New York City’s early-childhood classrooms are no longer locked into one citywide script—but the escape hatch comes with a citywide scoreboard. Under new Education Department guidance, publicly funded programs can seek approval to use a different curriculum, while still reporting child progress through GOLD, the assessment system that teachers have complained can turn playtime into a paperwork marathon.
The shift, first detailed by Brooklyn Eagle, unwinds a 2023 mandate from former Mayor Eric Adams that required publicly funded infant, toddler, 3-K and pre-K classrooms to use The Creative Curriculum. The policy covered roughly 140,000 children ages 5 and under across public schools, community-based programs and home-based settings. Providers seeking a change must include parent and teacher input and select from a city-approved list that includes Montessori, HighScope, Tools of the Mind, Units of Study and several specialized or city-developed programs.
The Choice Comes With A Big Assessment Catch
The new policy gives Montessori programs a route back to Montessori and lets other providers pursue approaches they believe better fit their communities. But it is not a clean break from the Adams-era system: Programs must continue using GOLD, which requires teachers to evaluate children across dozens of developmental objectives and document the scores with observations, photos or work samples several times a year.
The city’s original rationale was consistency. In a 2023 announcement, the New York City Mayor’s Office said all early-childhood programs would adopt The Creative Curriculum alongside Teaching Strategies GOLD and the Ages & Stages developmental screener, with training and coaching intended to help teachers implement the system.
Educators Had Plenty To Say About The One-Playbook Approach
The mandate drew criticism from educators who said a single curriculum could make it harder to tailor lessons to children’s cultures, languages and individual needs. Earlier coverage by Chalkbeat described concerns that the shift would replace flexible, locally developed materials with a more rigid and generic approach.
Those complaints were aimed at more than the lesson plans. Teachers also objected to the documentation burden associated with GOLD, while some programs argued that locally developed materials included New York-specific subjects and more language options than The Creative Curriculum.
Preschool Policy Is Now Splitting From K-12
The curriculum change puts early childhood on a different track from the city’s K-12 system. As Brooklyn Eagle’s report notes, city officials have kept the broader literacy and math mandates for elementary and high schools, even as preschool providers gain a formal process to request alternatives.
The city’s public NYC Reads materials still describe the original early-childhood model as requiring a single curriculum, suggesting the policy shift is recent enough that public guidance has not fully caught up. For families and providers, the practical question is how many programs will actually apply—and how many will be approved.
Parents are not getting a curriculum shopping cart for preschool, and providers cannot simply switch on their own. They can now make a case for a different approach, with families and teachers involved in the application, while the city keeps its preferred assessment system firmly in the classroom.
