Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools
economist.com
economist.com
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/...
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.
Also, y'know, not a phrase I would use with American schools.
Let's have less shooting eh?
[1] https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this.
It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might take some time for these literate 4th graders to get up to 8th grade age.
I don’t think Alabama is a model for anything related to public education.
Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!
In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.
Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resources on remedial education
If the metric is everyone passes, then you either taught really well or lowered the standard.
https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/953/2015/04...
Page 95. “The limitations that resulted from the curricular requirements also affected the use of classroom resources. In some cases, there appeared to be particular books, teaching models, and other resources that were mandated in the curriculum. An observation following a teacher interview illuminates the inability of teachers to include non- prescribed resources: "She wanted to be able to use more chapter/trade books and it was not possible because of all of the excerpts and mandates of basal instruction" (IA, WSRSD, ES, Carey, FN, #8, p. 2). The teachers seemed to want greater curricular control. While they indicated that they did have control over their instructional methods, they appeared to be inhibited by the lack of authority and decision-making power with regard to the curriculum.”
To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
When you click on the NCLB wiki link it states it was signed by George W Bush.
When you click your link it doesn't mention Obama or NCLB. It just talks about how kids cant do math, that predates Obama.
Why link to something that has nothing to do with what you said? It seems quite disingenuous.
But in all seriousness, I think I gave a decent one sentence tldr. I decided to be nice and pull a part of the transcript on my phone.
> “That accountability gets weakened in 2011, as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So, that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.”
From Plain English with Derek Thompson: The American Math Crisis, Nov 21, 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
> “We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose, Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013. Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their decline accelerated after the pandemic.”
From Plain English with Derek Thompson: The American Math Crisis, Nov 21, 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
Nice ad hominem attack! I'm not the one lying on a message board.
Recently, there has also been a movement to drop standards based grading and advanced classes, under guise of equity. That I find more troubling.
2) "They know the letter of the law, but not the spirit." No common shared understanding of the purpose/point/value motivations.
3) "Time marches on." There is a constant influx of new kids to educate and you can't realistically block the flow without rupturing something.
Talk to someone educated in the 1950s and 1960s and you'll understand. There was always one or two kids in the class who were 2-3 years older than everyone else, because they frequently had to repeat grades. It caused a problem for them because they weren't with their peers, age-wise. (As opposed to the kid who was born too close to the cut-off and held back a year because they were just too young to start school.)
When I was in school, (1980s and 1990s,) sometimes kids who fell behind had to go to summer programs to catch-up. But, I was sent to private schools; children with special needs were sent to public schools that head the resources to handle them, and everyone was either from a financially stable family or otherwise knew the strings to pull to keep the kids in private school.
I also went to private school. There, it was clear that every student was expected to advance every year, but that each had to also truly meet the standard to advance. No teacher would let you fall behind, and any and all actions needed were taken. I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)
Charter schools have the same benefit too, at a much lower cost to you.
Personally, after my father pushed me to an "expensive" college that ended up not being very good, I got over my love for private schools. Two points to consider:
1: My dad kept trash-talking UMass Amherst when I was a teenager. Turns out it was the 4th best CS department in the US, #17 in the world, and the expensive private college he talked me into had a very lousy CS department that didn't even rank.
2: We (wife and I) chose our town based on school rankings. The local public schools are AWESOME compared to the private schools I went to as a kid. Much more resources and attention than I got; and they get to take advantage of economies of scale from having many more students. (Granted, I live in a high tax town where the residents prioritize great schools.)
big picture... people avoid telling others what their gaps are, where they're underperforming.
this empathy ruins people and, while it avoids difficult conversations, doesn't do the kid any favors. it is actually very unkind to the individual while the messenger protects their own comfort.
this pattern repeats it self in adulthood too.
Academic prowess shouldn't be such a social booster/crusher, especially pre-PhD, but it is, so we have to deal with it, and that mean not making kids repeat classes too much (two decade ago, it was max a year below 11, max two after that in my country, nowadays it's just avoided as much as possible).
