Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools
educationdaly.us
educationdaly.us
Is that what you're saying?
The most obvious case of this is comparing private vs public schools, where the private schools can be selective and kick out anyone who doesn't perform or they don't like, but the public schools have to accept everyone by law.
Obviously failing anyone who cannot read from getting to 4th grade will greatly improve 8th grade reading scores.
What we care about is the level of achievement by a given age. To determine that, we need to be comparing states using standardized tests given to age groups, not grade levels. It is fine to hold students back, if we think that will do them more good than advancing them. But they still need to be tested the same way as their age group if we want to do a meaningful comparison between states.
See this example of a paradox that applies a lot in educational settings: you can raise the average level of two classes just by shuffling students from one to another:
The data point is the number of 3rd graders failing. If you insist in filtering out those 3rd graders, limiting your analysis to the subset of kids who didn't failed does not represent a success story. It represents an attempt to arbitrarily remove inconvenient data points to portray a false idea if success.
Even if we assume that's the case, that's not the problem.
The problem is that the school system fails to provide the necessary and sufficient services that would prevent a statistically significant number of 3rd graders from being held back. Feeling the need to hold kids back is a symptom of the problem, not a solution.
I strongly suspect that Mississippi should be allocating more resources to education. But this is a political problem and the schools have nearly no say in whether the legislature does or does not increase funding.
So. Do we close down the schools and wait until it is resolved?
Or do the schools do the best they can with the resources they have? Do you have evidence that placing kids in the most skill-appropriate classroom is a worse use of available resources than placing them in the “correct” classroom based on age or previous cohort?
"Ton of spending" are weasel words. "Not a ton of results" is already the problem.
If your school system fails to teach kids how to read after 3 years, this is a school system that fails at it's primary and most basic responsibility. These third-graders are not the problem, they are the canary in the coal mine.
Advocating for holding back third graders and expelling underperformers is a kin to advocate for getting rid of canaries because they are a nuisance when assessing health and safety.
I never disagreed on this point.
Now what? Every morning, kids wake up a day older. Is there a way to hit pause so you have time to go in and fix it?
If a school system is designed so that the average kid in 3rd grade is expected to be in 4th grade the following year, the fact that a statistically significant subset of kids is not able to meet that bar is a sign that the system is failing those kids.
What's the goal here? Is it to get pretty metrics by filtering out the failures, or is it to provide an effective education to all kids?
Because I bothered to look it up. In the last few years, Mississippi has been holding back between 5-10% of it's students.
The biggest red flag here for me is not that the tiny elite remain, it's that life circumstances will dictate that the majority of the tiny elite will continue to come from privileged families who have the time and resources to give their kids a leg up. BUT pushing kids into places where they objectively cannot compete intellectually or physically under the auspices of fairness is the devil's work. We need constant work at creating equality and to lower barriers to social services, not "fairness" and pretending everyone is already equal.
Failing to teach kids how to read is a failure of the school system, not the kid.
Dropping kids because the school system failed them is just yet another failure of a school system, and one which is at best a self-serving failure: a way to mask the extent of which the system is broken by blaming the victims of said system.
As an exercise, invest a few minutes thinking on why most communities do not experience this failure rate.
For the same reason, they mostly got rid of "tracks," where an age group would be divided into different classrooms according to test scores and previous grades rather than random chance, so the 'A' fourth grade room could go at a different pace from the 'B' fourth grade room. All that's left of that is gifted programs, which people somehow accept even though they're just the mirror image of holding kids back.
There's really not a good answer, because like it or not, learning ability varies, so if you put 25 kids in the same classroom for no reason other than their being the same age and living in the same neighborhood, some are going to struggle and fail and some are going to cruise and be bored.
That's besides the point, and orthogonal to the discussion. If after 3 years a school system failed to teach kids how to read, that represents a failure of the school system. If a school system feels the need to hold kids back so early in hopes that subjecting them yet again to the same school system that already failed them will somehow improve outcomes, this means the same school system is not investing in fixing the real problem.
