Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

https://www.educationdaly.us/p/mississippi-cant-possibly-have-good

by pkrecker • 1 year ago

104 214 1 year ago

duxup2• 1 year ago

I wish this story dove into the "why" or what these test results even are / validate them rather than finger wag at everyone within shouting distance.

xadhominemx3• 1 year ago

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.

bitshiftfaced5• 1 year ago

If I'm not mistaken, they compare children of similar demographics. This controls for how different states have different percentages of varying demographics. Based on this, I don't see how the convergence of performance over time could explain why Mississippi would be doing well.

pixl97• 1 year ago

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.

derbOac2• 1 year ago

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.

bombcar3• 1 year ago

My repeated experience has been that the teachers on the ground (actually teaching the classes) know exactly what they'd like to do to improve things, but they instead have to implement whatever new policy has flowed down from who knows where this year or decade.

(An actionable example of a policy that parents can implement today is "redshirting" where you hold a child with a late birthday back a year in pre-kindergarten)

WaitWaitWha2• 1 year ago

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."

kogus2• 1 year ago

This was very interesting to read, and news to me. It's gratifying to see Mississippi prove that it's possible to break out of a pattern of failure. I would love to see a discussion around the specific policies and practices that MS has put in place to actually achieve these results. The article doesn't really discuss that.

dataengineer56• 1 year ago

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

pc8613• 1 year ago

Who would have thought that not pushing kids forward into an academic environment they're not prepared for would be beneficial?

duxup2• 1 year ago

Is that a state wide policy?

c4mden• 1 year ago

They invested heavily in early literacy programs and literacy training for K-3 teachers.

MattSteelblade• 1 year ago

The author posted a link to an article[1] showing that Mississippi's retention policies were not responsible for the increase in scores.

But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything.
...
In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform.

[1] https://jabberwocking.com/mississippi-revisited-the-mississi...

amanaplanacanal• 1 year ago

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.

pc8613• 1 year ago

If the educational system is run in some measure by the government, it is going to have political implications regardless.

rubyfan• 1 year ago

yeah, they lost me at the use of the word “elites”

lolinder9• 1 year ago

Just to clarify to those reading the comments first, the political point he's making is not to ignore Mississippi just because it's Mississippi.

He has warnings for both Democrats and Republicans at the end and is pretty clearly not a fan of the way either party is approaching education at the national level right now. He is drawing attention to the fact that some red states with historically bad schools have started pulling ahead of some blue states with historically good schools, but his interest is in making sure we learn from that, not scoring culture war points.

kardianos• 1 year ago

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".

miltonlost3• 1 year ago

Is that in the article? Where do you know their curriculum?

aredox3• 1 year ago

Proven methods... For what? Acing standardised tests?

There is more to live and success than standardised tests. Steve Jobs wasn't a brilliant student with top marks everywhere.

kogus2• 1 year ago

The article suggests that someone from Maine would be reluctant to ask Mississippi for advice, given the stereotypes and biases that all Americans have absorbed over the years.

If the Maine Secretary of Education overcame his or her reluctance and did in fact ask Mississippi for advice, imagine their disappointment if the response was "we actually teach math".

Do you have a source for your response? I'm genuinely curious about what they changed to achieve this level of success. I'd be interested first for the actual educational methods, and secondarily I'd be interested in relating it to the idea of organizational changes that can produce relatively rapid reversals of a long term trend.

keenmaster3• 1 year ago

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.

happyopossum2• 1 year ago

ACT scores trail education outcomes by ~10 years, as students in school in the middle of a shift don’t get the full benefit from it - they’re often not included in policy changes for the sake of continuity (you may not be able to suddenly change the way you teach math in 5th grade).

reverendsteveii5• 1 year ago

It's the height of elitism to pretend that this comment isn't shooting up in the rankings, and it would be foolish to ignore it

dentemple3• 1 year ago

By the way, if you control for HN comments made by me on 5/7/25, this is the #1 ranked comment.

