Get the Ricochet app
Ricochet will work fine in a browser on your mobile devices, but for the best experience please download our app.
The NYT (of all places) has a great article about some public schools that work. And they are in unexpected places.
For anyone familiar with civil rights history, national testing results are astonishing. A Black Mississippi child is two and a half times as likely to be proficient in reading by fourth grade as a Black California child.
Likewise, low-income children are more likely to test proficient in reading in Mississippi or Louisiana than in California, Massachusetts or New York. A low-income fourth grader is almost twice as likely to test proficient at math in Mississippi as in Oregon.
For many years, skeptics have offered dispiriting arguments about the prospects for educational gains: The way to improve literacy is to fix the family, fix addiction, fix the parents, for as long as the child’s environment is broken, there’s not much else that can be done.
The gains in these states suggest that that critique is wrong. Mississippi and Alabama haven’t fixed child poverty, trauma and deeply troubled communities — but they have figured out how to get kids to read by the end of third grade.
This matters in myriad ways: One recent study found that states with large increases in school test scores enjoyed rising incomes and drops in teen motherhood, incarceration and arrest rates compared with states that didn’t enjoy such gains.
What’s particularly impressive is that the Southern surge states lifted student achievement with only modest budgets. Spending per pupil in Alabama and Mississippi was below $12,000 in 2024, while in New York it was almost $30,000.
That’s worth celebrating and emulating.
I don’t know what’s more surprising…the gains being made in MS, AL, LA or the fact that the NYT admits it. It’s well worth the read, and there doesn’t seem to be a paywall.
This post was promoted to the Main Feed at the recommendation of Ricochet's members.
Discussion (20)
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Ok. So Democrats are surprised that Democrats destroying today's educational system is more harmful to today's black children than Democrats enforcing Jim Crow laws 100 years ago?
Astonishing, indeed...
CHARTER MEMBER
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
I tried to read the NYT article but rapidly lost interest. Got about as far as “educational leadership”...then zzz. I was momentarily diverted by the part about tracking down a truant student through Snapchat. I have nothing at all to do with social media, and if you told me this one’s interface has a button that says “Click here if you’re 15 miles away at your girlfriend’s,” I’d totally believe it. But the numerous qualifiers for anything that might be construed as success – “recovery from pandemic losses in reading,” as if coronavirus caused illiteracy – just wore me down.
I do not expect anyone anywhere to seek or find a correlation between effective primary education and the lack of given names like Tahitianna or Dyhlan. Even though such an inverse relationship certainly obtained where I went to school. The topic could be fascinating but it just never is. The NYT is right to give these articles away.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
Which goes a long way towards explaining why the education system remains broken almost everywhere. The things that need doing aren’t sexy enough. So you get “as far as “educational leadership”…then zzz.”
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
On Ricochet, the rule is
If I read your Comment correctly, you are violating that rule.
To read this bio, please join Ricochet.
The main point of the zzzzz factor was not the method used but that attendance was taken seriously and was not dealt with lightly. The parent factor is critical. That kid's attendance and education has to be important to the parent regardless of the motivation. Hopefully, that is for the sake of the child itself but there has to be a sense for all involved that a firm standard is present for both behavior and achievement. Yes, that means it is a matter of culture and values that we are dealing with. Having allowed those elements to dissolve bit by bit we have placed ourselves in a position of rebuilding and re-energizing those critical factors. Everything in the article of importance could have been passed on from any good offensive line coach or effective horse trainer to the upper layer of academic educational "experts" at any time in past 100 years at no charge. But the price was paid not by the deaf experts but by the generations our republic depend on.
You're seeing five of 20 comments. Sign in, or join for just $5 per month, to read them all and add your own.