FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, PhD (parent leader) – 718-704-7387; Smitha Varghese (AQE) – 516-232-6591, Martina Meijer (teacher) – 413- 222-8752

RJPS calls on Mayor Mamdani to invest in culturally responsive education and community schools—not an expansion of failed literacy initiatives like the prepackaged curriculum mandates and standardized testing

NEW YORK — New Yorkers for Racially Just Public Schools (RJPS) is calling on New York City and State leaders to stop doubling down on mandated, prepackaged curricula and instead invest in culturally responsive and sustaining education, community schools, and instruction developed with educators, students, families, and communities.

While test scores are an arbitrary measure of success, which have consistently been weaponized against school districts in Black, brown and poor neighborhoods, these test results in particular are not surprising. For years Black and brown parents, students and educators have been fighting for a holistic education approach that centers not just what we teach, but how we teach it. We’ve fought for more state and city funding, safe and supportive schools, transformative engagement policies that center stakeholder voices, integrated schools and culturally responsive and sustaining education. 

Eric Adams, defunded education at every turn, invested highly in wasteful contracts and had the opportunity to implement culturally responsive education, but instead spent an immense amount of resources creating a developing NYC Reads. 

After three school years of NYC Reads, and as the city prepares to expand the initiative further, English Language Arts proficiency among students in grades 3–8 fell six percentage points, from 56.3% in 2025 to 50.3% in 2026. That decline nearly erased the previous year’s seven-point increase. The decline was especially notable in the elementary grades where third-grade ELA proficiency fell 13.8 percentage points, fifth-grade proficiency fell 13.1 points, and across grades 3–8, only about half of students met the state’s proficiency standard.

The city’s math results were also inconsistent. Math proficiency increased by only 0.1 percentage point citywide, from 56.9% to 57%, while third-grade math proficiency declined 2.5 points and eighth-grade proficiency declined 1.6 points. Statewide math proficiency rose approximately two points during the same period.

RJPS recognizes that standardized tests are not a reflection of student learning and should never be the sole basis for curriculum policy. The 2026 results do not prove that NYC Reads caused the decline, just as the 2025 increase did not prove that NYC Reads caused the gains.

But these dramatic swings show why the city should not make sweeping curriculum decisions based on selective interpretations of test scores.

NYC Public Schools’ own data reveal substantial contradictions. According to the city’s press release this last Friday (August 7):

State ELA proficiency fell six points, while literacy screener results increased 2.9 points.

State math proficiency increased only 0.1 point, while math screener results increased 7.9 points.

These differences may reflect variations in what the assessments measure, how they are administered, scoring practices, curriculum alignment, student participation, or other factors. This year was the first that the state tests were fully computerized, there were crashes in the system and schools reported difficulties in administering the tests. All of these variables require an independent analysis on the reliability of these test scores.

Last year the city’s own analysis showed that community schools made stronger long-term gains than the rest of the city across several important measures. This year this analysis has not been made public. However, a May 2025 NYC Public Schools analysis of 403 community schools found that the first cohort of community schools, established in 2014–15, outpaced the rest of the city over ten years:

ELA proficiency increased 22.9 percentage points in community schools, compared with 19.1 points across the rest of the city.

Math proficiency increased 26.7 points, compared with 18.5 points across the rest of the city.

Graduation rates increased 25.1 points, compared with 11.6 points across the rest of the city.

Chronic absenteeism increased by 4.3 points in community schools during a period that included the pandemic, compared with a 9.8-point increase across the rest of the city.

Other community-school cohorts also outpaced the rest of the city across multiple measures, including ELA proficiency, math proficiency, graduation, attendance, and postsecondary enrollment. These findings demonstrate the value of investing in the conditions that make learning possible.

Culturally responsive and sustaining education connects new learning to students’ identities, languages, communities, interests, and prior knowledge. It treats what students bring into the classroom as intellectual and cultural capital—not as a deficit or obstacle.

New York State’s CRSE Framework calls for student-centered learning environments that affirm racial, linguistic, and cultural identities, prepare students for rigorous and independent learning, elevate historically marginalized voices, and develop students’ capacity to think critically across lines of difference.

