and work with districts to identify other needs. The agency did specify when districts must achieve full compliance.

Without holding districts accountable, Assemblymember Carroll said, New York will continue to lose the race to literacy.

In 2023, Carroll introduced a bill called the Right to Read Act, which would require all elementary school teachers to be trained in the science of reading, provide grants to districts to hire literacy coaches, and mandate school districts to choose from a list of approved, evidence-based curricula. The legislation is currently awaiting action in the education committee, but Carroll said he’s optimistic it will advance this year, citing recent conversations with colleagues and the governor about the need to improve New York schools to keep residents from leaving the state.

“Right now, in New York, you have to be lucky to learn how to read — and that is unjustified and unconscionable,” Carroll said. “We know how to fix this, and I know the governor wants to fix this. But we all need to work together because this is going to take the effort of the legislature and the governor working together to get this done.”

Carroll’s bill has the support of EdTrust, which is also calling for school districts to submit literacy plans with evidence of implementation and notify parents if they are using non-evidence-based curricula. In addition, the organization wants to see the state invest $15 million so that districts can purchase science of reading curricula, and mandatory universal screening in grades K-3.

“We have to catch up with the rest of the nation,” Smink said. “For the amount of money we spend and for how important learning to read is, we deserve policies like every other state.”

Despite New York City’s last-minute withdrawal of, parents, students, and educators packed this week’s school board meeting to speak on AI anyway.

More than 100 New Yorkers testified at a nearly seven-hour-long meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, earlier this week.

Community members repeatedly argued that the Education Department is rolling out AI tools without clear rules, transparency, or adequate knowledge of the technology. Students said AI was already reshaping classrooms, and surveillance practices, like the, are already in use at 150 city schools. Educators expressed concern that the increasing use of various technologies in schools conflicts with the the city released in March.

One parent from Park Slope approached the microphone with her two toddlers in tow, holding one in her arm while clasping the other tightly by the hand.

“I’ve never been an activist before, but I feel so strongly about this: It is starting. Gen Z is turning against AI; I’m turning against AI. The city is telling us that AI is inevitable, but won’t tell me what devices and applications my children are using. You tell us you are spending our money to give artificial intelligence to our children?” she said to a chorus of cheers at Wednesday night’s packed meeting.

The had little to do with AI. It centered on the Education Department’s capital plan, the estimated budget for the coming year, and the updated Fair Student Funding weights that shape how money flows to schools. The panel also voted on 30 separate contract agreements, from cafeteria equipment repairs to special education services.

But the bulk of the seven-hour meeting involved parents, children, and educators arguing against the city’s spending on AI and educational technology contracts and the city’s preliminary AI policy. Although the Next Generation High School proposal was removed from Wednesday’s agenda following backlash over its AI focus and selective admissions, speakers said those concerns would extend to future school plans.

“Many feel AI is teaching a dangerous message that results matter more than the learning process. Some of the most important learning happens when students struggle, make mistakes, ask questions, and improve over time,” said student panel member Julia Nasef, of Staten Island’s Tottenville High School.

AI discussions surface issues with current Department of Education process

Throughout the night, speakers expressed waning confidence in the Education Department’s and its ability to protect students, educators, and families from a complex and rapidly-changing technology.

Most of the speakers were opposed to any AI in the classroom.

Panel for Educational Policy Chair Greg Faulkner admitted on Wednesday that he was a “baby boomer” with limited understanding of AI, and that he wanted more thorough engagement with both the community and Education Department in future AI-related proposals.

But he also thought that Chancellor Kamar Samuel’s move to pull the AI-focused school proposal for Next Generation High School aligns with the schools chief’s priority to better engage and respond to the needs of local communities.

“Under previous administrations, the general assumption was that the panel votes yes on all DOE proposals. But the chancellor’s decision and the panel’s back-and-forth discussion on Wednesday showed us that the old model isn’t working anymore,” Faulkner told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

Faulkner said the “AI question” has him considering proposing changes to some of the Education Department’s policy-making processes. He said he would like the panel to work more closely with the department’s AI policy authors — the names of whom are not public — so the panel can get up to speed on AI research and better share community concerns.

