When Mayor Eric Adams was a student at Public School 140 in Queens, his classmates teased him for struggling in class, he recalled. 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 would just hope, ‘Please don’t call on me,’” Mr. Adams said in an interview.
It was not until college, after overhearing a documentary about learning disabilities being played in the library, that Mr. Adams discovered he had dyslexia. His academic challenges suddenly made sense.
When he later became a police officer and ran for public office, he never forgot or forgave how the school system had failed him and his mother, Dorothy, a house cleaner who raised six children in poverty.
“Mom had no idea where to get help from and navigating the challenges in the bureaucracy of the Department of Education,” Mr. Adams said. “We thought you just have to try harder.”
Now as mayor, he is reshaping New York City’s entire approach to reading to try to make sure children like him do not fall behind.
Mr. Adams recently announced a sweeping plan to screen nearly all public school students for dyslexia and to pivot the nation’s largest school district to more phonics-based literacy instruction. It could be his most significant policy achievement in his first term beyond his focus on crime.
Other elected officials have recently opened up about their disabilities: Gov. Gavin Newsom of California shared his experience with dyslexia; President Biden talked about his stutter during the 2020 race.
Mr. Adams’s 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 key to understanding him, according to Evan Thies, a longtime adviser.
Mr. Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, often talks about policy solutions for those issues: 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 self-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 while I’m on this high-profile stage — those children with learning disabilities, with different issues they’re trying to overcome — they need to see that they’re going to be all right,” Mr. Adams said.
The education plan will not be easy to implement, and it is unclear how much it will cost. It calls for testing hundreds of thousands of students, creating special programs for dyslexic students at schools in every borough and retraining teachers who teach children how to read.
By embracing phonics instruction, Mr. Adams is staking a clear position in the long-simmering “reading wars” between those who favor explicit instruction in the connection between letters and sounds, and those who support “balanced literacy,” a method that devotes less time to phonics and places more emphasis on allowing children to gravitate to books of their choice. That approach took hold 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 dismal reading scores. Less than half of students in third through eighth grade were proficient in reading in 2019, according to state test scores.
Experts fear that the pandemic has exacerbated those problems.
The mayor’s plan has several pieces: Students will be screened for literacy three times per year; those who are identified for being at risk will receive additional testing; children with dyslexia will receive support at their current schools or can enroll at one of the two specialized programs at schools in Harlem and the South Bronx.
Teachers in kindergarten through second grade will be required to use a phonics-based curriculum, which teaches the 44 unique sounds in the English language known as phonemes. By next spring, teachers at all grade levels will participate in a two-hour introductory training on dyslexia.
Reading experts have praised the plan, but said that the details of the implementation would be key. Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and reading expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that all students could benefit from better reading instruction.
“The research is very conclusive about the importance of teaching children how to make the connections between print and spoken language, which is what we call phonics,” he said. “It has been overlooked in American schools for a long time.”
Carolyne Quintana, the city’s deputy schools chancellor for teaching and learning, confirmed that the city is moving away from the balanced literary reading approach favored by Lucy Calkins, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, which was embraced by Mr. Bloomberg in 2003 and by Carmen Fariña, Bill de Blasio’s first schools chancellor.
“That approach is a wonderful approach for students who already have those foundational skills,” she said. “But the reality is that in grades K-2, regardless of the homes they’re coming from, we want to make sure they have really strong foundational mechanical reading skills.”
Professor Calkins is revising her reading curriculum to include structured phonics, and the Department of Education has said it will review her new materials to determine if they meet its standards.
As Mr. Adams and his schools chancellor, David C. Banks, talked to literacy experts, they said they came to the conclusion that the research backed phonics.
“Once we started digging into it, it was clear we were on the wrong pathway,” the mayor said.
Some states like Mississippi and Tennessee have already moved to require phonics instruction. New York City’s decision could prompt more school districts to follow suit.
Mr. Adams said that screening all children was the first step, and then the city would have to provide the services that children need to catch up. Experts believe that as many as 20 percent of students are dyslexic.
“That’s the real secret of not diagnosing,” he said. “We don’t want to give the services. Now you’re going to have to give the services, and it’s too expensive. We’ve got to get the services to children with special needs.”
The screenings fit with his broader criminal justice plans to reach young people before they get pulled into crime. He often cites the statistic that more than a third of prison inmates are dyslexic.
Early in his campaign for mayor, Mr. Adams was encouraged by an adviser 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 thoughts that all of those little handicaps that I thought of — being arrested, a learning disability, working as a dishwasher — all of that stuff came out in the campaign,” he said. “Those things that I thought were harmful turned out to be helpful for me to win the primary.”
Mr. Adams recalled having trouble learning to read. He had difficulty connecting letters on the page with sounds.
“I was called the D student, the dumb student,” he said, remembering how he dreaded making the half-mile walk from his home in South Jamaica, Queens, to elementary school many mornings. “You almost become sort of an introvert.”
Mr. Adams later attended Middle School 8 and then Bayside High School, a predominantly white school, more than a half-hour away by bus.
There were no individualized education plans for students with disabilities when Mr. Adams was in grade school in the 1960s and ’70s.
Mr. Adams said he blamed himself for continuing to get poor grades. He joined the Seven Crowns gang, and still bears 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 actually graduated a semester late in January 1979. He said he took night classes to make up several credits, including an English course.
Then at 19, when he was a student at Queensborough Community College, he overheard the documentary about learning disabilities.
“I became curious, and when they finished, I checked out the documentary and listened to it,” 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 John Jay College of Criminal Justice, rose within the Police Department to become a captain and received a master’s degree in public administration from Marist College in 2006.
“When I studied for my promotional exams, I had the entire patrol guide — thousands of pages — on cassette tapes,” he said of the police training manual. “I’d listen all the time to it. That’s how I retained information.”
The mayor’s younger brother, Bernard Adams, who is now working for the mayor on his security team, recalled how Mr. Adams did his best to conceal his academic struggles, studying hard to overcome them.
“He put in the time and the effort,” the mayor’s brother said. “I didn’t know it was because he had to.”
As mayor, Mr. Adams has a different way of processing information, avoiding thick policy documents in favor of Power Point presentations. He has staffers review topics with him verbally.
“I am an oral guy,” he said. “My team laughs because Audible books are like gold for me.”
