New York discovered a large share of would-be teachers could not clear a basic literacy exam. The state’s answer was not to fix the colleges that minted them. It was to kill the exam. That was March 2017. Nine years later there is still no standalone academic-literacy gate for a teaching certificate, half the state’s prep programs fail a science-of-reading review, and a mountain of fourth- and eighth-graders sit at Below Basic. The adults who could not pass a reading-and-writing test were told the test was the problem. The children are still taking the loss.
Teachers in New York are unable to pass a basic literacy exam, so they got rid of the exam.
Liberal logic. https://t.co/ZpzxvxN7E3
— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) September 22, 2026
What the Exam Was
The Academic Literacy Skills Test asked candidates to read hard passages and write a coherent argument. It cost real money and it was one of a stack of certification hurdles. First-try pass rates in the early years were ugly in the way the Board of Regents could not politically survive: about 64 percent of white candidates, 46 percent Hispanic, 41 percent Black. A task force called it expensive, redundant with a college diploma, and insufficiently scrubbed for bias. Emergency repeal, effective the next day.
There was a prequel. The older Liberal Arts and Sciences Test produced even wider gaps — nineties for white takers, roughly half for Black and Latino takers in the mid-nineties — and a lawsuit that has already cost New York City on the order of three-quarters of a billion and counting. A judge said the city never proved the old test measured the job. The new literacy test had a different legal fate. The state dumped it anyway.
Why So Many Could Not Pass
A college degree is not a reading score. Education schools have spent a generation teaching methods, feelings, and “inclusive pedagogy” while treating phonics like a rumor. A June review of New York prep programs found half of them failing to cover the five pillars of how children actually learn to read. Many would not even send the syllabus. Candidates who themselves came out of weak K-12 buildings arrive unable to parse a dense article or write a clean paragraph. The exam made that visible. Visibility is what the system cannot afford.
The racial gaps were real. So is the pipeline: if the high schools and the ed schools do not teach literacy, the test will sort by who escaped that pipeline, not by who has a protected category. Abolishing the sort does not install the skill. It installs a fiction — that a diploma plus a methods course is the same as being able to read the text you are about to assign.
Why Killing the Test Is Not OK
Because the customers are children. Hispanic and Black eighth-graders in New York still cluster at Below Basic in reading at rates that should end careers. Statewide fourth-grade Below Basic got worse over a decade on the national exam. You do not fix that by certifying adults who could not analyze a passage. You fix it by making the adults pass, then making the colleges teach what the test measures.
The official story was diversity and burden. The diversity story failed on its own terms. Latino kids are about 30 percent of enrollment and about 7 percent of teachers years after the gate came down. You did not get a representative faculty. You got a lower bar and the same mismatch. The burden story is a union story: fewer exams, cheaper programs, more warm bodies in front of rooms. edTPA, the performance portfolio, got killed in 2022 for being stressful. Content tests now come with a near-miss waiver if your GPA is pretty. High school Regents-as-diploma is being phased down. The pattern is one direction.
A literate teacher is not a luxury item. Kids who cannot read do not catch up because the adult in the room was spared an essay. They catch up when the adult can model the skill. New York chose the opposite: if the candidates fail the literacy test, fail the test. That is how you run a system for the employees. It is not how you run a school. The exam was the last honest sentence in the hiring file. They deleted the sentence. The reading scores are the footnote they cannot repeal.