This is like buying bad tires. If a tire blows up, you can argue all you want that changing the tire is much better than keeping a flat tire on. But the root cause is that the tire blows up, isn't it? Changing a bad tire with yet another bad tire won't fix the problem, will it? The tire you just added will easily blow up again, and everyone else buying those tires will go through the same problem.
I repeat, advocating for holding kids back and even rejecting underperforming kids from the school system is a Hallmark of a deeply broken, unsalvageable system. The only purpose of these approaches is to falsify the actual quality of the work performed by the school system, and generating fraudulent statistics of success at the expense of throwing kids under the bus.
This idea that school is a place where kids compete with one another, the weak are weeded out and the strong are rewarded with additional resources is a disgusting perversion of an institution we used to recognize as providing a baseline for everyone. And it simply doesn't work.
I think the point is that the school system is outputting kids that are not prepared for the academic environment they create themselves for these kids. So instead of fixing the problem, they are eliminating the bad results to inflate the success statistics.
> 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...
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.
You left out the fact these warnings essentially boil down to: "Democrats need to stop being bad, and Republicans need to continue being good."
The political bias is clear as day in the article.
I think people just have an idea of what his political slant must be because he's defending the indefensible state of Mississippi.
They do NOT encurage using Paulo Freire's "methods".
[1] https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/mississippi-student...
There is more to live and success than standardised tests. Steve Jobs wasn't a brilliant student with top marks everywhere.
[1]https://www.sciencenews.org/article/balanced-literacy-phonic...
English is wild language with plenty examples of phonetic rules being broken.
Take a simple word like 'rough'. Learning the phonetics doesn't help with the word 'cough'. Neither help with words like 'though' and 'through'.
Words like 'read' and 'lead' cannot be properly pronounced without context clues. Not to mention all the odd-ball words in English like 'colonel'.
I also think location plays a role too. Where I am from, words like 'tin' and 'ten' are not pronounced differently at all [1]. In other parts of the US, that is not the case.
I do not doubt phonics is the best method method for learning to read. All I am saying is that the other methods must truly be abysmal for phonics to be the best.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
You're right, English is kind of wacky, but this exists in other languages as well. For example there's significant Gaulish influence in French[2] and the written and spoken language offer a number of surprises for learners.
[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/a-full-breakdown-of-the-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Gaulis...
"Phonics" the term is mostly something that comes up in American context because there is a controversy on how to teach reading and writing English to begin with. In many other countries, the equivalent of phonics is simply the standard methodology that has been in use for so long that most people can't think of anything else, so it doesn't need a special term to describe it.
> Proven methods... For what? Acing standardised tests?
Phonics is the proven method for learning how to read English. Quite controversially, a lot of states ditched or de-emphasized phonics in favor of some faddish "balanced literacy" idea that took the education establishment by storm, but doesn't actually work as well and led to bad outcomes, like poor literacy. Now that the damage has been done and is visible, a lot of states are now mandating phonics again.
I think there have been similar cycles with math.
Education is probably one of the areas where our cultural obsession with innovation and change leads to bad outcomes. It's not like reading is a new technology or prior generations were full of stupid people (though there are a lot of chauvinists who assume they were). At a certain point, new educational ideas are very likely to be worse ideas, but they're pushed and adopted because people are required to be "innovators."
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.
[1] https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/mississippi-student...
[2] https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/a-full-breakdown-of-the-s...
And yet, looking at the chart in the article, that appears to be pretty much all there is to say.
Judging by results (based on the limited evidence in the article) Mississippi doesn't seem to be doing anything revolutionary. Their scores today are still significantly worse than Maine was in 2013.
The question we should be asking is "What is Maine doing wrong?" What caused their scores to decline precipitously since 2013?
