It has examples of states which are seeing some improvements. Those states seem to be addressing one of the main problems this article highlights: they hold students to expectations and prevent them from advancing grades if they don’t meet the bar.
Resources doesn't mean iPads and software subscriptions, it means teachers. Good teachers.
There's been a catastrophic collapse in numbers in the profession, and many of the leavers are at the more talented end. They're the ones who have the skills and quals to get better jobs elsewhere.
There's no point "raising expectations" unless you provide the resources to change what's possible.
Individually, students have the least agency in the entire system. They're at the mercy of parents, school boards, and administrators who may be actively hostile to the very idea of a broad liberal education, of corporate opportunists who are trying to sell unproven study aids of all kinds, and of the disapproval of their peer culture.
The one thing that can cut through this - sometimes - is inspiration and motivation from educators.
The "Mississippi Miracle" boils down to directing resources toward struggling kids. They hired reading coaches specifically for struggling students, provided teachers with literacy-based professional development resources, and created Individualized Reading Plans for struggling kids and their parents. Yes, they also held back kids who didn't pass a literacy exam (and moved them to teachers who specialized in helping struggling children), but failing more students was not the primary policy improvement here, and on its own it would do nothing.
"Low-expectations theory" (and the accompanying suggestion that progressives are somehow to blame) is an absurd diagnosis for a problem that was not solved by raising expectations, but rather by targeting available resources toward problem areas—a solution which is painfully obvious in hindsight. That doesn't have an ideological valence, though, and this article seems intent on sticking it to progressives somehow.
It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress.
FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
> It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress
These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a necessary component of progress. It seems that if the evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.
Let's not even get into how kneecapped teachers are in classroom management. A student reported him for pointing at them and touching them when he was never fewer than 3 feet away pointing away from them. The students know they have the power now, and they're definitely not going to be told what to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholastic_probation
You could also reward students for outstanding accomplishments.
To be clear, I am talking about replacing grade levels (K, 1, 2, ..., 12), not graded assessments. I updated my comment to clarify this.
You might need more carrots and sticks since the penalty for being held back is lessened.
We already run colleges this way, granular down to an academic quarter.
There are methods that you could use to increase mentorship and attention by distributing expertise to less-credentialed individuals. This is done in many other credentialed institutions, like hospitals, colleges, or universities.
Beyond that, you could utilize technology in blended learning. This lessens a load on a teacher.
From what I understand, much of this cannot happen easily because there is a gigantic top-down system distributing rules to institutions. On top of that you have labor agreements that blend into those rules and so on.
It seems accomplishing major reform, outside of curricula alone, would be a massive undertaking.
A system like this would address that issue, and could prevent education resources from being applied redundantly.
also those kids who don't pass will hold those who do pass - as the next year teachers waste time teaching what the majority already knows
one complication is that standards for jobs you could live off of were at that point much lower... many more people could drop out and make a living, this is less often the case now
Obviously you could make a metric for this and if you're holding back say 50% of students there's probably a problem but a small portion isn't obviously a bad thing. Snark is fun but it isn't analysis.
We’ve built a system where the performance of teachers and schools is measured by graduation rates, as if every student who doesn’t graduate on time is a failure of instruction. That’s nonsense. Some kids need more time. Some face life circumstances that derail their progress like undiagnosed learning disabilities, unstable home environments, trauma, poverty. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons a child might struggle in a given year, and pretending that all of them can be solved by pushing them forward anyway is not accomplishing anything but putting them in academic and later career situations that they are not prepared properly for.
What No Child Left Behind did was make an AWFUL perverse incentive where schools are indirectly ordered to pass every kid at every opportunity lest their already meager budgets get slashed even further. Children are not widgets moving along on an assembly line and we have spent decades now proving this fact.
It strikes me that US K-12 systems don't have a clear architecture to support, er, non-uniform progress. A student either moves to the next grade in all classes, or "repeats" a year. Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? Maybe in high-school the concept of "honors" classes becomes available.
Perhaps that represents a conflict between the social goals (keeping cohorts together) versus per-subject educational ones.
This works for middle and high-school students, where courses are somewhat independent. It doesn't for a third grader who can't read. They need the time to master what they haven't. Rushing that process compromises every year of education in front of them.
Sending kids who haven't learned to read on to higher grades and having no standards for success is not a more "inclusive" policy than having benchmarks that must be passed.
I just thought it aligned particularly well with the OP on that specific point.
While all this sold a story 'whole word' nonsense was going on in public schools (my mom was a public school teacher), our Catholic school (non union) used a phonics based curriculum. It was the teachers unions circulating misinformation to public school teachers about the efficacy of the 'whole word' method.
EDIT: Because I'm getting downvoted, let's go straight to the source. Here is the California Teacher's association itself highlighting its efforts to ban mandatory phonics-based instruction:
https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
Mississippi Association of Educators (a teacher's union that is part of the National Education Association, aka the largest union in the US) supported the efforts to improve the literacy rates.
I'm fine with employees banding together. What CA and other states do (require teachers to pay dues to the union) is criminal.
Basically, the strength of the union correlates with educational outcomes: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
As of 2006 (a bit dated), only 36% of MS teachers were in the union.
Person1> Don't trust Unions.
Person2> But you are using a union as an example.
Person1> No, my union is better than all the other unions. Mine makes a difference, thus I'm not a commie.
Person2> What?
> Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left. They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi does.
This teacher's union supported improved literacy rates in MS. Would be insane for any organization to not support that effort.
Also, the most effective left leaning organizations prioritize uplifting the South, including MS.
You're painting with an awfully broad brush there.
0: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/our-history
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Reeves
2: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/media-center/press-releas...
Because of this, the union has to do what teachers want, rather than vice versa.
I'm speaking from experience with the California Teacher's Association. CA mandates even non-member teachers to pay union dues.
EDIT: Here is an article from the CTA highlighting their efforts to fight phonics-based reading instruction: https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
Woohoo! teachers unions!!!