Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools (opens in new tab)

They teach using proven methods, like phonics. They actually teach math. They test and use that as real information. They focus on results not on ideology.

They do NOT encurage using Paulo Freire's "methods".

They hold students back if they don't pass a basic reading literacy test in third grade.

The scores are adjusted for some demographic factors, so one explanation could be that they use exactly the same strategies as everybody else but the “demographic factors” adjustment works out for them.

Mississippi's average ACT scores are tied for last (edit: tied for second to last). I’m sure some of their educational outcomes are improving, but the demographic-adjusted stats from elementary school students are misleading. Holding kids back for poor performance can really pump their numbers inadvertently. Even if that’s not a very prevalent practice, performance in high school is more important and far more predictive of life outcomes.

You know what’s crazier? Mississippi’s average ACT was higher before some of their education policy improvements.

That's because the article is really about politics, not education. Education was just a hook for the author to hang a political point on.

The basis is likely to create engagement with all the "blue states won't listen" and "Democrats are AWOL" commentary.

I think it was because the demographic adjustments move scores for black students higher and scores for white students lower. If unadjusted scores for white students and black students are converging over time, that would explain why Mississippi looks so strong compared to states like Maine, Vermont, and Oregon in the time series.

Yea, the information here is really limited and from only a single source.

And in the same sense the entire article was still damning to US education. Yes, Mississippi got better, but is still not at Maine 2019 levels.

Also 2020 was covid which we all know had huge upsets in education, so I'd like to see a much broader view among different states to know if this is just the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

I think it is sprinkled throughout the article:

e.g., the section "Edu-Snobbery Hurts Us All", "Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama climbed the charts because they focused on core academic instruction when much of the country used ESSA as an excuse to focus on anything and everything else. It paid off."

Yeah I think the phenomenon is interesting and important to be aware of, but the berating political take isn't really that helpful or productive in my opinion — even though it ostensibly attempts to be unbiased in its criticisms. It would have been more productive to dive into what is working and what might be irrelevant, and how it might or might not generalize to other places.

There is a kind of implicit spin to it. I think it's worth a read, but it's also worth reading and thinking a bit about some of the sources it criticizes.

For example, in this piece the author admits that some of the sleight of hand can't account for increases in reading per se:

https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississi...

However, if you think about it, the sleight of hand can still make the scores look better than they are overall. So while the improvements might still be valid, the comparisons to other states might not be — which is part of the primary substance of the essay.

I'm often disappointed in discussions about educational policy or curricula because so much of it has this cargo cult feel to it, masking political leanings with "objective" results. I say this about a lot of it, not just left or right-leaning discussions. It's almost like someone needs to make a fill-in-the-blank checklist critique of educational discussions (testing, admissions) like the old ones about email alternatives: focusing on means and not variances, attributing progress to everything in a basket of changes rather than trying to figure out which one(s) were responsible, ignoring who the students actually are, ignoring the counterfactual questions that are the elephants in the room, focusing on single outcome variables in isolation, etc. I always feel like almost everyone is cherry picking data to make a case.

I'm no longer living in Oregon but remain closely connected. I can't opine to the behavioral challenges, but in terms of the raw score drop I think there's also the one-two punch here of:

1) Schools were closed from Covid for a long time. Not here to debate whether that was good/bad/otherwise, but it is factually accurate to say Oregon schools remained remote longer than almost any others in the country, and we now know the duration of closure had pretty direct influence on learning outcomes.

2) In the past decade the Portland metro area has seen an influx of migration from economically disadvantaged families who are immigrants / first generation citizens / non-native English speakers in the home. Students from these families are lagging significantly behind their peers in terms of post-Covid recovery, which if I recall correctly, follows national trends as well.

I have kids in Oregon public schools. The schools themselves (in the sense of classroom education) are fine, for the most part. But education is very underfunded (especially relative to the tax base). So kids like mine do just fine, but anyone who needs outreach or extra support tends not to get it. That hurts badly on aggregate test scores, but not so much on college acceptance performance. So it's hard to correct, politically.