All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.
- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.
- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)
- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.
- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.
Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.
The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.
So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.
[1] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e...
[2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...
To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.
bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.
well yeah.... because for good schools you need good money. no money = bad schools. good schools dont appear in poor areas. thats the connection.
Does this explain the gap between white/black poverty too?
Have you? Jim Crow apartheid was in place in my parents lifetime. I don't care how many cars and ship you make, that ain't developed.
How should you measure an education system? Should you measure purely based on the student's performance? What if the students are just better at reading, independent of the school? It's not hard to imagine that even with identical teachers, that inner cities schools would have worse test scores than wealthy suburban schools, especially if the latter are rich enough to afford tutors, the family environment is more conductive to learning, etc. Recognizing this fact, it's fairly obvious that "you're either at a third grade level or not" is a terrible way of assessing how good of a job an educational system is doing.
Reading scores are SUPER strongly correlated with family income levels in the US. The fact that Alabama does a better job teaching its poorest students to read than Massachusetts does is impressive, particularly given the disparity in funding levels.
I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's _hard_ and requires genuine teaching - personal focus on a little kid's understanding. I can't imagine that scaling in a classroom but I'm no educator.
I guess I didn’t consider phonics to be hard.. it seems self evident. But yeah, I also read to my kid a ton and have been throwing some phonics practice in there. I don’t know how else to give a toddler footholds to comprehend what’s on the page.
Teachers use phonics all the time. “Teachers don’t use phonics anymore” is just a thing people say. It’s odd.
The NYT Daily podcast did an ok episode on this[1].
I read Pournelle's column in Byte in the late eighties and at times he bemoaned the lack of phonics in modern reading curriculum while also pumping his wife's expensive phonics-based reading software. I ran this by teachers I knew and the general response I got was a confirmation that teachers use phonics all the time, along with some frustration about the rather common misunderstanding, which is at times promoted by people with their own agendas.
As someone who knows teachers but doesn't have kids and has not been motivated to learn a lot about this stuff, I've found that the above pattern often holds. Teachers baffled and annoyed by the misunderstanding of what they're doing with regard to phonics, a somewhat political origin of the critique of reading education from people who are inclined to criticize public education more broadly, sometimes there's a product to sell...
Dealing with "phonics parents" who have bought into this is probably a bit surreal and frustrating. "You've spent time working with your child on lessons outside the classroom and they've displayed improvement? What an important and forgotten education principle you've discovered."
Moreover it is factual that universities instructing teachers were for decades only teaching the whole language approach. Implementation varied state to state, but you can literally look at curriculum material used in various states over time and see the shift.
The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I also know some teachers, but that's just anecdote and fairly parochial.
I mean... would you remember? Pretty much the only thing I remember about the relevant early years of kindergarten and elementary school is the time I went to school sick and threw up on my desk. (then again, I'm old)
> The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I actually have no idea how to confirm that, but I'm sort of willing to take your word for it. By contrast, it's easy to find the phonics lesson products that are sold to parents, like the one I mentioned in my post. Such products used to be pumped on the ads during AM hate radio shows, among other things. Those products were complimentary to the "educators are terrible and public education is terrible and everything done by experts is terrible" message those shows pushed.
To be clear, I don't think those lessons are necessarily useless. Time spent with kids outside class on their education is a positive thing.
> Implementation varied state to state
I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the difference in lesson plans we're talking about, and some states emphasize strong local control as well.
Yes. I distinctly remember sitting through a whole year of other kids struggling to guess what a word was based on context clues in some rabbit related reading book written for whole language instruction. It was painfully slow and boring. I distinctly remember having been taught by my mother to sound out letters, so I didn't have to guess and the teachers telling me not to do it.
> I actually have no idea how to confirm that
Marie Clay is the name you want to google.
> easy to find the phonics lesson products that are sold to parents
The reason there was a market for this is because what schools were doing was not working.
> Such products used to be pumped on the ads during AM hate radio shows, among other things. Those products were complimentary to the "educators are terrible and public education is terrible and everything done by experts is terrible" message those shows pushed.