I have nothing to add. I just wanted to show that I helped contribute to make keenmaster's 5/7/25 comment on this thread his #1 comment on this thread for the day, 5/7/25. Hello to all of the future historians looking back on this moment!

WaitWaitWha2• 1 year ago

https://www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services/the...

Indeed they are towards the bottom, but not "tied for last".

Talking about statistics, take a look at the "Estimated % of Grads Tested" column. the top 20 do not break 20%, while the bottom is near 100% with the exception of Hawa'ii.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

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.

bitshiftfaced5• 1 year ago

Children of similar demographics are getting better absolute reading scores in Mississippi. How would it "work out" for them in a way that isn't explained by performance?

api8• 1 year ago

"Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. It’s not just tolerated - it’s venerated."

Warning: possible flame bait, though I do not intend it this way. I am serious.

I've had this thought for quite a while: the (social) left could pivot and win by being more woke.

WTF? What I mean by this is: expand diversity and inclusion to include rural American white culture, Christian conservative culture, and all the rest of what the American academic (mostly urban, mostly middle class to wealthy, mostly coastal) left culture considers out-groups.

DEI should include the "deplorables." (I knew Hillary Clinton was going to lose when she said that. What cringe.)

An American woke social liberal would not go to India and immediately start trashing rural conservative Hindu culture. They would not travel to Saudi Arabia and start trashing poor rural Muslims for having views they disagree with. They're even willing to stick up for Palestinian Muslims in spite of their social views. Why can't they extend this to their own country?

What would sticking up for the "deplorables" look like? First, it would be to stop trashing them. Then it would be to stick up for their rights and defend their needs and go to bat for them against the very real social and economic adversaries that they face. Talk about the opioid epidemic. Talk about the hollowing out of the rural economy. Propose solutions.

You don't win friends or change peoples' minds by mocking and bashing people. That just makes them double down out of spite. There's a very large -- probably double digit -- percentage of die-hard MAGA Trump supporters whose real reason for supporting him is because comparatively-rich white coastal educated liberals hate him. It's a big "fuck you." These people have been the butt of jokes for decades, and they notice. They know they are mocked as dumb, in-bred, ignorant, bigoted, small minded, etc.

throwanem13• 1 year ago

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.

api8• 1 year ago

You have a good point here, and I'm afraid it's a human universal: humans are tribal and have a hard time forming coalitions and movements without someone to hate.

Being "universally woke" would mean not hating anyone, and that makes it hard to unite.

We really need an alien invasion. Any Trisolarans listening?

const_cast2• 1 year ago

I mean, this is a classic paradox of tolerance problem.

If you extend diversity to include people who ideologically oppose diversity, then you're going to end up with more resistance and therefore less diversity.

Yes, it would be cool if we could just include populist nationalists in our policy but the problem is that those ideologies are inherently zero-compromise and reactionary. So, what now?

ascondabout• 1 year ago

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

api8• 1 year ago

It doesn't seem to stop people from having sympathy for the victims of collective punishment, like Palestinian Muslims whose social views tend toward the extreme right, in other countries.

It's hard, I agree. When someone hates you it's by far the easiest path to hate them back. But that's not going to change anyone's mind. It will make them double down.

Edit: I'm not bashing Queers for Palestine. It's brilliant. It's probably changed some peoples' minds in that region of the world. You don't hear about it, of course, because when people reconsider long-held and culturally dominant beliefs they often don't say anything about it for a long time. They reconsider quietly. Bigots and hate-mongers and war-mongers are loud.

One big rule for interpreting culture is: the craziest, meanest, most bigoted people are almost always the loudest. The wise whisper and the idiot yells.

voxic11• 1 year ago

Yet they are able to support Hamas and other similar groups so I don't think this really explains it fully.

armchairhacker2• 1 year ago

But it's unfair to believe someone wants you dead just because of their origin.

There are millions (probably tens of millions) of rural Southerners. Many don't want you dead, but vote red because they don't feel accommodated. Many vote blue.

Moreover, when somebody grows up around people who hate a certain group, it's human nature that they'll also develop hatred. What do you do with those people?