And no, it's not the lack of discipline. In fact my experience is that the peer culture around my kids is much, much safer and respectful than what I saw growing up. And I went to what at the time was the consensus-best public school system in the country!

Oregon is 2 different states: there's the west coast and big cities (Portland, Eugene), and then there's the East Half, which is rural and underfunded. So you have highly funded schools and then underfunded.

There's definitely a phenomena I've seen especially post-Covid where parents and schools just let a child... not learn. Not attend school, not attend classes. Substitute virtual education which is just a pretend education.

How do they look in terms of raw scores? Those are the rankings that matter.

I can't speak for the cities. At least in rural oregon where some of my family resides there's a few competing factors.

For starters, services in rural oregon are terrible. If you aren't in portland, living in nearly any part of oregon translates into being multiple hours of driving to get to any sort of medicine (for example). This applies to pretty much all sorts of desirable things you might want.

But further, even though rural oregon is isolated, the housing prices there (and everywhere) remain at extremely high levels. Due to some of the geography of oregon (lots of hills and mountains) many of these small communities simply have no location where you could build a house even if you wanted to. Unless a city decided to eminent domain some land/a home to build housing (fat chance) the current supply is the maximum supply.

That makes it really hard to hire competent teachers. In many cases you are asking them to do 1, 2 hours, or longer commutes just to teach (if they aren't an established community member. Which is increasingly rare. Most people looking for an education want out of these rural communities). Often times, these rural communities are less destinations for teachers and more stepping blocks for new teachers to then get hired in more desirable locations. That results in high levels of turnover which kills student/teacher relations.

My guess on why cities suffer is a bit different. In my own city (not oregon), it's because of overcrowding, plain and simple. The kids are packed in like sardines. I'd imagine building new schools in a place like portland would be pretty difficult and expensive. So you end up with a large and growing population and limited school infrastructure to handle the ever growing pop. Decreasing the student:teacher ratio is simply a must if you want better results.

My childhood school (rural) ranked as one of the best in Idaho and even was nationally ranked. How did it get there? A couple of factors. For starters it's well positioned, there's a smaller city nearby with a decent amount of services and a larger city just a 45 minute drive away. That makes it pretty easy to find teachers. The student/teacher ratio was almost absurdly low (10:1 in my class). Finally, all the teachers were themselves long term community members. My highschool math teacher taught everyone in my family and some of their kids. There was a relationship there that's hard to recreate.

The schools we played sports against were almost universally in a worse state. Particularly the most isolated schools which were 3 hours from nearly service.

As an addendum: there is an exception to my theories that I really have no good explanation. There was a native american reservation school which was close to the same city we were. It had more money than god thanks to the casinos and had some of the nicest facilities with long-term teaching staff. Yet their student outcomes were absolutely awful. Very few went on to higher education. My best guess is that while the school was the gold standard in terms of funding, the tribe's families weren't so lucky, having a much lower SES score than my school.

I attended in the late 80s, early 90s and originally thought my education was subpar relative to other states. As I got older, I realized my fundamentals were solid and I'd constantly be surprised by what people people didn't know that I learned in middle school.

That said, I could see the gap when it came to others who participated in Honors or more advanced topics in high school. This is a smaller subset of most school's students, but I walked away with a sense that education in these topics at other schools were more rigorous.

What if the reason is external to the school? Hmm, what has changed between 2004 and 2024?

We have devices and experiences that are medically classified as addictive. It can also be home life stuff, it’s kind of a difficult time for a lot of people.

We could have the best trained and supported teachers in the world, but they are up against completely different challenges.

I’m not saying we can never fire anyone. But you suggesting that if we don’t like an outcome we get rid of someone without understanding the entire problem is plain dumb.

I can tell you why with reasonable certainty. When my mom became a Maine teacher in 1990, the starting pay was $28k, for a part time position. By her first retirement in 2022, she was making $48k, for full time work, in a more expensive school district, with more responsibilities (including creating the entire lesson plan and running the department). What was inflation during that time frame?