The problem is, the Maine Secretary of Education would then reply “We actually teach math, also.”
What I've seen of Common Core math is very different from how it's traditionally taught, to the point that parents don't understand it. I think I can see a thread in there, that it's attempting to teach what those of us good at math end up figuring out ourselves with numbers, but the examples online are bad and lead to further misunderstandings. So I could see teachers having similar issues, and students not learning very well because of it.
To put it in more techy terms, Common Core math is like learning computer science before learning your first programming language: probably possible, but it won't work well for most people.
You know what’s crazier? Mississippi’s average ACT was higher before some of their education policy improvements.
For the same reason, you'll see some surprising state scores for SAT/ACT. If you're in a state that prioritizes the ACT, the main students taking the SAT are the strongest students who are looking at out-of-state schools.
Aside from the time lag, I don't think you can look at voluntary test scores and draw many useful conclusions from it.
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!
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.
As for % tested, states that don’t mandate the ACT tend to have higher performance in general. They don’t have as compelling of a need for the mandate, and they have many students who’d rather just take the SAT on its own. There is an effect going the other way though - if you don’t mandate the ACT, then students who don’t want to take any standardised testing at all…won’t, and so they won’t depress the average score.
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.
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.
(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)
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."
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.
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!
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.
No, but they outperform Mississippi too. The article is about the first derivative, not the signal.
> A bucket of money doesn't solve bad systems, bad administartors, bad teachers and bad parents.
You are describing the situation often occuring in poverty, crime, and violence plagued communities (of which the US has many). In those situations schools need more funding than a more well off area because they are doing more than education: they are default community social support centers, providing food, mental health support, and sometimes even shelter for children who are facing horrible scenarios in their communities and homes.
Pulling funding from those schools without addressing the societal issues will make things worse, not better. Right now, the school is the point of social service delivery.
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.
> For decades, taxpayer spending on K-12 education has consistently increased, outpacing inflation by 2.5 times over the past 50 years. But while most people believe that more funding should lead to better outcomes for students, the evidence indicates that higher spending alone has had little impact on improving student achievement.
https://myelearningworld.com/us-educational-spending-50year-...
The average teacher salary in Oregon is $45k. It has NOT increased by 80% in that time frame.
Nobody can afford to be a teacher, certainly not people with a valuable level of time, effort, productivity, and success.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
1) Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue. All you have to do to fire someone in a union is take notes that they failed in their job duties, email them about it, take notes that they didn't improve. Unions cannot prevent you from firing workers for cause. The vast majority of "benefits" teachers unions in the US provide is a phone number for a lawyer. If you can't convince a judge someone should have been fired, why are you paid anything at all?
2) The fact that the administration does not do the above is because there are zero teachers to replace them with, because nobody wants to be a teacher. They also don't do the above because they are woefully incompetent and utterly incapable of telling you which teachers are good teachers. Note that, no, students aren't good at telling you who are good teachers either. Administration and students alike often love teachers who are wildly incompetent and don't do their job, and just as often hate very competent teachers who aren't willing to jump when they say so.
3) The administration is incompetent and unable to fire teachers based on merit because they are politicians, not educators. They weren't hired for their competency as an educator, or skills as a manager, or experience dealing with children, but because they have enough clout in the small community to parlay that into a $250k a year job where he wastes taxpayer dollars on absurd projects. Property taxes are less than half one school district over, and their system isn't any more competent.
If an administrator is unwilling to do the paperwork necessary to do their job, like fire someone who has union backing, means they should not be in administration, a job defined by paperwork. They get paid that insane sum of money to administrate a school district that has 500 kids in 3 schools which already all have their own administration staff. Meanwhile, they utterly refuse to support teachers trying to keep problem students (you know, that thing everyone always hates for holding their kids back and wasting everyone's classroom time) out of the way, and consistently bow to parental pressure to not punish misbehaving students because their job is political. Teachers want to get rid of misbehaving assholes, but the administration does not put in any effort to do so.
