Reading test scores climbed seven points for New York City public school students who took state exams in the spring, a substantial increase over previous years that comes after efforts to change the way students learn to read.
About 56 percent of students in grades three through eight showed proficiency on the reading tests, the school system announced on Monday. Mayor Eric Adams framed the results as a prime accomplishment in educating the city’s children as he runs for re-election.
The improvement in the nation’s largest school system comes two years after Mr. Adams’s administration overhauled how elementary students are taught to read. Experts, though, cautioned against attributing the results to a single initiative, saying that it takes years of intense effort to achieve sustained improvement from reading reforms.
The improvement was especially large for third-grade students, a crucial benchmark because children who cannot read well by then are more likely to drop out of high school and live in poverty as adults. About 58 percent of third-graders showed proficiency in reading, a nearly 13-point rise from the year before.
The higher test scores could buttress Mr. Adams, who is running for re-election as an independent, against political attacks on his schools record. His administration has faced criticism over cuts to education funding and its management of the city’s popular free preschool programs for 3- and 4-year-olds.
Despite the increase overall, the results revealed the persistence of inequality. While about 73 percent of white and 75 percent of Asian test-takers showed reading proficiency, roughly 44 percent of Hispanic and 47 percent of Black children were proficient.
Mayor Adams called the results a “a testament to what’s possible when we invest in our young people,” and his schools chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, cast them as a product of the city’s efforts to set high expectations for students and give educators “the right tools.”
The city’s math scores increased by about four points.
“We are closing gaps, raising achievement in every borough and making sure more students than ever are on track for long-term success,” Ms. Aviles-Ramos said in a statement.
Starting in the 2023-24 school year, the city’s Education Department began rolling out a mandate that one of three reading curriculums be adopted by most elementary schools. New York City had allowed its roughly 700 elementary school principals to select their own reading programs.
But in recent years, a national movement has urged school districts to embrace practices rooted in the brain science of how children learn to read — including systematic, sound-it-out instruction and exercises to build vocabulary — and to abandon strategies, such as prompting children to guess words based on pictures, that decades of research show do not work for all students.
Most of Mr. Adams’s opponents in the mayoral contest have commended his administration’s decision to change course on how reading is taught and pledged to maintain the initiative. But they have criticized his administration’s implementation of the changes.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, has called the overhaul a “step in the right direction,” while arguing that teachers require better training and greater latitude in adapting curriculum for their classrooms.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is mounting an independent bid himself, has taken a similar stance, calling professional development “inconsistent across schools, often disconnected from classroom realities” and lacking “sustained support to help educators translate theory into practice.”
The Adams administration on Monday touted the results as the highest rate of students showing proficiency on state reading exams since 2012. But state education leaders have changed the exams during the past decade, including most recently in 2023, which means the results are not comparable to 2012.
On the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a gold-standard federal exam that represents one of the few consistent measures of academic outcomes over time — the percentage of city students showing “below basic” reading skills, the lowest performance level, rose between 2011 and 2024.
Reading experts on Monday described the latest results as promising but argued the overhaul must be refined.
Kim Sweet, the executive director of Advocates for Children of New York, a nonprofit that focuses on improving education for disadvantaged students, called the results “a hopeful signal that we are headed in the right direction.”
But she remained alarmed by the large rates of children testing at the lowest proficiency level, along with the huge disparities in outcomes. Only about one in four students with disabilities showed proficiency in reading.
Ms. Sweet said that New York must ensure that children who are behind — such as middle and high school students who never became proficient readers — receive support.
“We continue to hear from families who are unable to get their children the help they need,” she said.