So basically, Maine can't afford any teachers. It's been coasting on the same 65 year old teachers it had back then. The few new teachers you DO get in rural Maine are the ones that aren't smart enough to notice that they're getting fucked, or are morons screaming at 12 year olds that the vaccine is poison and masks will kill them, or are literal sociopaths who write 17 page (not exaggeration) manifestos full of spelling mistakes and grammar errors due to a perceived slight. Despite that man being an obvious wacko, the administration we spend so much on left my mom high and dry to fend for herself, and it could have destroyed her career and reputation as one of the best teachers in the area.

A school in the Kennebunkport area convinced her out of retirement with a cool $80k a year and strong agreements towards getting her (state program) retirement fully funded.

Everyone in the US loves to harp that "oh we've spent so much on education" but we have not. We have spent immensely on paying a bunch of MBAs to "administrate". Superintendents are politicians, and do not do anything useful for schools. That superintendent spent tens of thousands of dollars on "smartboards" while the teachers used VHS tapes bought in the 80s to teach things. Teachers want supplies, not gimmicks.

But don't worry, that Superintendent will use his political connections to assure everyone that the millions a dirt poor community has handed to him totally isn't a waste, and that buying a heated turf soccer field in fucking northern maine wasn't a waste, and the local numbnuts will continue to blame "woke liberals". It definitely has nothing to do with talented teachers who worked their asses off for 40 years getting jack and shit while their bosses drive Mercedes and buy their third house.

Wow this is an excellent point and really undermines the article conclusions. We should always be looking at unadjusted scores as well as a whole series of adjusted scores with a variety of methods.

Just grabbing one highly adjusted score and drawing conclusions solely off of that is not enough. It's really only giving you one piece of a very complex puzzle in the case of something like education scores.

Observational stats in social sciences turns out to be a lot like epidemiology and strongly held conclusions are hard won.

Can you clarify what exactly you mean by the idea that adjusting for gender, age, race, and ethnicity makes this less impressive?

Generally speaking in order to evaluate the success of a school system you really do want to adjust for the demographics that that school has to deal with, so you don't attribute the effects of, say, private tutors to the public school system. It would be really unfair to judge teachers in the Bronx for their inability to compete on raw scores with teachers in upper Manhattan.

What is a fair way to compare then? If rich Asians kids from the "best" school perform the same as the rich Asians from the "worst" school and poor Native American kids from the "best" school perform same and poor Native American kids form the "worst" school, and the only differences between the best at the worst school is the proportion of each demographic, what does that say about the quality of the shcool?

It's not impressive if you don't understand statistics I guess.

You want to measure the impact of educational policies on students. So you control for other factors that influence educational outcomes, and you try to eliminate those effects.

Girls do better than boys on most testing. Asians do better than other races. Free & reduced lunch kids do worse. Special education and ESL students obviously do worse. So of course you're going to adjust for these populations.

The only reason you look at the raw scores of a rural district outside Biloxi that is 70% black and compare that to the raw scores of a suburban San Francisco district that is 50% asian and 35% white is that you either don't understand math or you're more interested in making a political argument than an educational policy one.

So the schools are doing their job properly, instead of relying on upper-middle-class native English speaking parents to do all the work. It is impressive.

I think it's partly because political conservatives are more often right when it comes to education, because they don't listen to the experts and just demand boring conservative things like phonics, learning the times tables, learning facts, and other stuff that "doesn't really teach you how to think".

Just have a look at what the Harvard Education Review thinks is important - https://meridian.allenpress.com/her - no that's not a parody site by someone who uses the word "woke" without scare quotes.

Progressives listen to experts, and the experts in education are often a bit ... scientifically lightweight. Teachers are not all brilliant at scientific research (nor do they need to be, and expecting every teacher to be a scientific researcher would drastically limit the talent pool, or require a very significant salary bump to get more candidates), so universities need to cater to the lowest common denominator, which makes teaching degrees mostly a course in using education jargon to write persuasive essays.