This is all because every rural small town in America is dying. Anyone with any financial literacy, capability, or valuable skill ran away. All that's left are the people who had no life plan, who flunked out, who wasted their youth, and have not grown up emotionally from their highschool days. They coalesce and form your local "good ol boy" network, and tend to take over local politics.
This superintendent had the job for decades despite continuing decline in outcomes. Hows that for not firing underperformers?
The leader of my cities police union had a relationship with a 17 year old at the high school he was stationed at. He was at jan 6. Hes been suspended 9 times and has 50 civilian complaints against him. 10 complaints were sustained. The city still could not fire him, though they certainly tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Catanzara
It takes a lot of paperwork to fire cops because they have zero accountability, so showing "they didn't do their job" is actually hard. You can thank the supreme court for that. More importantly, the person who SHOULD be the one firing them, the Sheriff or Chief of police, is a fellow member of the "Fraternal order of Police" and that violates the usual "labor"/"management" split of unions in other roles. Those roles are often either appointed, in which the city should be hiring someone willing to fire bad cops, or voted in, in which case that's a general problem in the US that cops and judges who get voted on tend to be extremely horrifyingly authoritarian and tyrannical and the voters LOVE it.
Nowhere in that link does it explain or document how they "tried to fire" the police officer at any point before 2021.
Unions have no legal authority or power. Their entire "power" is in getting your job specified in a contract, and suing the employer for violating that contract when someone gets fired and has enough pull with union management.
More importantly, for teachers, especially in Maine, the norm is single year contracts. There is no "tenure" or similar. You are only employed for a single year and the school districts have complete authority to just not hire you for the next year, which is their typical way to fire someone and happens often enough.
IE, the entire worry of pc86 was invalid from the get go.
Not really that impressive IMO.
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.
You'd have to do something like take the high-performing SF district and give half the students, randomly selected, free lunches.
Nonsense, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs are correlated with kids who do worse", which they absolutely are!
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.
Mississippi's kids are doing 1.5 grade levels better in reading than they were 20 years ago. That's an objectively good thing. Maine's kids are doing 1.5 grade levels worse than they were 20 years ago. That's an objectively bad thing.
It makes sense to look at why.
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.
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.
You don't see the issue?
When you're measuring schools you're trying to measure the impact of the actual school, not all the other factors, and to do that you have to separate out socioeconomics. Higher income parents are more involved in their children's education and can make up for a bad school in ways that lower income parents can't. It's pointless to compare schools to each other unless you adjust for demographics.
The correct approach is to adjust for demographics but do so carefully, rigorously, and consistently.
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.
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 smart people doing it again…ignoring their own statistical irrelevance while challenging other’s statistics as somehow inconsequential.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Being "universally woke" would mean not hating anyone, and that makes it hard to unite.
We really need an alien invasion. Any Trisolarans listening?
Except we shouldn't even hate _them_, because they're sentient beings too. I guess we should only hate the worst aspects of our own nature.
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?
That’s not what I said. I said rural Southern and Midwestern white working class culture. Many tend toward conservatism but the majority of them are not raging frothing at the mouth bigots. I was not talking about committed ideological hate mongers. I was talking about regular people and the way they feel ignored and mocked for where they come from or their cultural trappings.
Their conservative views are the views that were instilled in them by family and literally their whole culture. It’s absurd to expect large numbers of people to deviate far from such things, especially when the other side gives off condescending vibes toward them. That only pushes them to double down. It’s not how you change anyone’s mind.
When I think about ideologically committed bigots I honestly think more about Silicon Valley adjacent circles these days. Turn on “show dead” on HN to see dead comments and you’ll see a parade of race science defenders and stuff like that”low IQ people are not human.” (One I saw a week or so ago.)