I believe the best you can do if pacify them, and convert those whose hatred isn't ingrained. Acknowledging people and accepting the non-hatred parts of their culture is an easy way to reduce the motivation to kill you, and convert those on the fence, without giving leverage. Funding is another way, and while it can give leverage (because adversarial groups shift their own funding towards aggression), I believe if done carefully, the decrease in hatred will outweigh the increase in power, making aggressive efforts overall less effective.

yogurt-male6• 1 year ago

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.

throwanem13• 1 year ago

Spoken like a rich white liberal. I grew up in Mississippi white and poor, and I had friends (when we could get away with that) who were black and poor.

If you haven't noticed the way those latter are kept apart - quite literally the oldest play in America - then you haven't been nearly as attentive as you imagine yourself to be. The ignorant contempt you display here confirms it. Well, as you correctly note, ignorance in some cases is a choice. Choose better.

hooverd6• 1 year ago

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).

redczar3• 1 year ago

I’m white and not from the south. But I went to FSU as an undergrad. White people assumed I was just like them in attitude and beliefs. One friend tried to get me into Christianity. He casually mentioned that black dominated churches weren’t real Christians. For “them” it was cultural and not a real belief.

The biggest snowflakes in the country are white southern Christians in my experience. Anything that challenges their privilege is an attack to them.

seabird• 1 year ago

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.

hooverd6• 1 year ago

It's a category error to think racists are ignorant people who don't know better and not people who actively enjoy their place in a racial hierarchy.

scarmig• 1 year ago

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?

hooverd6• 1 year ago

cosmopolitans of the rootless variety

germinalphrase• 1 year ago

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.

klabb3• 1 year ago

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.

redczar3• 1 year ago

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.

api8• 1 year ago

In America the groups you talk about are not at a disadvantage when it comes to recruitment in the respective areas of the country.

When I was in college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people from the rural South were at times told they should lose the Southern accent because it would hurt their ability to get hired in jobs like finance and engineering especially in the Northeast. This was at a college in the Midwest.

If you go to New York, Boston, or Silicon Valley and try to break into a top-tier industry with a thick Southern accent and talk about how much you love to go deer hunting, this will absolutely put you at a disadvantage. I lived in Boston for five years and one thing I learned is that even being from a poor or "flyover" area of the country makes you a lower class of person. There's a very strong but quiet classism, especially in the Northeast, and the Northeast is the cultural heartland of American liberals. "Where did you go to school" is the biggest class marker, followed by where you're from.

Is it as big of a disadvantage as other things? Probably not, but "the oppression olympics" isn't a good take or a good strategy.

BTW -- every human culture has class markers and in-group out-group dynamics. It just seems like the US left is blind to the fact that they have these too, and no it's not all about rejecting Nazis and misogynists. Everyone from the rural South or Midwest is not a Nazi or a misogynist. Most are not.

sbuttgereit2• 1 year ago

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.

yogurt-male6• 1 year ago

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.

jl62• 1 year ago

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.

gadders• 1 year ago

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).

jasonlotito2• 1 year ago

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.

NegativeK• 1 year ago

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.

ZeroGravitas2• 1 year ago

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.

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

Not to diminish the achievement, but the chosen metrics seem pretty narrow. Why no mention of 5th grade reading level? Or second grade math? It gives the impression that the author is extrapolating from outliers rather and identifying a student body wide trend. Especially when no insight to what is driving this is given.

alwa• 1 year ago

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.”

etempleton• 1 year ago

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

buggerme• 1 year ago

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.

yogurt-male6• 1 year ago

As someone who attended public school in Mississippi in the 2000s, this is deeply surprising to me. The quality of education I received was abysmal, and at that time there was no sign of anything turning around. Glad that the next generation is getting something better.

mindtricks• 1 year ago

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.

philo_sophia• 1 year ago

I think the comments on the article are a fair critique. Notably that this single metric for educational outcome is not as important as the author is suggesting.

Also, Maine has a huge drop on that chart I'm assuming from COVID. I don't think this is southern states catching up. I think it was just them outperforming during COVID potentially. Whether or not that will last, we will see.

svachalek• 1 year ago

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.

