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.
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...
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.
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.