New York City Mayor Eric Adams has cut school spending over the past three years, and students’ test scores have risen dramatically. One big reason is that he abandoned the progressive educational theories of recent decades and insisted on old-fashioned phonics and vocabulary lessons.

There are many moving parts and question marks here, and it’s too early to declare the spending cuts or the reading gains real. At a minimum, though, everyone should take a good look at Adams’s educational reforms and think about how so many school systems were led astray for so long on how to teach students to read.