TIMES AND SCHOOLS: How serious is Gotham's "literary crisis?"

THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2022

And does the New York Times care? When the mayor announced a major new plan, the New York Times couldn't be bothered.

More precisely, the New York Times couldn't be bothered to assign an experienced education specialist to report on the mayor's new plan. 

Instead, the Times assigned a bright young "general assignment reporter" to the project. This isn't the doing or fault of that very bright young reporter, but it does reflect the uncaring culture of the paper by whom she's employed

To what extent does the New York Times care about the (roughly) one million kids who attend Gotham's public schools? We'd say the newspaper tends to favor two approaches to this area of concern:

On the one hand, the newspaper seems to favor a policy of benign neglect, in which the only kids who get discussed are the school system's top few percent. 

This approach is augmented by the paper's widely observed "performative antiracism."  In accord with this approach, the only topic which gets discussed is racial imbalance within the system's various schools, a state of affairs the performative paper describes as "segregation."

The newspaper motors on these twin tracks, weekending out in the Hamptons. We've rarely seen a group of people who seemed to care so little about so many good, decent kids—about the toughly one million good, decent kids within their city's public schools.

It was in this context that the Times assigned Lola Fadulu to report on the new mayor's new plan. Fadulu is good and decent and very bright, but she's also very young—and she isn't an education specialist or an experienced education reporter. 

This last fact seemed to scream out at us at the start of last Friday's report:

FADULU (5/13/22): Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.

School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs—one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx—with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.

Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.

“Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life,” Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it “haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.”

New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

That's the way the report began. The framework struck us as odd.

Are the New York City Public Schools "facing a literacy crisis?" That's a somewhat peculiar way to describe a situation which has obtained all through our nation's public schools ever since the mainstream world began keeping track of this matter in the 1960s.

The language employed by this young scribe almost makes it sound like this "literary crisis" is some sort of novel event—is something has just recently appeared on the scene. The notion that the mayor is prepared to "turn the crisis around" speaks to the cheerful ignorance which may perhaps accompany an unavoidable lack of experience.

In fact, the "literary crisis" which the mayor is (said to be) planning to "turn around" has dogged the nation's public schools ever since roughly forever. Over the course of the past sixty years, a wide array of simple solutions to this crisis have been brought forward and ballyhooed, and have then been quietly abandoned.

We don't blame Mayor Adams, in any way, for the Pollyannist tinge to the language which animates this description of his new proposal. Nor do we blame the bright young Fadulu, though we do think her framing is odd. 

(Are there any experienced editors at the New York Times?)

Lola Fadulu is a good young person. It's the upper-class newspaper by whom she's employed which has long been at fault.

As far as we know, the New York Times has never had an education specialist on its editorial board. When it does appoint the occasional journalist to serve as lead urban education writer, it may bring the eternal note of nepotism in, naming another young person whose mother has served as foreign editor and deputy executive editor of the Times, and as senior correspondent on gender issues.

Not that there's anything wrong with it! But that's how this newspaper functions.

Out of this unsalted stew comes the scent of benign neglect. In Times reporting, the message about the city's public school students is clear:

If you're headed for Brown, you can stick around! But if you're just black, get back!

We'd planned today to go beyond Fadulu's brief account of the "literary crisis" the mayor is (said to be) planning to "turn around." We don't blame Fadulu for the brevity of that account. If anything, this passage takes us a bit beyond what we normally read in the Times:

New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

In that passage, Fadulu offers some data from New York's statewide testing in 2019. Her data are quite limited, but they go beyond what one normally finds in the New York Times.

Having said that, let us also say this:

It's amazingly hard to find the data which emerge from New York City on this statewide testing program. 

Almost surely, Gotham's scores on this testing program are somewhat better than you might have suspected or guessed. It's also true that test scores in reading and math had been improving over the past fifty years, in New York City itself and around the nation, although the lordly Times has rarely bothered itself, or its readers, with information of that encouraging type.

At any rate, the New York City Public Schools seems to show little interest in letting the public see the data from the statewide program. Similarly, the New York Times simply motors along, periodically screeching about "segregation" and talking about nothing else.

What kind of "literary crisis" will the mayor's plan encounter? To the extent that it can be measured, Fadulu's report offered a tiny peek at the size of this crisis in question. 

We'd planned to run you through some data today, using performance from the federally-administered National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as from the New York statewide testing program, whose data are more problematic.

That said, we think we'll push that service back to tomorrow. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and the New York City Public Schools are full of good, decent kids. That said, it's depressing to swim in the seas of the New York Times' education reporting. 

That isn't the fault of the young Fadulu. She's a good decent person herself, one of the many kids in our floundering nation who have done everything right.

Tomorrow: A fuller look