If you have scientifically lightweight uni courses, you tend to get a lot of scientifically lightweight researchers, who are far better at writing a persuasive essay than actually looking at evidence. And with a critical mass of lightweights, they don't really want education to move into a more scientific or evidence based footing, because then their own influence and maybe even careers will be harmed. Yes, there's good education researchers, but most of them work in Psychology departments, not Education departments. Or special education, which is a bastion of sound evidence based practice, for some reason, probably because like teachers in red states they actually need to do their jobs properly, and can't just rely on demographics to do all the hard work.

Those are the only grade levels at which the NAEP is administered.

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/guides/scores_achv.asp...

I’d be more worried if the author stepped beyond their scope, and went from observing results to speculating without evidence about what drove the changes.

It seems like enough to say “here’s a big signal that goes counter to the stories we’ve been telling ourselves, it’s worth doing some work to figure out what’s going on.”

The metric of “random social media commenter” is too narrow to have impact. But you put it out there.

The smart people doing it again…ignoring their own statistical irrelevance while challenging other’s statistics as somehow inconsequential.

Certain grade levels are considered milestones and national tests are associated.

I can support your Alphablocks recommend.

But even more than that I recommend Numberblocks. My kid loved that show and was doing multiplication by kindergarten, because he eagerly learned it from the show. And for a young kid's maths television program, some of the scripts and songs were surprisingly strong.

You mean "At the end of the day, it's cognitive ability, not instruction method, that wins the day in the long term."? Which in the context of the comment is just blatant racism wrapped in some kind of incoherent triple redundant wrapper.

I imagine the 2nd year 3rd graders aren't tested since the tests are only administered at certain grades.

But... if repeating 3rd grade leads to better test results in 4th grade, it may lead to better educational outcomes? You'd hope that the state would also be looking into the rate of repeating and how to do interventions to reduce that rate.

Personally, I've never been a fan of test scores as presented as an indicator of school quality. I'd like to see something like a delta of a test at the beginning of the year and the end of the year; of the kids that were in this school for a full school year, how much 'academic progress' did they make? Conceivably, you could match up children's scores from 4th and 8th grade and do it that way, for students that stayed in one school system for 4 years, but I've never seen that done.

Testing is expensive, so I understand why it's not done; but it might also be nice for teachers to have an early in the year test result for their students so they can lesson plan around what the class may have missed. I know there's ways to do that outside standardized tests, too.

From TFA - a 10 point gap in NAEP represents approximately one grade level, so your 21 point spread is the difference between 3rd and 5th grades.

> Why can't they extend this to their own country?

Because they aren't a cohesive movement and, without someone to hate, could not manage even the rather poor pretense of unity with which they occasionally pretend to care to bother.

If they were capable of taking your advice, they wouldn't need it.

I think the reason the left trashes this segment of the country is for two reasons. First, I don't think they're fully aware of how different the circumstances are for a middle-class (sub)urban person and a poor rural one. I doubt many "coastal elites" have spent much time in rural Alabama, for example. Second, they're able to extend empathy to the ignorant poor in other countries because they don't have to suffer the consequences of their ignorance and cultural backwardness. They absolutely do in this country, though. Just look what's going on.

In a very real sense I think the "left" (that is, Democrats) in the US see conservative, rural ignorance and prejudice as inexcusable. I don't think that view is fully unjustified either. Having spent time in Mississippi growing up, I will never forget how blatantly racist and hateful those people were. Even (especially?) the wealthy, educated "elites" there. And even with a poor school system, we have libraries, the internet, etc. Ignorance in the 21st century is absolutely a choice, excepting maybe people in the most brutal of circumstances.

Coming from a lower-socio economic background - i.e. growing up poor - is very much a proper diversity characteristic (regardless of ethnicity or anything else).

I’ll explain it clearly: it is impossible to accommodate someone who wants you dead.

Two important caveats.

1) DEI does include rural American white culture, Christian conservative culture, and all the rest...

