Debunking the debunkers on the Mississippi Miracle

Today, Kelsey Piper and Karen Vaites debunk the viral post supposedly debunking the Mississippi Miracle. Plus, I round up takes from Ben Sasse, Vic Klatt, Melissa Tooley, Matt Barnum, Morgan Polikoff, Neetu Arnold, Charlie Barone, Andrew Epifanio, Nat Malkus, Rick Hess, Vlad Kogan, Chad Aldeman, and Tim Shanahan, and Joe Klein reports on the Blue State Blues as they apply to the Empire State.

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• When an education policy debate breaks out into the wider world, SCHOOLED will always pay attention to it, and this week it was a viral post by Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman, highlighting a recent paper by Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky and Daniel H. Robinson that claims the Mississippi Miracle is a mirage because of the state’s third-grade retention policy. You wonks know that this is hardly a new argument. It’s been examined and rejected many times before, including by the late (liberal) and beloved blogger Kevin Drum. And that’s because Mississippi’s gains are too large and too long-lasting to be explained by a relatively small number of students repeating third grade. Thankfully Kelsey Piper and Karen Vaites were ready to debunk the debunkers, here, here, and here. Kelsey: “For all of these reasons, while weaker students having an extra year to learn to read is almost certainly contributing to Mississippi’s scores, it cannot explain Mississippi’s gains since 2003—or even much of Mississippi’s gains since 2013.” Karen, meanwhile, demonstrates that Louisiana has made huge progress in reading even without a grade-retention policy, which should make skeptics question their priors.

• The other issue that has broken through into the mainstream is the devasting report from the University of California San Diego that the number of students needing remediation has jumped dramatically. SCHOOLED has covered previous takes from Robert Pondiscio, Marc Porter Magee, Kelsey Piper, and Rose Horowitch, and now Ben Sasse weighs in with his diagnosis and prescription. “University leaders must acknowledge that the test-optional admissions experiment has been an abject failure,” he writes. (Though UC’s system is actually test blind—even worse!) All the more jarring is that most of the remedial students earned A’s in high school. “Congress should hold hearings examining how these students were systematically failed—and how federal tax dollars continued to pour into a system this fundamentally corrupt.” Sasse also isn’t a fan of the Trump administration’s ham-handed attempt to dismantle the Department of Education without Congressional approval, which will consume “oxygen that should be focused on immediate accountability and real reform.”

• Speaking of said dismantling, longtime GOP Hill staffer Vic Klatt comes out of retirement to call moving K–12 programs to the Labor Department “neither smart nor conservative” and “absurd on its face.” After all, the Labor Department is a wholly owned subsidiary of the labor movement. Guess who will appoint the next Labor Secretary when Democrats win back the White House?

• Melissa Tooley agrees with me that “dismemberment” is the right word to describe what’s happening to the Department of Ed—and even has the artwork to go along with the metaphor! She writes that “Congressional leaders should request that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) examine how executing this plan would impact the overall time, cost, and quality of services provided by ED, and the impact it would have on students, families, and the overall economy.”

• Let’s stay with Washington just a little bit longer to feature Matt Barnum’s latest analysis, this one on the newfound nostalgia for No Child Left Behind and test-based accountability. He runs through the research illustrating that, yes, NCLB boosted test scores, as have other accountability policies. As Morgan Polikoff told him, “The body of evidence is overwhelmingly consistent with the idea that test-based accountability meaningfully improves student outcomes.” Boom! Then Matt reminds us that both NCLB in particular and test-based accountability in general come with trade-offs and unintended consequences (because: that’s how the world works), including some narrowing of the elementary school curriculum and isolated cases of cheating. “For those who want to revive such policies,” Matt writes, “now would be a good time to shift from demanding more accountability generally to thinking about how to build better systems that reflect what we’ve learned from the success and failure of NCLB.” Deal!

• And here’s brand-new evidence to add to the pile demonstrating that accountability works. School ratings—and the pressure to improve—measurably reduces arrests and incarcerations among young adults, writes Neetu Arnold. A new longitudinal study shows better outcomes for students in South Carolina’s lowest-performing schools, which were subject to state intervention, compared to schools that just barely avoided the sanctions. Why is this only getting attention on the right?