It's important to step away form the culture war aspect of the "reading wars". There is simply put an evidence based and scientific way to teach reading, and one based on wacky theories fro mt he 1960s that don't work but were popularized by hucksters. The excellent podcast series sold a story has great coverage. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ (I wish they published long for text, and its ironic I know, but here we are).
> I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the difference in lesson plans we're talking about, and some states emphasize strong local control as well.
This is to an extent true, but teachers have to get trained on instruction in literacy and for many years colleges were all teaching utter nonsense.
That said, it's important not to over focus on the mechanical part of reading, phonics, because background knowledge and vocabulary are key to using phonics well.
I'm very skeptical that the aforementioned "consultants" made money off of the phonics controversy in a way that was comparable to those selling home lessons, but that's my main quibble at this stage.
> for many years colleges were all teaching utter nonsense.
That must be an exaggeration. It made me realize I actually have no idea how many different streams of methodology there are in education, outside of what we define as the mainstream. Certainly phonics is a part of Montessori education. Ah well, another thing to read about someday.
Not that phonics is useless, but it isn't as helpful as it should be. We need spelling reform first - which probably needs to start with a more general spoken language reform, and that doesn't seem like it will get anywhere for political reasons.
It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.
[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...
>Three city programmes stand out.
>The first tackled absenteeism [...]
>Next, the district turned to preventing holiday learning loss [...]
>[...] “Birmingham Promise”, a programme that pays full tuition at many Alabama colleges for graduates of the city’s public schools. [...]
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE
I plotted a bunch of random states and created a line chart showing the progression since 2017. I chose to look at Math scores, since that's most objectively measured. I am not trying to "adjust for demographics" because that just makes it easy to derive whatever result you want.
Some obvious conclusions from playing with the data:
* Everybody is worse off compared with pre-pandemic. The best-performing states seem to be doing worse compared with 2019
* Puerto Rico is a total disaster outlier, and Massachusetts clearly outperforms the rest of the states.
* There doesn't appear to be any other clear "winner"
The only conclusion I think you can draw from the data the article describes is that Alabama and Mississippi are poorer, and so if you adjust your data by $$ they move up more.
And math is much worse. 51 of 53 States* have worse 8th grade Math scores in 2019 than 2024. (Again, not a single state improved.)
My biggest takeaway is that it is in-person teaching, in the classroom, that actually helps kids learn, _not_ spending on "edtech".
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
(incl DC, PR, military)
Thus bad schools don't necessarily have bad teachers. They have a concentration of complacent or actively bad parents who drag the entire experience down for everyone. Throw in the bulk of special needs kids who fall on the public school system that is not in any way equipped to actually handle them and it's no wonder very few kids are learning effectively.
Not something I was advocating, thanks.
Seriously, I can't fathom why you'd think the poorest students in Alabama shouldn't be receiving high quality in person education even in the face of imperfect ventilation. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.
For now. Your state legislature has multiple bills in progress to increase vaccine exemptions and reduce requirements, following the national trend.
> and has a 95.3% vaccination rate
93.8% the year prior, see below. We’ll see if it’s an upward trend or an outlier soon enough.
> But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow [sic] childhood vaccine rates".
Here’s a weighting of various vaccination metrics by state: https://www.newsweek.com/states-that-vaccinate-most-map-2127... (2025)
And a local report from a couple months ago: https://alabamareflector.com/2025/12/08/alabama-sees-lower-v...
> The vaccination rate for children aged 13-17 nationwide remained high in 2024, but it drops significantly in Alabama as children age. Where about 70% of 4-10-year-olds are up to date on vaccines statewide, only 25% of children 11-18 years old are up to date.
And as I said to the sibling commenter, I’m not advocating doing nothing about absenteeism. It’s perfectly reasonable to criticize a specific method while endorsing its intended effect.
Honestly you take is disastrously stupid. It's this sort of illness safety maximalism that lead to COVID learning loss to begin with.