Education Department officials said that the initial AI guidance was shaped by the Department’s central Academics and Instruction team, with input from stakeholders and various internal Department subcommittees.

“We have not had any briefings on AI research, and while I am concerned about a moratorium, I don’t know enough about this technology,” said Faulkner.

Nasef, the student PEP member, said at the meeting that many of her peers acknowledge that AI can be helpful when used “intentionally” to help them understand math and science concepts, for example.

She urged the panel to “support clear, student‑centered guidelines for AI implementation.”

The, released last month, did not include guidance on how or if students can use AI for homework, nor did it differentiate AI use for students in different grades

Panel greenlights controversial tech contracts as AI policy lags

Of the 30 contract proposals up for a vote, three included three educational technology products. Just one was voted down.

One of the contracts approved covered the full line of K-12 digital learning products from , a global educational services company that has in their digital test prep products. Several speakers who testified at Wednesday’s meeting mentioned the company’s recent privacy breach affecting the personal information of. Despite those concerns, the PEP approved the company’s $500,000 contract.

A representative for AI-based software tailored to early childhood education , spoke at the meeting. He assured panel members that the software could be “turned off at any point” because “teachers have complete control of what is going on in the classroom.” This was the only contract that the PEP voted against.

Naveed Hasan, the panel’s de-facto technology expert who had previously supported the AI-focused high school, announced at the meeting that he now supports a two-year moratorium on AI use in schools, saying the city needs more time to address data privacy infrastructure and learning concerns.

The term limits of all current panel members expire at the end of June. The Education Department’s full AI policy is also expected to be released that month, and the Education Department is asking families and educators for through May 8.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Students across New York were unable to log in to the digital platform for the state’s grades 3-8 math exam Wednesday morning, raising fresh questions about the transition to computer-based assessments.

The New York State Education Department told schools they could pause or delay the math tests, officials confirmed.

The issue affected schools across the state, including some in New York City where schools were expected to administer the exams sometime between April 28 and May 8.

“More than 116,000 students tested without error this morning, with thousands more expected to complete testing later today,” state Education Department spokesperson JP O’Hare wrote in a statement. “Since the testing window opened, more than two million exams have been successfully submitted.”

Officials declined to provide specific numbers of affected students. But O’Hare said it was a “limited number.”

Upon learning of the problem, O’Hare added, “NYSED immediately contacted our vendor, NWEA, to expeditiously address the issue.”

State officials said schools can administer the exams at a later point during the window, which runs through May 15.

The city’s messaging to caregivers struck a somewhat different tone. A letter principals were encouraged to distribute said “many” students were unable to complete the test and “we are pausing the administration of the Math exam and will reschedule once we receive the assurances we need that no additional disruptions will occur.”

A message to principals encouraged them to postpone state testing scheduled for Thursday.

New York’s multi-year transition to computer-based tests has been by . This year’s problems come amid a against the proliferation of technology in schools, including the amount of time students spend on screens.

After , the state fully transitioned from paper-and-pencil tests to computer-based tests this spring. The grades 3-8 English language arts exams have already been administered.

Some principals began receiving notifications Wednesday morning from the city’s Education Department about the login problems with Nextera, the state’s testing platform.

“We are receiving a high volume of escalations about students having trouble logging into Nextera,” city officials wrote in an email obtained by Chalkbeat. “It is happening statewide.” The message said schools could continue testing if students had already logged in, but should cancel testing for the day if students continued to have problems.

Officials at NWEA, the state’s testing vendor, said they “have directed all available internal resources” to fixing the problem and hope to have the system running by Thursday.

“The cause of this has not yet been identified, which means the fix is also pending,” Simona Beattie, a company spokesperson, said in a statement.

At one Brooklyn elementary school, students were unable to log in to start their exams for more than an hour but were eventually able to log in and complete the tests, according to the principal who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I’m sure there are going to be parents who feel like it’s not going to be the best picture of their child’s performance because of the way it happened today,” the principal said. More broadly, the school leader wishes the state would keep paper and pencil tests, especially for younger students who have to “learn a whole other set of skills” to take them digitally.

