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.

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."

Not really that impressive IMO.

(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In our school, we saw a lot of outdated teaching materials - we got our kids hooked on Alphablocks - a BBC funded children’s education program that teaches phonics, because it seemed like there were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.

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.

> 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.

"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!"

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.

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."

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.