I’ve seen comments around here from time to time that are more chilling than anything I’ve ever heard from Midwestern rural types. My all time favorite was to the effect that “the idea that all human life is valuable is a recent one, and maybe not one that is working out.” (Paraphrasing.) It about literally made me shudder. I’ve heard the N word in rural Ohio, but I’ve never heard anyone attempt an intellectual deconstruction of the value of human life.
Visit forums that are friendlier to the tech right like anything crypto adjacent and you’ll encounter much worse things. Human life is only valuable insofar as it scores high on an IQ test or makes money.
But coastal tech people don’t get mocked ruthlessly as inbred hicks in spite of the fact that coastal tech people fund the new right and are its intellectual backbone. Classism in the biggest “ism” in this country, and it’s the one that carries the least stigma.
We have transitioned past the point where most everyday people are reasonable and the American right is merely disagreeable. This is more akin to attempting to convert Christians to Judaism. It just doesn’t work, and it’s not productive. It will only make things worse.
This natural distrust in all that is organized or exists outside the control of one man means that these people don’t want to be part of our particular organization. The fact we are not devotees is evidence enough that we have been corrupted. This is the fatal populist checkmate. In their irrationality, they revel. The proposal of finding things out or working together towards a better state are hostile to it.
To be perfectly clear, these are not bad people. Nor does it have to do with what kind of people they are. Rather, they were vulnerable at the right time and, at this particular point in history, it is the perfect condition for populist messaging to work.
I’m not sure it will survive the death of Trump. There is nobody else with… whatever weird formula he has. Nobody else has been able to nail his schtick.
I don't know, I suppose. You say you live in the South, and I only grew up there and then got the hell out. I believe I hear more of how folks in that culture speak with people they trust, but I admit you have a better view these days of what they show to those they don't.
Like in the famous “gentle introduction” he spends like 10000 words to convince you that… maybe Samuel Adams was an asshole? Okay, fine. Therefore the American revolution was a fraud, because… some Tory wrote a witty book mocking its leaders? Wow, so you are saying that a major revolution was not absolutely black and white and that maybe some of the folks on “our” side were dicks? What a revelation. Meanwhile there’s little engagement with the actual ideas, which are the important and lasting part.
That’s just one example. I have no interest in spending days deconstructing those walls of text. Let’s just say they did not change my mind on anything.
I have this theory that much of Yarvin’s underlying motive is a sublimated rage out about the idiocy and hypocrisy of San Francisco politics. He lived there at the time. But he couldn’t just say damn these SF latte sipping rich lefty people are hypocritical assholes. If you don’t like a place then for fuck’s sake just move.
A big irony is that SF is not a well functioning democracy. It’s a one party state controlled by boomer NIMBY property owners with a gigantic divide between rich and poor. It’s a f’ing feudal city state run by landlords, and he thinks the whole world should be like that?
I happen to dislike a lot of things about how SF is run and some things about its zeitgeist which is why I don’t live there.
That sounds impressive as hell till you actually start looking at them. Filtering out Youtube, broken, and frothing-at-the-eyeballs, less than a hundred were interesting and a couple of dozen proved actually worth following, when I carried out this exercise for my own interest some time around 2013.
As a collator, that gives Yarvin a considerably poorer score than Noah Smith, which I think would embarrass me were I either man. As anything else, I'm not sure whether Smith or Yarvin is actually more useless, but I may just need to move the decimal one place to the left in my epsilon.
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.
If you don't know that about Clinton's strategy, are you really the right person to be commentating on how she should have built her campaign instead?
Note, Palestinian people are not Hamas.
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.
There are many examples of rural white discrimination, e.g. the FAA "personality tests" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43882962#43883255) and affirmative action (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658; it benefit blacks, but didn't benefit rural Southerners despite them being underrepresented in college).