BugsJustFindMe3• 1 year ago

There are reasons other than race for some children to do better in school than others.

sepositus• 1 year ago

I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly why Oregon has some of the worst scores in the country (I believe it ranked dead-last this year when adjusted for socio-economic factors). When I see what's going on around me, I can only think it's somewhat related to broken family's and undisciplined kids. The stuff that my kids come home and tell me is happening in school is pretty mind blowing.

I've also noticed a complete reversal on any form of discipline. There's not even detention anymore. It seems in the name of acceptance we're taking in all kids, even ones exhibiting extremely aggressive behaviors, and then doing absolutely nothing to curb those behaviors.

ajross2• 1 year ago

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!

megaman8212• 1 year ago

Oregon public schools are underfunded compared to Mississippi?

Some of the worst performing schools in my area have the most funding per pupil. A bucket of money doesn't solve bad systems, bad administartors, bad teachers and bad parents.

Duwensatzaj• 1 year ago

education is very underfunded

Wrong.

https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2025/02/05/dramatic-incre...

Students in Oregon saw their reading and math scores decline over a decade when the state’s spending on schools rose by 80%, an analysis by Georgetown University shows.

jobs_throwaway2• 1 year ago

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

lolinder9• 1 year ago

No, those are the rankings that are immaterial to measuring the success of a school system.

Raw score rankings do not as a rule measure the output of schools, they measure the involvement of parents, which will always have a much larger impact on child outcomes than the schools do. Schools are an important marginal add-on that we want to make better, and in order to measure their value add we have to find ways to account for parental involvement and remove it as a factor. Socioeconomics is a passible proxy for involvement.

sullivanmatt• 1 year ago

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.

HDThoreaun5• 1 year ago

Portland and oregon more generally is nowhere close to the top in terms of percentage of residents who are poor immigrants. Even if it is the immigrants bringing down scores(my experience in k-12 was that the immigrants were the hardest workers and even though they had a lot of responsibilities/struggles to overcome they were never the worst performers) why is oregon worse than areas with more of them?

miltonlost3• 1 year ago

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.

cogman10• 1 year ago

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.

ianbicking• 1 year ago

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.

lastofthemojito• 1 year ago

I guess I don't really get the basis of this blog post. I've heard of the Mississippi Miracle several times among my blue state teacher friends - it feels like it is in fact en vogue to talk about it and try to figure out how to emulate it. Do a search for Mississippi Miracle for countless articles and posts.

altcognito• 1 year ago

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

jobs_throwaway2• 1 year ago

BIG caveat that these scores are adjusted for gender, age, and race or ethnicity, free and reduced-price lunch receipt status, special education status, and English language learner status. In terms of raw scores, Mississippi is still in the bottom 10.

Not really that impressive IMO.

pc8613• 1 year ago

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.

bombcar3• 1 year ago

But unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" - which isn't supported by the evidence, because there may be other factors that coincide with those who are eligible for them.

You'd have to do something like take the high-performing SF district and give half the students, randomly selected, free lunches.

dentemple3• 1 year ago

Statistics can also be gamed, and this article reeks of it.

As other commenters are saying, Mississippi children's actual achievement rates are still bottom of the barrel. So while they might be statistically doing better, they're not actually doing better at the moment.

That's not to say that things can't turn around, or that this newfound investment into education might not bear fruit very soon.

But the OP made the choice not to address any of these issues; therefore, the article doesn't seem to have been made in good faith relative to the HN community's expectations.

megaman8212• 1 year ago

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?

tstrimple• 1 year ago

I've largely been convinced that "good schools" are just a side effect of motivated parents migrating to an area with "good schools". It has nothing at all to do with the schools or teachers themselves, but the parents with means who make decisions based on education will likely be doing other things to encourage education as well. Achieving a critical mass of children with involved parents will make a school "good".

epidemiology• 1 year ago

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.

lolinder9• 1 year ago

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.

khelavastr• 1 year ago

Great classes which target top-performing students will be different than great classes that target below-average students..

margalabargala2• 1 year ago

"Well, Mississippi has lower scores, but when you account for the fact that the people having those scores are black people the Mississippi comes out ahead!"

