Recently, an old friend of mine from elementary school ran a hand over my bookshelf, stopped, and said, “You stole this.”

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did. You totally stole it from school.”

She pulled out my copy of The Once and Future King, and showed me the inside of the front cover. It was stamped: “Board of Education, City of New York.”

Okay, so I stole it. But I had a good reason. I loved that book so much; I couldn’t bear to return it to the school library.

My grade-school memories are full of books: bulletin boards that tracked the class read-a-thons, hand-written book reports, summer-reading lists. But a student growing up, as I did, in New York City’s District 20, will have a very different experience today. The city has adopted a new literacy regimen under which many public elementary schools are, in effect, giving up the teaching of books—storybooks, narrative nonfiction books, children’s chapter books—altogether.