“This Curriculum Has No Real Reading:” A Case Study of Student Activism in Response to a Centralized Curriculum Mandate

by Alina Lewis

The widespread implementation of Science of Reading (SOR) policies across national and local contexts in the past few years is yet another chapter in the reading wars (Preston, 2022; Thomas, 2024; Goldberg & Goldenberg, 2022). This is not the first time that a national panic about literacy has incited fierce debates over how best to teach reading. Since the publication of Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, the question of “how, when and how much phonics instruction” has been hotly contested among scholars and practitioners (Thomas, 2024; Flesch & Sloan, 1955). The current literacy policy landscape—in the wake of the neoliberal education reforms of the late 1990s and early 2000s—is characterized by top- down efforts to legislate literacy instruction and curriculum, pervasive and stringent accountability structures, and the proliferation of commercial curricula (Aydarova, 2024). One historical continuity over the last 75 years has been the absence of student voices and experiences in the debates over how to teach reading.

This article begins to fill the void through a case study of a group of students in a progressive public school in New York City who, alongside their parents, resisted a top-down literacy program that was introduced on a city-wide scale. It highlights how a particular group of students responded to a prescriptive commercial curriculum mandated in the name of the “science of reading,” exploring what students learned about literacy and advocacy in the process. The students in this study pushed back against recent trends to reduce literacy to decontextualized skill practice and challenged one of the dominant assumptions embedded in the popular SOR discourse: that standardized, commercial curriculum is inherently higher quality than local, teacher-developed curriculum. After a yearlong public advocacy campaign, students won the right to continue to use their school’s local curriculum, becoming empowered as writers, speakers, and activists. Through their activism, they learned how to navigate the complex centralized bureaucracy of New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) under a governance structure that does not prioritize community input in instructional decisions (Lewis, 2013; New York State Education Department, 2024). This case study offers valuable insights for educators, policymakers, and community members, including other students, about what makes for effective literacy practices and how young people can work together to influence the education policies and practices that directly influence their lives.