• A few weeks ago, SCHOOLED reported on a new paper on differential pay released by the National Parents Union and Education Reform Now. This week, Charlie Barone and Andrew Epifanio write it up for The 74, showing that differential pay is much more common in nursing than in teaching—even though both fields are highly unionized, and both groups are often represented by the same union! “Targeting bonuses to educators in high-needs areas—beyond the additional pay for seniority and advanced degrees that most teachers enjoy—would help equalize access to high-quality educators, rectify per-pupil spending inequities between schools with high proportions of low-income students and their more advantaged peers, alleviate shortages in specialty areas such as STEM and special education, and reduce teacher turnover at high-poverty schools,” Charlie and Andrew write. Furthermore, “we think our findings weaken the argument that bonus pay is somehow inherently anti-union or unmanageably divisive.”

• Meanwhile, Nat Malkus has noticed that “AI has come for K–12 education,” and offers a nice round-up of the current debate, featuring Team Optimism (including John Bailey, Michael Horn, and Carlo Rotella) versus Team Worry (including Andy Smarick, Robert Pondiscio, and Jessica Grose).

• Let’s round out this section with takes on recent books. First up, Rick Hess interviews Vlad Kogan about Vlad’s No Adult Left Behind. Among the interesting tidbits, Rick notices Vlad’s contention that “polarization is a top-down, elite-driven process.” Vlad: “I think the best example of this is what happened during Covid-19. We know that partisanship—not objective public-health conditions—was the single most powerful predictor of when a district reopened for in-person learning. But there is no coherent reason why reopening schools should be a Democrat versus Republican issue. I identified the two-week period when public opinion on this issue polarized, and the only thing that happened during that period was that Donald Trump said schools should reopen.” Yikes. But it wasn’t just Covid. “Polarization on education issues often increases when public officials take positions on them.” IMO, that’s another reason that having a pro-ed reform Democrat in the White House could help reformers in blue states.

• Finally, Chad Aldeman writes not one but two posts about Tim Shanahan’s recent book on leveled reading. Here’s his traditional book review, and here’s a more in-depth, wonky take on how the books we assign to young children have gotten easier over time. And when I say that Chad’s scribbles are worth checking out, I mean it literally!

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Cheers to a proposal to put California’s education decisions under the appointed state board rather than an elected superintendent, a move that might take away at least some power away from the California Teacher Association. —John Fensterwald, Ed Source

Getting rid of dubious college-degree requirements for certain office roles is a promising trend that’s sweeping the country—and has been embraced by governors in blue and red states. But few non-degree holders are actually landing jobs. —Lawrence Lanahan, Hechinger Report

“Public school funding nears $1 trillion, Reason Foundation finds” —Kara Arundel, K–12 Dive

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Joe Klein

K–12 education in upstate New York for students from impoverished homes is abysmal. Overseeing educational activities, the New York State Board of Regents, formerly composed of strong and caring leaders, has been gradually changed by our deep blue legislators. The regents now protect failed education. The state lowers standards—in my city, Rochester, graduating high school while illiterate is not uncommon. The state is starving charter schools financially. In Rochester, charter students receive less than 60 cents on the dollar.

Zohran Mamdani, an idealogue whose pockets will be lined and ego stroked by NYSUT and UFT, will most probably attack the charter sector while hurting all K–12 education in NYC. The education advisors Mamdani has asked for advice are pro NYSUT and UFT data deniers. My guess is that any and all education reform will be gutted. As for many Democratic politicians from New York State finding any courage to try to improve K–12 education, the probability of that happening is infinitesimal.

If Cory Booker, Gina Raimondo, Michael Johnson, or someone of that caliber was elected president and then implemented a city-based Race to the Top, without the union buy in, funds going to an education reform organization if the city did not agree, we could re-ignite real educational progress and make it sustainable. Or a third-party candidate could accomplish this if the Democratic party nominates another weak, bought candidate. At one point, Democrats for Education Reform tried to elect cohorts of education reformers in red and blue states—but the NEA and AFT were too powerful.

See you next week!

Mike