CRSE does not mean lowering standards. It means giving students meaningful ways to enter rigorous academic work and ensuring that they can see themselves as readers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, historians, and producers of knowledge. CRSE is built on the three pillars of 1) academic achievement; 2) cultural competence; and 3) critical consciousness.

Research on culturally relevant coursework has found improvements in student engagement, attendance, academic performance, credit accumulation, graduation, and college enrollment. A Stanford study of an ethnic studies course, for example, found sustained improvements in attendance and graduation among participating students. When students recognize their lives and communities in what they are learning, they are more likely to engage deeply, persist through challenging material, and understand why learning matters.

After years of relentless advocacy from parents and educators, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city announced a broader investment of approximately $500 million in culturally responsive education, including $202 million for the Universal Mosaic Curriculum, anti bias teacher trainings, and mandated equity councils created by schools to discuss curriculum and policies that impacted student outcomes. 

Mosaic was intended to be a rigorous, culturally responsive K–12 English language arts and mathematics curriculum created specifically for New York City. It was supposed to be developed with educators, students, families, and communities and to reflect the histories, languages, and experiences of the city’s public school students. The Adams administration abandoned Mosaic and other anti-bias initiatives with little transparency or meaningful public engagement. The city then replaced that public vision with corporate curriculum mandates that were deemed culturally destructive. 

Ultimately the mandated uniformity of any standardized curriculum must be resisted. There is no single curriculum that will serve every student in our schools, and teachers need to be supported in utilizing professional autonomy about what would be most responsive and meaningful for the students in front of them. 

Now is the chance for the Mamdani administration to reverse course on expanding these harmful initiatives which inadvertently privatize the curriculum, outsourcing NYCDOE dollars to for-profit entities like Veritas Capital, owner of HMH Into Reading (the most widely adopted of the NYC Reads curriculum), whose profit motive does not align with the motive of NYCDOE to ensure a fair and equitable education to all students. The lack of asset based representation of non-white characters, lack of diversity in authors, and lack of the incorporation of whole books means that HMH is not an adequate curriculum for our students. We need students reading whole books that interest them, reflect their identities as well as exposing them to the experiences and cultures of others, and allow them to grapple with complex ideas.

RJPS calls on New York City and New York State to:

Conduct an independent evaluation of NYC Reads and NYC Solves. Examine student outcomes, implementation, curriculum quality, opportunity gaps, teacher and student experiences, and differences across districts, schools, grades, racial groups, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities.

Publish a complete financial accounting. Disclose all spending, contracts, amendments, curriculum licenses, assessments, digital products, consulting agreements, training costs, and professional-development expenditures connected to NYC Reads and NYC Solves.

Pause further expansion of curriculum mandates. Do not expand prepackaged programs into additional grades or districts until the public receives a transparent evaluation of their academic, instructional, and financial effects.

Expand and fully fund community schools. Invest in community-school directors, mental health services, health care, family supports, attendance initiatives, after-school programming, the arts, and sustained partnerships with community-based organizations.

Invest in CRSE as a core academic strategy. Fund sustained culturally responsive and sustaining curriculum development, professional learning, anti-bias education, ethnic studies, and community-based learning across subjects and grade levels.

Restore educator expertise and flexibility. Allow teachers to adapt instruction to their students, incorporate educator-developed units, and supplement foundational skills instruction with whole books, writing, inquiry, science, social studies, and the arts.

Invest in diverse books and authors. Ensure students read substantial works that reflect Black, Latine, Asian, Indigenous, immigrant, multilingual, disabled, LGBTQ+, and other historically marginalized people—not only short excerpts or superficial representations.

Revisit the Universal Mosaic Curriculum. Develop a public, culturally responsive curriculum for and with New York City educators, students, families, and communities.

Create meaningful public oversight. Give parents, students, teachers, Community Education Councils, and community organizations a formal role in selecting, evaluating, and revising curriculum.

Protect a complete education. Ensure mandated literacy and math blocks do not displace science, social studies, the arts, physical education, libraries, and other essential learning experiences.