It may not be enough to beat back the Democratic Party’s socialist savior, Zohran Mamdani, this November, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams has overseen a successful reform of New York City public schools that has delivered significant gains in reading scores, especially for black and Hispanic students. All Adams had to do was copy Mississippi to do it.

In addition to a 5% across-the-board cut in spending in 2023, Adams introduced phonics-based reading, a system that teaches children to read by connecting letters with their corresponding sounds and then blending those sounds to form words. If this sounds to you no more than common sense, you were probably born before the 1980s when whole language learning became vogue and was taught to teachers on college campuses nationwide.