2) ...except for people who want to eliminate people. Sorry, but you can't make room for someone that wants to end your existence. And there is a non-insignificant number of MAGA that want, support, and promote doing just that.

> Why can't they extend this to their own country?

We do. We literally do. We literally think our country can be better than it is. If you don't see this, you are blinding yourself.

> You don't win friends or change peoples' minds by mocking and bashing people. That just makes them double down out of spite.

> They know they are mocked as dumb, in-bred, ignorant, bigoted, small minded, etc.

The irony.

Edit: I also find it interesting that as much as the is opposed to DEI, they still support it. They just pretend they don't. Heck, even now the government is still supporting DEI initiatives with Trump's approval. It's crazy.

Identity politics of all sorts get their salience by having enemies to coalesce around. Who would be the enemy of your broadened woke coalition? White coastal elites?

As someone who grew up in "rural American white culture, Christian conservative culture", you can't get away with saying half the shit they say about cities and urban areas about them. We propose solutions but those solutions are economic, not a return to default status for them. I've seen the vile, disgusting things rural people say about minorities and LGBT because outwardly I'm just another white dude. I've had grandmas scream at me about Obama being the devil (because I thought canvassing in '08 was a good idea).

I'm going to paint with a fairly broad brush here, for which I apologize. But it lines up with the majority of the politically outspoken people I'm referring to. For context, I grew up in the south. I also regularly disagree with my liberal friends when they categorize Southern conservatives as brainwashed idiots.

But (here's the but): When I lived in the South, I heard a _lot_ of abject vitriol toward liberal elites, ivory tower academics (Piled Higher and Deeper, ho ho ho), and antisemitism occasionally dog whistled (but often just blunt racism) as anti-banker or anti-world order. You can throw in more things, like Civil War denialism and using racial slurs at the workplace in front of people of the target race with no recourse.

I currently live in a metropolitan area of a swing state. When I hang out with a group of friends that's politically outspoken and conservative, I'll hear what I think lines up with liberal shit talking. Comments that would be outright insulting in the presence of the other party, refusal to actually consider the opposition's site, etc. I do think that rhetoric is harmful to democracy, and I am so very tired of liberals I agree with and conservatives I disagree with echoing jabs and talking points.

But it doesn't compare with the vitriol I heard when living in the deep south. I refuse to live in a place where it's okay for the stranger cutting your hair to drop a nasty racial slur during inane chit-chat. I don't know how the hell you woke embrace a group that has so much hate toward your party and your politicians.

If the social policy of the progressive left were capable of wrapping itself in the messaging of Family, Community, and Freedom for rural America - there would be an appetite. Remember that for a large swath of Trump voters, Bernie Sanders was their second choice candidate.

When your chief argument for your attaining political power is that you have been wrongly oppressed, you need need to identify the oppressors as a rallying point for would-be supporters. For Nazis, the Jews could be vilified as the cause of German suffering. For many progressives, that's "the deplorables" just as for conservatives it's the woke.

Of course, truth and the complexity of reality dilute and blunt the arguments of oppression which is precisely why you will never see your plan come to fruition. The world would be a nicer place, but those you need to act on your plan are the only ones that would be hurt by it.

That sounds not so much more “woke”, but more like classical left-liberalism, sticking up for the disempowered and disadvantaged, regardless of identity group membership.

It’s not that much flamebait imo. It’s not exactly a secret that the mainstream global left have been losing large amounts of voters to populist right. It’s driven by fear of scaring away voters with socialism (both Europe and US) and in the US in particular the Dems are a corporate center party which actively resists progressive policies and rhetoric that acknowledges the struggles of average people. See exhibit A: sidelining Bernie.

I think the left has been making these judgments in error: the risk of being labeled socialists didn’t stop Bernie from getting grass roots rural support, just as the risk of being called a totalitarian fascist didn’t stop Trump one bit. Now, the issue is even if the dems wake up, how are they gonna consolidate the direct conflict of interests with their corporate support? You can’t win a game of money in politics if you upset the money that fund both the entrenched political class and the campaigns. Right wing populism is easier that way. All they want from the corporations is cultural obedience like removing DEI, it doesn’t hurt their business one bit. Look at how quickly Meta etc turned coats.

