Reading Rates Rise — With Room To Grow

Two years after the school district switched over to a phonics-focused literacy curriculum, reading levels among New Haven’s youngest students are slowly but surely on the rise.

New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) representatives delivered that academic development update Wednesday night during a public workshop hosted by the Board of Alders Education Committee. The meeting took place in the Aldermanic chamber on the second floor of City Hall.

Most of the meeting focused on kindergarten through third-grade literacy rate changes over the past two years. 

Following a nationwide literacy reckoning around the importance of sounding out words and the discovery that 87 percent of New Haven third graders were reading at below grade level in 2023, NHPS shifted teaching tactics. 

In 2023, the district adopted a new core literacy program for K‑3 to include 30 minutes of phonics instruction, 20 minutes of whole-group structured literacy learning, and 40 minutes of small-group instruction.

Now, two years after implementation, students are showing improvements. Through Amplify, teachers assess all K‑3 students three times a year. Between the 2022 – 23 and the 2023 – 24 school years, the rate students met their growth targets increased by 3.85 percent. And New Haven is increasing at a greater rate than the state as a whole. 

From data collected between fall 2024 and winter 2025, 3- and 4‑year-olds, on average, are on track to identify and sound out all 26 letters by the end of the year. They are, however, not on track when it comes to onset fluency (isolating the first sound of a word). ​“It’s gonna take more time,” Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans said Wednesday night. ​“But we are moving in the right direction.” 

One chart in the presentation grouped students into benchmark categories and identified their likelihood of performing at grade level by the end of the year. 

At the start of the current academic year, 2,401 students fell into the lowest level of ​“well below benchmark.” By the middle of the year, 261 of those students moved up a level to ​“below benchmark” and 103 students skipped to ​“at benchmark.” Fourteen of the students jumped to the highest status ​“above benchmark.” Still, 2,023 students remain at ​“well below benchmark.” 

“So we need to figure out, who are these kids that are slipping and why?” said Redd-Hannans. ​“We need to remember, our kids are not just numbers. And so, it’s upon us to figure out what’s the story.”

Fair Haven Alder and Education Committee member Sarah Miller said it is good to see trends moving in the right direction. But she highlighted that the ​“well below benchmark” category contains most of New Haven K‑3 public school students. She explained that her son struggled with reading and needed one-on-one training for 45 minutes every day for years. ​“Do we really have the capacity as a district to really move these kids and if not, what does it really take?” Miller asked. 

Redd-Hannans told the Independent after the meeting that New Haven needs reading interventionists in every public school across the district. This support, according to Redd-Hannans, would provide ​“double and triple dosages of instruction daily to help them get to where they need to be.” 

“We have the systems and structures in place in New Haven,” said Redd-Hannans. ​“I just want everyone to have patience with us. It’s not gonna happen overnight but we have good people in a system that’s committed to the work.”