You don't see the issue?

wisty• 1 year ago

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.

OhMeadhbh• 1 year ago

So... uh... this seems to say "if you eliminate all the test scores that are bad, Mississippi only has good test scores left." By "adjusting" student test scores based on age, gender, ethnicity and whether or not they get a school lunch, what they're really saying is "there are a lot of poor kids who qualify for school lunches" rather than "there are a lot of poor kids who did remarkably well on standardized tests."

paxys• 1 year ago

So if you remove all the bad test scores from the data set you can show that Mississippi actually has great test scores. Top tier analysis.

BugsJustFindMe3• 1 year ago

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.

"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.

Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites.
When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results for student demographics...

Clicking through to the Urban Institute, one then finds:

comparing states’ NAEP scores is misleading for many purposes because states serve very different student populations. For example, more than 20 percent of children live in poverty in Alabama and Mississippi, compared with less than 10 percent in New Hampshire and Vermont

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

If adjusting for poverty is so important, maybe the biggest problem is governments deciding intentionally to let children suffer so much from poverty!

And if poverty and hunger are so strongly connected to education outcomes, which state just again for the second year in a row rejected school lunch funding for poor families? https://mississippitoday.org/2025/02/03/mississippi-again-tu...

"Oh but our schools are good actually!"

"Oh but your children are starving and you think that's fine!"

lolinder9• 1 year ago

"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.

OJFord• 1 year ago

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

ch4s35• 1 year ago

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.

smeeth2• 1 year ago

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.

BugsJustFindMe3• 1 year ago

Compassion for the people, yes. None at all for the state that has again decided that funding for school lunches for poor children is beneath their let-them-starve ideology.

Perhaps you should consider who is responsible for wellness programs in the state instead of deciding that your "this is racist" hammer is the only tool needed. Children live in poverty because the government decides it's ok. Trying to connect what I said to race identity politics is projection.

pc8613• 1 year ago

I am much less interested in why MS schools are doing so much better - which don't get me wrong, is great, and I hope studied and modeled in better-funded states - than I am in why other schools are doing worse.

Taking that first chart into account, if Maine stayed around a ~225 for the last 20 years, and Mississippi went from 203 to 220, that's great for Mississippi but not necessarily an indictment of anything Maine is doing wrong.

But not only do you have Mississippi gaining an impressive amount of ground, you have 4th graders in 2024 Maine 1.5 grade levels worse than 4th graders in 2004 Maine.

If I was an educational policymaker in Maine I'd be looking for who to fire and it'd probably take a bit of work to convince the answer isn't "everyone."

cyberlurker• 1 year ago

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.

pc8613• 1 year ago

That could very well explain the decline in Maine's scores. Do we see that decline elsewhere (other than Mississippi at least)? Maybe we can add this to the multi-page list of reasons to ban phones in schools bell-to-bell.

mrguyorama4• 1 year ago

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.

pc8613• 1 year ago

I think you touched on a key component to this and I'm curious if you agree with me or not.

The level of effort expended by teachers in instructing their class varies wildly from teacher to teacher. I'm sure everyone remembers their best teacher and their worst teacher, and the delta between those two is often staggering.

Wouldn't schools be better off if we could easily get rid of those bad teachers? I would love to pay great high school teachers $150k/yr, and I would love for the worst teachers to be able to get fired. Unfortunately teachers' unions care more about seniority than skill, and any aspect of teacher accountability or evaluation is painted as "you just want to fire the expensive teachers."

ZeroGravitas2• 1 year ago

This all feels a bit astroturfed.

Is their increase in 4th grade student reading scores still there if you count the kids that they made resit grade 3 if they failed to meet literacy standards as 4th graders?

