Phonics Finally Gets Its Due in New York It took the city’s education bureaucracy 20 years to recognize that the Success Academy approach works. By Eva Moskowitz
American students continue to suffer the effects of pandemic learning loss, as this week’s miserable National Assessment of Educational Progress scores demonstrate. But school closures and lockdowns explain only so much. If you truly wish to understand the dysfunction plaguing U.S. public schools, consider the remarkable story of Joel Greenblatt. A hedge-fund manager with no training or experience in education, Mr. Greenblatt nevertheless figured something out 20 years ago that New York City’s sprawling $38 billion school system is only now starting to realize—phonics is the key to early childhood literacy.
In 2005, as chairman of the City Council’s Education Committee, I heard about a school in Queens where the proportion of fourth-graders reading proficiently had doubled, from 36% to 71%, in four years. This school, P.S. 65, was using a phonics-based curriculum called Success for All that had been developed in the 1970s by Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden at Johns Hopkins University. The curriculum’s design was ingenious. It broke down reading skills into bite-sized pieces that children could understand. Students were evaluated every six weeks, placed into small groups at the same level of reading mastery, and taught exactly what they needed to progress to the next level. Success for All’s materials were so detailed and clear that even a relatively inexperienced teacher could use them.
Implementing Success for All didn’t require tons of money or brilliant teachers making heroic sacrifices. All it required was some modest additional funding so that students could learn in small groups for 100 minutes a day. Mr. Greenblatt, who picked up the tab, thought the school could make the money go further by asking other educators—such as the assistant principal or the art teacher—to pitch in.
Union work rules made that impossible at a district school. But it could be done at a charter school, so in 2006 Mr. Greenblatt and his business partner, John Petry, founded one and asked me to run it. Conveniently, I was available, as Randi Weingarten, then president of the United Federation of Teachers, had arranged for my early retirement from politics for holding hearings questioning the wisdom of the union contracts she’d negotiated.
Seventeen years later, the school we founded, Success Academy, has blossomed into a network of 49 schools educating 20,000 children. If we were our own school district, we’d be the fifth largest in New York state. Over the past several years, our mainly poor and minority students have done better on average in all subject areas than students in any school district in the Empire State, including affluent suburban districts. Our success is due in no small measure to the Success for All curriculum that Mr. Greenblatt championed.
The city’s education bureaucracy, which for two decades insisted on using an ineffective reading curriculum that doesn’t emphasize phonics, is finally coming around. David Banks, New York City’s schools chancellor since January 2022, recently acknowledged that the old approach was “fundamentally flawed” and offered the following mea culpa to the tens of thousands of public school parents whose children can’t read: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault.”
Mr. Banks’s admission of responsibility is refreshing, but it can’t repair the incredible damage that has been done. In the two decades it took the city to figure out that phonics work, an entire generation of students has been miseducated, with minority students suffering the most. According to the NAEP test, only 12% of black fourth graders and 18% of Hispanic fourth graders in New York are proficient readers.
How is it that New York City’s massive Education Department, filled with highly trained professional educators, couldn’t see what Mr. Greenblatt saw? The elevation of ideology over evidence is principally to blame. Instead of objectively evaluating what actually works, educators fell in love with the utopian idea that children would naturally learn to read if only teachers made reading fun. In reality, most children need explicit phonics instruction.
At Success Academy, we have a simple approach: We do what works. When it comes to discipline, our schools look like Catholic schools, with strict standards for behavior and school uniforms. But other aspects of our school design—such as our emphasis on project-based learning, block play, independent reading, and developing children’s mathematical intuition—would be considered “progressive.” Many educators who visit our schools are confused by this because they view the selection of pedagogical methods as a function of personal identity. If they perceive themselves as progressive educators, they feel compelled to vote a straight party line for every progressive pedagogical practice, even those that simply don’t work.
New York’s NAEP scores will likely improve when the city’s school system adopts a phonics-based reading curriculum this fall. But the real progress will come only when the city’s educators abandon the old ideology altogether and commit to doing what works.
Ms. Moskowitz is founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools.
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