When Mayor Eric Adams was a student at Public School 140 in Queens, his classmates teased him for struggling in class, he recalls. They once put a sign with the word “Dummy” on his desk and he still remembers his fear of being asked to read aloud.
“You’d hope, ‘Please don’t call me,'” said Mr. Adams in an interview.
It wasn’t until college that Mr. Adams discovered he had dyslexia after hearing a documentary about learning disabilities played in the library. His academic challenges suddenly made sense.
Later, when he became a police officer and ran for public office, he never forgot or forgave how the school system had abandoned him and his mother Dorothy, a cleaning lady who raised six children in poverty.
“Mom had no idea where to get help from and how to solve the challenges in the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Education,” said Mr. Adams. “We thought you just had to try harder.”
Now, as mayor, he’s reshaping the entire approach to reading in New York City to keep kids like him from falling behind.
Mr. Adams recently announced a sweeping plan to screen nearly all public school students for dyslexia and redirect the nation’s largest school district to more sound-based literacy classes. It could be his most significant policy achievement in his first term in office, outside of his focus on crime.
Other elected officials have been candid about their disabilities recently: California Governor Gavin Newsom shared his experience with dyslexia; President Biden spoke about his stuttering during the 2020 race.
Mr. Adams’ struggle with dyslexia was one of three formative experiences — along with being beaten by the police as a teenager and overcoming diabetes in his 50s — that are essential to understanding him, according to Evan Thies. an old adviser.
Mr. Adams, the city’s second black mayor, often talks about policy solutions to those problems: police reform, promotion of a plant-based diet, and dyslexia screenings.
The mayor recalled in the interview how he was reluctant to talk openly about his learning disability earlier in his career because it affected his confidence. But he decided to embrace the issue during the mayoral campaign to show working-class New Yorkers that he understood their challenges because of his own experiences.
Now he wants children with disabilities to see that they can be successful.
“People need to see that while I’m on this high-profile podium — those kids with learning disabilities, with various problems they’re trying to overcome — they need to see that they’re going to be okay,” Mr. Adams said.
The education plan will not be easy to implement and it is unclear how much it will cost. It calls for the testing of hundreds of thousands of students, the creation of special programs for dyslexic students in schools in every municipality and the retraining of teachers teaching children how to read.
By embracing phonetic instruction, Mr. Adams takes a clear stand in the long-simmering “reading wars” between those who prefer explicit instruction in the connection between letters and sounds, and those who support “balanced literacy,” a method that spend less time on phonics and put more emphasis on allowing children to be drawn to books of their choice. That approach gained ground in New York City under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
For years, education advocates have pushed for major changes to address New York City’s poor reading scores. According to state test scores, less than half of students in third through eighth grade were proficient in reading in 2019.
Experts fear the pandemic has exacerbated those problems.
The mayor’s plan consists of several parts: Three times a year, pupils are literacy literate; those identified as being at risk will undergo additional testing; children with dyslexia receive support at their current school or can enroll in one of two specialized programs at schools in Harlem and the South Bronx.
Kindergarten through second grade teachers will need to use a sound-based curriculum, which teaches the 44 unique sounds in the English language known as phonemes. Next spring, teachers of all grades will participate in a two-hour introductory training about dyslexia.
Lecture experts praised the plan, but said the details of its implementation would be critical. Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and reading expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said all students could benefit from better reading education.
“The research is very compelling about the importance of teaching children how to make the connections between printed and spoken language, which we call phonics,” he said. “It’s been overlooked in American schools for a long time.”
Carolyne Quintana, the city’s deputy chancellor for education and learning, confirmed that the city is moving away from the balanced approach to literary reading favored by Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who was appointed in 2003. embraced by Mr. Bloomberg and by Carmen Fariña, Bill de Blasio’s first school chancellor.
“That approach is a great approach for students who already have those basic skills,” she said. “But the reality is that in grades K-2, regardless of the homes they come from, we want to make sure they have really strong fundamental mechanical reading skills.”
Professor Calkins is reviewing her reading curriculum to include structured sounds, and the Department of Education has said it will review its new materials to determine if they meet the standards.
While Mr. Adams and his school’s chancellor, David C. Banks, spoke to literacy experts, they said they concluded the study supported phonics.
“Once we started digging into it, it was clear we were on the wrong track,” the mayor said.
Some states like Mississippi and Tennessee have already moved to require phonetic instruction. New York City’s decision could lead to more school districts following suit.
Mr Adams said screening all children was the first step after which the city should provide the services children need to catch up. Experts believe that as many as 20 percent of students are dyslexic.
“That’s the real secret to not being diagnosed,” he said. “We don’t want to provide the services. Now you will have to provide the services, and it is too expensive. We need to bring the services to children with special needs.”
The screenings are in line with his wider criminal justice plans to reach young people before they are drawn into crime. He often cites the statistic that more than a third of inmates are dyslexic.
Early in his campaign for mayor, Mr. Adams was encouraged by a counselor to focus on his life story and the challenges he overcame.
Suddenly he was talking about dyslexia at debates and campaign events.
“It was a change in me and my mind that all those little disabilities that I thought about — getting arrested, having a learning disability, working as a dishwasher — all those things came up in the campaign,” he said. “The things I thought were harmful proved helpful for me to win the primaries.”
Mr. Adams remembered having trouble learning to read. He had trouble connecting letters on the page with sounds.
“I was called the D student, the stupid student,” he said, remembering many mornings fearful of walking the half-mile from his home in South Jamaica, Queens, to elementary school. “You almost become kind of introverted.”
Mr. Adams later attended Middle School 8 and then Bayside High School, a predominantly white school more than half an hour away by bus.
There were no individual education plans for students with disabilities when Mr. Adams was in elementary school in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mr. Adams said he blamed himself for continuing to get poor grades. He joined the Seven Crowns gang and still has a large scar on the back of his head from a fight where he said he was hit by a bat with a nail in it.
He has said that he graduated in 1978, but according to his high school transcript, he had actually graduated for a semester at the end of January 1979. He said he took night classes to make up for several credits, including an English course.
When he was 19, while a student at Queensborough Community College, he heard the documentary about learning disabilities.
“I got curious and when they were done I watched and listened to the documentary,” he said. “It was like a light bulb went off in my head.”
Mr. Adams, now 61, adapted to learn in his own way. He attended the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, rose to rank in the police force to become a captain, and received a master’s degree in public administration from Marist College in 2006.
“When I was studying for my PhD exams, I had the entire patrol guide — thousands of pages — on cassette tapes,” he said of the police training manual. “I would listen to it all the time. That’s how I held on to information.”
The mayor’s younger brother, Bernard Adams, who now works for the mayor on his security team, recalled how Mr. Adams tried his best to hide his academic difficulties and studied hard to overcome them.
“He put in time and effort,” said the mayor’s brother. “I didn’t know it was because he had to.”
As mayor, Mr. Adams has a different way of processing information, avoiding bulky policy documents in favor of PowerPoint presentations. He has staff members discuss topics with him orally.
“I’m an oral man,” he said. “My team is smiling because Audible books are like gold to me.”