I quickly skimmed a few reports and articles and the lack of clarity on that point makes me suspicious.

toast0• 1 year ago

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.

silverlake• 1 year ago

If you look at the full table of NAEP scores, you see the differences are not that much. 8th grade reading is 245(WV)-266(MA). That's 20 point spread, where NAEP goes to 500 pts. A 4% difference between the best and worst state is insignificant. They all suck because they are at 50% of the scale.

happyopossum2• 1 year ago

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.

miltonlost3• 1 year ago

None of this article says WHY Mississippi changed, just that it did and Blu States should emulate. But emulate what? School vouchers? Feeding children before school? The blog doesn't say, just implies that it's Republicans doing.... The analysis is lacking and surface level and right-wing water carrying.

sollewitt• 1 year ago

There is a similar effect in parts of SFUSD where some of the schools with more poor students are bucking trends: https://sfparents.org/sfkidscantwait/

(SFUSD overall has something like a 10% poverty rate and a 3% marginally housed population, so I think the comparison is fair)

In our school, we saw a lot of outdated teaching materials - we got our kids hooked on Alphablocks - a BBC funded children’s education program that teaches phonics, because it seemed like there were no explicit classes in phonics. The debate over phonics is settled, they work - I understand the situation here is improving.

The math curriculum has improved too, they are adopting techniques from Japan, but I suspect the limiting factor there is teachers’ math discomfort.

In the end it’s been the parents holding the school system and elected officials accountable that has spurred change. I bet behind the great numbers in Mississippi is a sea of under-appreciated moms.

sbuttgereit2• 1 year ago

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.

nunez• 1 year ago

Interesting factoids from /r/teaching, /r/teachers and /r/mississippi:

- Mississippi's Mississippi Excellent in Teaching Program was given a ~$13M grant in 2013 so that students who attend MSU or University of Mississippi can get their entire tuition written off if they agree to teach in the MS Public School System for five years. On paper, this looks like a super sweet program. I don't recall any other state having anything similar to this outside of compensation accelerators like Teach for America (only a two year commitment) or NYC's Math for America (very selective). See MSU's METP benefits: https://www.metp.msstate.edu/about-metp/benefits. Five years is a long-enough time to convince people who would otherwise not consider a career in education to stay.

- However, MS is still a hellscape of an environment to teach in, per the comments in this (https://reddit.idevicehacked.com/r/teaching/comments/sf4rpc/...) and this (https://reddit.idevicehacked.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/...). As of 2024, MS is still dead last in teacher pay. Caps out (https://mdek12.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/36/2025/03/Salar...) at $71k for 35+ years experience and "AAAA" experience (i.e. you have a Ph.D; see here: https://www.mdek12.org/sites/default/files/Offices/MDE/OA/OT...).

- MS also instituted a policy in 2013 wherein third-graders who fail a state-level reading test are held back. This has led to an increase of teachers teaching "to the test" to decrease retention rates. The "comeback" that's documented here is for 4th grade reading performance. Unsurprisingly, the data does not show maintained levels of performance at 8th grade, as documented here (https://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2023/07/mississippis-miracl...). Some are even claiming that the MS DOE manipulates test scores to make themselves look better than they are! More here: https://reddit.idevicehacked.com/r/mississippi/comments/1idd...

My take? Improvements in student performance (at one grade level!) without corresponding improvements in teaching conditions or increased state-level committment to public education is a huge smell.

clircle• 1 year ago

You first have to convince me that it makes sense to (1) do any adjustment in the first place, the adjustments are not reality, and (2) that the chosen adjustment method is the correct one.

beej71• 1 year ago

This is the one piece of meat in the article:

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.

Definitely worth a deeper dive.

arh68• 1 year ago

Underperforming states escape scrutiny. Our biases prevent us from asking, for instance, what’s going on in Oregon. Or Vermont. Or Maryland.

Uh, is this true ?

I feel like there's been plenty of asking as to why Oregon schools are as bad as they are. Going back 10 years. Hell, maybe 30+ years. It's not a secret. I've never felt we-can't-talk-about-it, as the author claims.

I'm glad Mississippi is making progress, but a lot of the article reads like a straw man (or, weirdly, a reading comprehension test)

Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

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