The "deplorables" comment you refer to was doing exactly what you are asking for but you claim you heard it and knew she'd lose, so I guess it's a losing strategy you're proposing.

Not only did she say it, she said to to a crowd in New York at an LGBTQ fundraiser and still felt that Trump voters should be mentioned as worthy of compassion.

> Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

They absolutely should be doing this but they're never going to. For a huge number of people, this is Team Blue vs Team Red. Those born-drunk fuckup hick racists are Team Red so their role in the game is to be a verbal punching bag.

There's a very real chance that the Democrat demographic coalition collapses in our lifetime. The contempt so many commentators held for groups that "surprisingly" swung for Trump is pretty telling of how this is probably going to keep going.

I think you don’t understand what DEI really is. In America the groups you talk about are not at a disadvantage when it comes to recruitment in the respective areas of the country. As such they aren’t part of DEI in corporate recruiting.

In education how would you make white Christians a greater part of the curriculum? Their history and contributions to society already dominate the curriculum.

I’m a woke liberal. You are right regarding your comments on Saudi and conservative Hindu culture. I do condemn idiotic beliefs no matter who has them. This includes condemning idiotic beliefs of white Southern culture. One such idiotic belief is the idea that including marginalized groups is an attack on white people.

Also, asking for educated people with a soul for acceptance and understanding of clear idiocy, hate, bad faith in conversation, and just malice generally, is (ironically) asking Christ-like magnanimity of them.

Why should we accept people acting like assholes? If someone consistently acts like an asshole in your personal life, you cut them out. Tolerating nonsense just begets more nonsense.

> "Your children aren't just dumber, they're also poorer" feels like a very spicy way to elevate the status of a state to me.

Would this comment have been made if we were talking about The Bronx instead of Mississippi?

The author is saying that given the poverty status of the state it's remarkable how quickly they've been able to turn their education system around. A really good school in The Bronx will have lower scores than a mediocre school in Upper Manhattan, but that doesn't mean that we should all go out and emulate the mediocre school in Upper Manhattan. The really good school in The Bronx is obviously the better model.

The author's initial point is correct, though: because it's Mississippi we're talking about that intuition doesn't apply. It's okay to diss on Mississippi for being Mississippi.

Mississippi is largely poor because it never industrialized before industrial jobs started getting automated away or off shored.

I think it's interested that they're now investing heavily in early reading education, teacher training, and holding kids back who need more time to learn to read. They've also focused on evidence based reading curriculum which is great. It seems like they're starting to show progress and some of those lessons might be applicable in other states. Maryland as the article points out does a terrible job teaching poor kids to read, just abysmal and its a very rich state.

It seems like a decent way to compare schools' performance, just not really any good for pupils or 'education levels'.

It's truly remarkable how much compassion liberals purport to have for the poor before, apparently without any self-awareness, saying something like this.

> This article is advocating that using poverty-adjusted scores is a better way to assess student education levels. I just can't agree with that.

No, it's advocating that this is a better way of assessing the quality of the education they receive. And it is.

Rich kids in bad schools can score higher on tests than poor kids in good schools. If you want to isolate the quality of the schooling this is what you do.

> Pardon me, but 20% of your children living in poverty is my personal exact definition for an embarrassing cultural backwater.

First, this has nothing to do with the article, which is about education.

Second, perhaps without knowing it, you're spouting a classic white supremacist take: black people (there are much more in Alabama and Mississippi) are poor because they have a bad culture. If they just stopped sagging their pants and walking out on their kids like the good whites they'd be better off. Even if the intent was to direct this at the poor white people, it's still racist.

Perhaps you should consider that the people who live and struggle in other states are deserving of compassion, not derision. Yes, even if they believe different things from you, or have less money. Practice empathy.