More generally, there's an issue when you point these out someone will reply saying "but also...". I understand blacks and foreigners are also discriminated against and deserve to be accommodated. You shouldn't need to argue that whites aren't being discriminated against and are very accommodated, because there will always be some cases where it's untrue, and it doesn't really hurt black anti-discrimination efforts regardless. I'd argue that constant downplaying of white discrimination hurts black anti-discrimination efforts more, because it drives undecided people who've seen it firsthand towards those who acknowledge it, who as of today tend to be bigoted themselves. That's why I feel the need to say something about it.
So is ours:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
None of this would exist without probably trillions in DARPA, NASA, DoD, and government-funded university research on computers and networks.
We live in a complex internetworked and interdependent civilization. Everyone is subsidized by everyone else, and balancing the books is incredibly hard.
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.
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.
Denying my personal experience and calling it ignorance is pretty fucking arrogant of you.
You're making quite a lot of assumptions about my experience, none of which is really correct. I wasn't openly hostile to these "antebellum plantation families", but I avoided them as much as possible. Most of my friends were from other liberal-leaning families.
Many of the people I spent time with were poor whites. I wasn't ever beat up by a poor white kid, and I wasn't afraid of any black kids. If I consider the political leanings of the white kids I knew, I didn't notice much difference in prejudice based on social class. So again, denying my experience just because you're mad (I assume?) that your segment of society is being painted with a certain brush. And imagining all sorts of things about my life to dismiss my attitude to boot.
Is what I wrote earlier unfair to you? Yes, probably (so are your replies to me). But I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about what I experienced, and that crosses boundaries of social class, despite your implication that it doesn't.
Prior experience over many iterations of this conversation strongly suggests your next play will be to accuse me of being (in some combination) fascist, racist, a Trump voter, homophobic, morbidly obese, or whatever other such libels occur to you. To my considerable surprise, predicting such deviations aloud lately seems not much to reduce the odds of their occurring. Let's see what happens this time!
Also, I feel no shame for being called a "rich white liberal," which really shows how little you understand my psychology (or me, period).
All this vitriol even after I singled out rich southerners in my OP. Something isn't adding up here, but unlike you, I'm not going to assume what it is. Have a good one.
(My hometown, actually, I bet. Oxford, right? Biggest net exporter of nonmalodorous feces in the state, bar none. The university draws 'em like flies on...well, never mind. Bet you never put a finger in a bullet hole on the Lyceum's frontage, the way I did.)
Where my other interlocutor and I really differ is that they expect to get a pass for having been "one of the good ones," and I issue no such passes. It isn't that I consider anyone who grew up that rich beneath my consideration, only that I'm less inclined to be patient and gentle with those who can afford about as much such treatment as they like and yet still expect it free of charge from me.
I don't even care they won't listen to me trying to explain how they're blinkered, because I have been trying for three mortal decades and that literally never works; to somebody like this one, I'll never be anything but poor white trash, no matter just how cleverly they always think they say it.
I grew up poor and white in Mississippi and I didn't grow up hearing slurs. That is white trash behavior - white trash, not poor! - as I was raised to believe from before I myself could speak. Like public drunkenness or indecent exposure, that is, an "unforced error" invariably both culpable and shameful. And here we have this fool who not only did grow up with those who knew no better, they themself is ignorant enough not to know they should have known better, yet believes themself qualified not merely to opine but to condescend. Must I wipe their nose for them as well? Another orifice, perhaps?
The biggest snowflakes in the country are white southern Christians in my experience. Anything that challenges their privilege is an attack to them.
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 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.
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.
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.
DEI started due widespread systemic disadvantages certain groups have historically experienced. White Christians can’t reasonably claim to be part if this in the U.S.
The speech part of your comment is quite ironic given the vitriol hurled towards black English speakers by white southerners.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I encourage you to respond to the article and what people say, not what you think they believe. I've been a registered democrat my entire life, and I live in a red state. I don't need to "consider who is responsible" for policies, they're my neighbors and friends, and I have compassion for them even when I disagree with them or think their preferred policies hurt people.