Maybe California just has more rich people. When you control for demographics/SES, Texas schools seem far superior:
https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the...
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...
https://www.chadaldeman.com/p/which-states-actually-have-the...
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/States_Dem...
Mississippi, for example, has a third grade reading gate. Texas holds black kids back at a nearly twice the rate of white kids. These kids are older and have repeated the grade so they do better in the 4th grade NAEP assessment.
This is possibly working as intended. However, you can achieve the same results by redshirting your kid or having them repeat a grade.
So the claim from the blog post that
> but Texas has a slight edge for Hispanic students and a huge advantage for Black students.
says that the Texas results are driven by a demographic that's aggressively held back.
In practical terms, the states kind of have different definitions of what it means to be in 4th grade. And that's one way of increasing your score on this particular measurement.
I think the right thing to do is intervene before students are held back. But that costs money and might make your NAEP scores worse if the student just squeaks by this year rather than staying behind a year. But I don't have the data on how much they're attempting to intervene in cases where students look like they're going to be held back.