Ara Calcano knew the public education system in New York City was failing her young son when he constantly confused letters and sounds while his classmates were becoming proficient readers.

His teachers wondered whether he might have dyslexia. But each year, he was moved ahead anyway. He was barely able to read above kindergarten level by the time he entered third grade, a crucial year because students who can’t read well by then face a far greater risk of never graduating high school.

It took Ms. Calcano more than two years, dozens of hours of meetings and calls, and pleas to a lawyer to get help for her son, who was growing increasingly demoralized.

“I felt alone,” Ms. Calcano said. “It was like, ‘You’re the parent. You deal with it.’”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After generations of students with dyslexia languished in New York City schools, Eric Adams, the outgoing mayor, pledged to change course. The issue was personal: Mr. Adams’s own dyslexia went undiagnosed until college and he feared being asked to read aloud in his public school classes. On the campaign trail and in office, he frequently portrayed his struggles with reading as a foundational part of his biography.

Mr. Adams spoke in lofty terms about transforming the biggest public education system in the United States into a national model for how to find and serve children like him.

Today, though, New York is still falling short of its promise — and its mandate under federal law — to provide an equal education for every child with dyslexia, according to interviews with more than a dozen parents, advocates for students with disabilities and special education lawyers.

Sarah Part, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Children of New York, said that the mayor’s record was decidedly mixed.

On one hand, he achieved several meaningful wins, bringing more attention to dyslexia and joining a broader national movement to overhaul reading instruction and embrace practices rooted in brain science and how children learn.

But too often, Ms. Part said, students remain unable to access the support they need. Her organization still regularly receives calls from distressed parents whose dyslexic children are struggling. And middle and high school students remain especially underserved.

“No one should be declaring victory,” Ms. Part said. “There’s still a long way to go and a lot of work left to do.”

The challenges reflect a familiar struggle for families in districts across the country, where children with dyslexia — the most common learning disability, affecting as many as 5 to 20 percent of students — are often never identified and regularly denied help.

The stakes are hard to overstate. With targeted support, students with dyslexia can become adept readers. But without it, they can join the ranks of the one in five U.S. adults who are functionally illiterate. They may spend their lives struggling to read medical prescriptions, fill out job applications or understand unwieldy transit schedules.

“It’s just completely screwed up because you’re failing kids that need the extra help,” Ms. Calcano said, who asked to withhold the name of her son, who is now 8, to protect his privacy. “This public school system needs to do more for our children.”

Nicole Brownstein, a spokeswoman for the city’s Education Department, said the city had worked to “create a sea change.” Through “universal screeners” for reading challenges, she said, the school system had assessed students’ risk for dyslexia and other learning disabilities, and taken “a data-driven approach to providing interventions.”

She also pointed to the city’s broader overhaul of how reading is taught, saying it had “revolutionized literacy instruction by going back to basics” and would expand help for disadvantaged children this school year. Still, in New York City, the struggle to educate every student with a disability not only leaves some children behind, but also takes a financial toll. When public schools fail to serve students, families may sue in an attempt to win a private school placement and tuition reimbursement. Those cases cost the city more than $1.1. billion in recent years. The spending has risen significantly at a time when the incoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will be searching for funding for his ambitious agenda. (For the sake of comparison, his proposal to make city buses fast and free would cost up to $800 million each year, according to his campaign’s projections.) Four years ago, it seemed dyslexia reform might emerge as a legacy-defining achievement for Mr. Adams, like the creation of a free, universal preschool program was for his predecessor, Bill de Blasio.

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