At another Brooklyn school, a teacher proctoring the exam for a group of sixth graders with disabilities said that one of the seven students was able to log on. The rest spent two hours trying before the school allowed them to take a break and play basketball in the gym.

“They were frustrated but understood there was nothing we could do,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity since she was not authorized to speak. “They were so patient.”

After their gym break, the students were able to log on and take the test, the teacher said, but she questioned the validity of the results.

“Your purpose is to test them, it’s not to test them after two hours of testing their patience,” she said.

City teachers union President Michael Mulgrew blasted the state Education Department in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Once again, students and educators were left scrambling because the state failed in its responsibility to hold its vendors and consultants accountable,” he said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .Ěý

A few years back, a groundswell of Brooklyn parents in District 13 wanted to ditch gifted and talented classes, concerned about sorting and segregating children starting in kindergarten.

Then-Superintendent Kamar Samuels, now chancellor of New York City schools, wanted to find an alternative that offered rigorous academics for all students in a school rather than a select few. He settled on the and encouraged schools in District 13, which spans from Brooklyn Heights to Bedford-Stuyvesant, to pursue the yearslong authorization process, using a grant to support the shift.

The IB approach embraces inquiry-based, transdisciplinary learning that allows students to go deep into a specific topic across classes, connecting global issues to their own experiences. Educators are trained to facilitate these connections and foster ways for students to become independent thinkers and leaders.

“It means something for a teacher to be an IB teacher. It means you’ve gone through a process,” , when introducing the initiative, “and you’re really pushing the envelope as you think about all your students.”

The district now has five elementary schools and two middle schools in the program, representing New York City’s first IB “pathway” designed to serve children from 3-K through eighth grade. (The district also hopes that students continue on to the handful of public IB high schools in the city, including those in neighboring districts.)

The IB model might soon gain in popularity as schools grapple with the state’s graduation requirement overhaul, as the Portrait of a Graduate framework replaces Regents exams for diplomas starting in the 2027-28 school year. The approach closely aligns with the state’s students must demonstrate (such as being creative innovators, effective communicators, and global citizens). And as schools await the state’s guidance on how to assess students under the new framework, IB schools already have a well-developed system of project-based assessments.

The schools also boast strong post-secondary outcomes: 71% of IB students in the U.S. enrolled in college compared to the average of 56%, .

On a recent Monday at P.S. 56, in Clinton Hill, second graders hummed as they worked on a project for a unit on self-expression. The kids were creating shapes to use for fabric construction, incorporating math, writing, and social-emotional learning as they jotted down the way the colors they used made them feel.

In a fifth grade room down the hall, students — also doing a unit on self-expression — tackled a poem about technology, as they discussed the effect technology is having on education. Another fifth grade class read a poem about bullying, and students were asked to write their own poem about a problem they wanted to change.

Jayda, a fifth grader, wrote about concerns with the increase in immigration enforcement across the nation. She recently participated in an anti-ICE protest that Lucy, another fifth grader, organized. They and their peers talked about how they struggled with writing when they were younger but have since blossomed as writers, especially as they’ve been able to work on more creative writing.

“Now it’s my passion,” fifth grader Noah said. “I couldn’t imagine life without it.”

Tracey Scronic, the instruction lead and coordinator for District 13’s IB schools, sees the shift to the IB model as an “equity tool” to ensure all of a school’s students are exposed to enrichment. She said it “de-prioritizes traditional testing’s emphasis on regurgitation of information.”

Leaning on IB to tackle enrollment declines

The IB program at P.S. 56 has helped prop up enrollment, its principal, Eric Grande, said.

Just before Grande became principal of P.S. 56 a decade ago, the Clinton Hill elementary school tried to bolster enrollment, then hovering below 200 students, by adding a gifted and talented program. Grande added a “world language” program, focusing on Spanish, hoping that would attract more families. But the school didn’t feel cohesive.

“Even though we had a relatively small school, there was almost like schools within the school,” Grande said. “You had your world language Spanish program, your gifted and talented program, you had your special education classes and your gen ed classes, and it just started to feel a little bit off.”

Students within the school, which is more racially diverse than most New York City elementary schools, were not integrated within the different programs, he said. (Last year, about 36% of its students were Black, 36% were white, 17% were Latino, and 1% were Asian American; roughly 47% of children came from low-income families.)

Grande began looking for a model to bring everyone — and all of their different programs — together, appeasing families who wanted a foreign language and those who wanted a project-based approach to teaching. IB offered the “perfect synergy of all things that we were doing.”

The school is now in its second year as an authorized IB school following three years as a candidate school. Enrollment has increased, with about 230 students last year.

And while Grande said his school has never been too focused on test prep, he was proud to see a shift in state test scores since his teachers transitioned to the IB framework, from about 35% proficiency on reading in 2019, the year before the pandemic, to more than 60% last year.

The move to IB can be challenging

The buy-in from teachers on IB takes some time, said Scronic. They needed training to shift practices and must do more in-depth planning around the new units. They also needed to figure out how to meld the IB framework with the mandated literacy curriculum for their district, EL Education.

“It is a bit more cognitively intense for the teachers,” Scronic said. But after a while, she said teachers feel like they’re being respected again for their craft and facilitating connections between the curriculum and students’ own lives. “I feel like the passion that a brand-new teacher brings to the profession then kind of gets squashed sometimes, IB has brought that back.”

Becoming an authorized IB school is not easy. Schools have to pay the Switzerland-based nonprofit that oversees the IB program about $9,000 a year to start the training and candidacy process. It’s about $10,000 each year once a school is authorized to support the implementation and maintenance of IB programs, . District 13 used a grant to cover the costs for the initial training for the schools, though the schools have had to foot the bill for new teachers.

Though Scronic leads District 13’s IB initiative, she’s started holding monthly Zoom meetings for about 40 IB elementary and middle schools in the city, a grassroots effort to provide support and create a community to share best practices and resources.

Samuels continued to promote IB schools when he left his Brooklyn district to become superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3. He encouraged schools in Harlem to adopt the IB model as a way to tackle declining enrollment in a part of the district facing heavy competition from charter schools. (District 3 used a grant to cover the costs as well.)

But Samuels acknowledged the challenges in pursuing IB authorization.

“I do believe in a lot of the work of IB, but it really takes a big investment,” “It takes principals being onboard. It takes teachers being onboard and willing to go and get a lot of background and content knowledge, and to be able to personalize for young people and the kids in your school.”

A middle school IB program helps students find their ‘voice’

Sanai Gary, an eighth grader at Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Restoration Academy — which is in its first full year as an authorized IB school after its yearslong candidacy — said the IB approach has helped her deepen her learning.

“I like how the topics transmit over to other classes. I feel like it helps me learn better,” said Sanai. “It gives me more time to focus on it.”

Last year, she and her peers became clean water advocates after diving into a unit on global sustainability.

It started after they read a novel in English class, “,” about the struggle in South Sudan for clean water. In their Individuals and Societies class (akin to social studies), a student brought up questions about t, that got the students wondering about the water quality in their own school. So, in science class, they tested their school’s water fountains and created makeshift filtration devices.

Concerned about the color and clarity of their school’s water, back in English class, the students mounted a letter-writing campaign to city officials demanding changes.

Restoration Academy has struggled with enrollment and has long served marginalized students. The middle school currently has roughly 80 middle schoolers; about 80% are Black and Latino, and more than 90% are from low-income families. Pre-pandemic, about 20% of its students were considered proficient in reading. Since transitioning to IB, the scores have improved, rising to about 30% last year.

But more importantly, Principal Adele Simon said, students are increasingly linking what’s happening around the world to their own lives and finding their voices to advocate for change based on what they’re learning in school.

“It’s the connection between what they’re reading,” Simon said, “and not just reading it for the purpose of reading it, but reading it for the purpose of, ‘Okay, what am I going to do with this? … Who’s in power and who is not in power? And how can I make sure that the people in power represent me and my community?”

Their school is getting new water fountains with filtration devices this spring.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .