Not long ago, blue states typically outperformed red ones when it came to education. That is changing. Blue states like Oregon and Washington experienced significant drops in reading and math scores for both fourth- and eighth-graders between 2015 and 2024, worse than the national declines during the same period. Mississippi, meantime, gained five points in fourth-grade reading and math and held steady in eighth-grade performance. Louisiana also maintained its scores, defying the negative national trends.
Whether you call it the “Mississippi Miracle” or the “Southern Surge,” Republican-led states are rapidly improving student outcomes relative to blue states, thanks to a series of substantive reforms over the past decade.
A place of politics, culture, and discourse
A big chunk of the “Mississippi Miracle” is changing how you count student performance so the large number of students held back a grade every year no longer count the progress of the rest of the students.
Wait, so the children who are held back a year do not count toward numbers, ever?
Like, when they finally move up to 4th grade, their performance isn’t counted?
Is there a source for this? This seems like it’d tear down the entire edifice.
Sounds like they’d be included but just in the following year. They get an extra year of instruction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h0GtdSOCTs
Despite it being called “educational malpractice” in that video, imho it’s a solid choice. I made my kid repeat 2nd grade and it worked out really well for her.
Sometime repeating a grade is indeed necessary. Using that as a way to cook the books is not.
Everyone who can not pass a basic 4th grade literacy test is so far behind that they should repeat 3rd grade and learn to read.
That sounds pretty “necessary” and I’m not sure why we’d call that “cooking the books”.
What’s the alternative, promote them to 4th grade even though they can’t read?
Right-Wing publication bashes Democrats and Blue States. News at 11
It’s “Film at 11”.
The joke dates back to the days when you had to develop film instead of just sending everything as 1s and 0s to a lightning box.
I’d worry more about whether the information is accurate than whether it’s right-wing.
LOL. It’s always hilarious when random politics get interjected into an article with absolutely no evidence.
There are four Southern states that have show solid improvements from _near last_ in the ratings to somewhere in the top half.
This is a good thing, although it is worth pointing out that this is _grading on a curve_…those states are still doing pretty bad, and they just look good on the comparison because that comparison is across identical demographics: Their students are being compared to similarly poor students. Which means, hilariously, states can gain ground by making their students poorer, or lose ground by making them less poor.
To be clear, that isn’t what has happened, but Mississippi is sitting there at 28% students in poverty and 14% in _extreme_ poverty, and, yeah, it does kinda matter. Grading on a curve like this is a really good way to _hide_ the actual problems of a lot of conservative states: That they have a lot of people, including kids, in poverty and they do nothing to change that.
That said, it’s good to be able to make sure that even poor students are well educated. In fact, one might suspect they’d be even better off if they got less poor! Perhaps their governments should work on that also!
What isn’t good is asserting, with no nonsense, that this is due to conservative policies, vs. liberal ones.
For once thing, as one of the linked articles points out, Louisiana was under Democratic control. Likewise, the article mentions ‘In 2021, Oregon eliminated high school graduation standards because they were allegedly harmful to minorities.’, which, not only have Oregon test scores been very bad before that so it’s pretty clear that’s not the cause, but it’s incredibly hard to see what high school graduation standards have to do with _fourth grade literacy_.
But on top of that, and most important, I think we need to ask ourselves what the heck we mean by ‘conservative’ education politices here. Because what is happening in the South _isn’t_ the ‘education reform’ most associated with conservatives, which is private schools and vouchers and ‘competition’ and whatnot.
It’s just actual evidence-based education. It’s developing, using experts, a good curriculum, and then training teachers in it. I’m not actually sure that’s political at all.
There are four Southern states that have show solid improvements from _near last_ in the ratings to somewhere in the top half.
This is something I’d say to defend the article.
In fact, one might suspect they’d be even better off if they got less poor!
I have heard rumors that literacy helps with this.
It’s just actual evidence-based education. It’s developing, using experts, a good curriculum, and then training teachers in it. I’m not actually sure that’s political at all.
It wasn’t when I was a kid, that’s for sure.
Seems to be now. Which is weird.
This is something I’d say to defend the article.
Yes, Jaybird, me repeating part of the article that is true does, indeed, sound like defending the article.
I then went on to point out problems with their understanding of that, and with other things in the article.
Glad we’re doing this entire meta-conversation about things, really keeps things moving.
I have heard rumors that literacy helps with this.
Yes, fourth graders having more literacy will, possibly, help them get out of poverty as adults, so all we have to do is *checks watch* wait 30 years until *their* kids show up. But let’s check something quick: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/economic-opportunity
The four state we’re talking about.
Alabama #42
Arkansas #48
Mississippi #49
Louisiana #50
*long whistle* Well, uh…Alabama doesn’t completely suck, at least? (I certainly can’t say anything, Georgia is at 37, which in many ways is worse than Alabama, because Georgia has a lot more money and yet apparently can’t use it to help anyone.)
But, more seriously, yes, having better schools will help fix this, not just with education but in general. That’s good. And it would be better if we didn’t pretend it was some weird victory for how conservatives want to do education when, again, almost every conservative proposal for ‘Education Reform’ is yammering about vouchers and private schools, a thing which you may notice is _not_ what was done here. They buckled down and worked hard to create a good curriculum and taught teachers in it, and started seeing effects pretty quickly.
Instead of going “conservative”, they went “reactionary”.
“Just teach them to read the way we used to!”
Which may work, if only in the long term.
It’s just actual evidence-based education. It’s developing, using experts, a good curriculum, and then training teachers in it. I’m not actually sure that’s political at all.
Blue has narratives which are undermined by Red being successful here. Red is supposed to be super racist and racism is supposed to be the big problem preventing educational success. Better management of educational machinery will put a lot of pressure on Blue to do the same.
Blue has narratives which are undermined by Red being successful here. Red is supposed to be super racist and racism is supposed to be the big problem preventing educational success.
That’s…not really the narrative.
But, regardless, racism is playing a part here, and it’s _exactly_ disguised by how they manipulate the figured.
Specifically, red states have a hell of a lot of poor minorities. And that is exactly one of the group that does poor in school, something that has been pointed out for ages…not because they are minorities, but because they are poor. It’s actually brought up pretty often when racists start talking about comparing scores by race, the response is generally ‘Those minorities tend to be poorer in general, and we know the poorer you are, the worst you do in school’.
What this article is very cleverly doing is saying ‘Look, if you normalize by poverty level, these schools are doing really good!’ Which is…just nonsense. Yeah, if you take the thing driving the scores down in the state, and recalculate as if it doesn’t exist, tada, the scores are much better!
That said, their scores _have_ actually increased. But that means those states came up _to_ the national average, they are not beating it. In fact, Washington, their example of doing very badly, is also at the national average!
The actual outlier, the one that doesn’t make sense to me, is Texas. (Florida also felt weird for a second until I remember how incredibly old their population is, aka, how much tax money there is per student.)
Look, if you normalize by poverty level, these schools are doing really good!’ Which is…just nonsense.
We measure the educational system by how well it educates. These figures suggest those four states do better at educating the poor than various rich states.
You are claiming rich states are uplifting the poor so they’re not poor. That might be true but these numbers don’t support it (nor oppose it). We’d need to look at different numbers to evaluate that idea.
Florida also felt weird… how much tax money there is per student.)
Florida spends the same amount of money per student as Mississippi in raw dollars. Spending as a % of taxpayer income is MUCH less in Florida. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state
These figures suggest those four states do better at educating the poor than various rich states.
‘Look, I know our track team suffers a lot of crippling sports injuries on the field, but we are something better at running with crippling sports injuries than anyone else! …what do you mean, that’s a stupid thing to brag about and we should probably instead do something about all the injuries? And we also should maybe try to heal some of those players instead of having them run with serious injuries? What are you, a bunch of communists?’
You are claiming rich states are uplifting the poor so they’re not poor. That might be true but these numbers don’t support it (nor oppose it). We’d need to look at different numbers to evaluate that idea.
I’m actually claiming rich states already have less poor, but, yes, that is because they, you know, have paths out of poverty.
And…if you really want numbers for some reason, I just gave some to Jaybird. This is how those states are ranked in ‘Economic Opprotunity’, which is a combination of ‘poverty rate, prevalence of food insecurity and median household income, as well as the level of income inequality’:
Alabama #42
Arkansas #48
Mississippi #49
Louisiana #50
I’m actually claiming rich states already have less poor
That doesn’t matter.
Take 1000 poor children. Those four states are better at educating them than the rich blue states. That’s what those studies are claiming.
You are correct in you’re better off being a random child in a Blue state than one of those states because your chances of being poor are lower… but after we know that you’re poor, those states are doing a better job with education.
At least for that year.
Take 1000 poor children. Those four states are better at educating them than the rich blue states. That’s what those studies are claiming.
I know that.
I’m pointing out that an article that talks about that success and asserts it is due to _politics_ around education is ignoring the elephant in the room that politics is also the reason there are so many poor kids to start with!
What they are doing is an success for the educational things they are doing, which…is not particularly political, and certainly isn’t the things conservatives keep _trying_ to do in education, aka, vouchers and private schools.
It is not a success for conservationism that it is in charge of states (1) with huge amount of poor people, including poor kids, even if it still somehow manage to educate those kids. The kids will, for example, _still_ have statistically outcomes in life. Probably won’t be able to go to college. Because, again, poor.
1) Although, as was pointed out, Louisiana, the arguably poorest state, had a Democratic governor anyway! OTOH, they’ve always had Republican legislature, and them electing Democratic governors occasionally is just a weird oddity.
politics is also the reason there are so many poor kids to start with!
There is a long list of factors in why some areas have more economic opportunity than others. We quickly will end up at the whole urban vs. rural thing.
Has it ever occurred to you to check whether this actually holds up to serious empirical scrutiny, rather than just accepting it as gospel truth?
For example, we have extensive evidence from twin studies that test scores are at least somewhat heritable. Let’s assume that the entire B-W test score gap is caused by differences in household income. It follows, then, that any any given level of genetic aptitude, black children will on average have lower household income than the corresponding white children. Conversely, at any given household income level, black children will, on average, have higher genetic aptitude than the corresponding white children. So their test scores will be higher.
So we have a testable prediction here: When we control for household income, do black students have higher test scores than white students? Your assignment is to find out!
“Grading on a curve like this is a really good way to _hide_ the actual problems of a lot of conservative states: That they have a lot of people, including kids, in poverty and they do nothing to change that.”
So the article is wrong and the students’ school performance did not improve?
It’s really funny how Jaybird quotes just the sentence before that, and pretend I’m defending the article, whereas you quote that sentence and pretend I’m disagreeing with the thing I literally said was true the sentence before.
I think both your comments should be filed in some sort of ‘Ordinary Times Dishonest Discussion’ hall of fame.
To reiterate the thing I literally said in the literally post you are responding to, in the sentence literally before that one: There are four Southern states that have show solid improvements from _near last_ in the ratings to somewhere in the top half.
I then go on to explain how the article _overstates_ this, because it is looking at numbers adjusted for poverty. If you want to know the sentence I was looking at, it was ‘But since then, the Magnolia State has steadily climbed the rankings. In fact, adjusted for demographics, it now stands among the top states in reading.’
‘Adjusted for demographics’ is doing _all_ the work there. Mississippi is above the national average, which is really good and a massive improvement. Other states have done the same thing, and also managed to do it with less spending than a lot of worse states. This is somewhat amazing, and does not need overstatement in a dumbass attempt to try to claim political points, especially when the claims are absurd nonsense. This paragraph, for example:
Meantime, blue states and districts are lowering the bar for students in both academics and discipline. In 2021, Oregon eliminated high school graduation standards because they were allegedly harmful to minorities. San Francisco and other progressive districts have tried to implement “equitable grading” policies that deemphasize tests and deadlines. California has made it harder for teachers to maintain order in classrooms. In 2014, it became the first state to ban suspensions and expulsions for “willful defiance” among K-3 students, citing the large racial disparities in infraction rates. A decade later, California expanded this policy to middle and high school students. These kinds of policy decisions from blue states—shaped by a strong pressure to conform to rigid equity dogmas—have become a serious liability.
Every page of that is nonsense, and is _blatantly_ nonsense. As I pointed out, high school graduations standards set in 2021 are pretty unlikely to have impacted 4th grade reading standards a decade ago, and pretty obviously are a _response_ to a totally broken, not a cause of it. (Note: I’m not saying it’s a good response! It’s a bad one!)
Likewise, and I didn’t mention this, if ‘suspension and expulsion’ help raise test scores, they do it by _literally kicking kids out of the standard system so they no longer count_. That is not a good thing, and the educational system is not more successful because kids driving down the standard are removed. (This is exactly the same reason that private schools tends to have higher test scores, because they can remove, or even not admit, poor-performing students.)
—
It’s also worth pointing out the dishonesty here, because if we’re comparing Mississippi ‘adjusted for demographics’, why aren’t we doing that for California? California, which in actuality is doing very badly in education, looks a lot better when ‘adjusted for demographics’. Why?
Because they have a lot of the children of migrants who do not speak English particularly well and are very poor. Which is, again something that needs to be solved in two different ways…both getting better at educating them, and also trying to fix the root problem of the poverty and ‘Not speaking the language’. (Which is why some schools have tried to provide native language education, but that is not really a great solution and can only exist as a stopgap. It also is moronically political, because the bigots enjoy confusing ‘Teaching a kid in a language they understand while also teaching them English, instead of stopping their entire education for a year to only teach them English’, with ‘Not having to learn English’. We don’t need to teach kids in America English, it happens automatically, but we can’t stop educating them until it has!)
Oregon _also_ looks pretty good when adjusted for demographics, and that’s because Oregon is _astonishingly racist_ in their education. That whole ‘graduation standards are harmful to minorities’ thing? No. What’s harmful to minorities is how Oregon sorta just _writes off_ Black kids the second they have the slightest problem in school. It’s like they took how the rest of the country is racist in education, and quintupled it.
I wasn’t pretending you were defending the article. I knew that you were disagreeing with it (or with its meta-points).
What I said was *NOT* “you’re defending the article”. What I said was, and I’m copying and pasting this, “This is something I’d say to defend the article.”
When it comes to my criticisms of California and/or Oregon they have to do with stuff like this essay from The Oregonian: Oregon again says students don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color or California’s math detracking initiative.
The stuff that ‘bama is doing to increase literacy is effective at increasing literacy.
Complaining that it’s not doing enough to eradicate poverty strikes me as asking for something that isn’t in the scope of a 4th grade reading curriculum.
“It’s only teaching kids to read” strikes me as something I’d say to defend the policy.
TL:DR – you can always cook the books to make yourself look better.
because if we’re comparing Mississippi ‘adjusted for demographics’, why aren’t we doing that for California?
My impression was Mississippi didn’t decide to “adjust for demographics”, it was the Department of Education. That makes sense because if you don’t adjust for demographics then the only thing you’re measuring is demographics.
Ergo California on that chart is adjusted for demographics.
Fourth-grade test scores of students living in poverty are not an end in themselves.
In the education literature, there’s a thing called “the Colorado paradox”. Colorado does a mediocre job overall of getting the local kids through high school and into post-secondary school. OTOH, Colorado has one of the two or three most-educated work forces in the country. The growth of the educated work force correlates almost exactly with Colorado growing from a poor rural state to a rich urban/suburban one.
At least from my policy perspective, what Mississippi needs to be is a state that is attractive to an educated work force. Raising fourth-grade test scores isn’t worth much if those kids leave when they finish school. It isn’t worth much if Mississippi doesn’t do the other things that make it an attractive place for people to build (or relocate) businesses that take advantage of a better-educated work force.
Come get me when Mississippi is a net destination state for college graduates, and I’ll be happy to applaud.
Fourth-grade test scores of students living in poverty are not an end in themselves.
The thing that they measure imperfectly *is*.
TracingWoodgrains points out a problem with Mamdani (this is education-related):
You can read that Advisory Group Report for yourself but, if you hate to read, here are some excerpts:
Over and over again, the whole issue of tracking comes up and, over and over again, there is a wacky solution that says “put the low performers in with the high performers!”
Ah, well. Maybe we can have Alabama’s 4th Graders test higher than New York’s in a decade or so.
You are never going to be able to prove that “tracking” is not just racism with a hat on.
My high performing daughters benefited from not having low performing disruptive students in the class.
The most extreme daughter benefited a lot by a G&T program.
There are lots of low achieving students around. Society benefits more by having the high achievers go as far as they can rather than by raising the scores of the lows by a point or two.
Getting rid of tracking is a way to make everyone more average by preventing success. That’s not a good outcome.
“Society benefits more by having the high achievers go as far as they can”
Right, and how nice for you that you’ve got “high achievers”, but what if the purpose of Public Schooling is not “give the (white) High Achievers all the goodies and let the (brown) Low Achievers rot” but rather “make sure that everyone leaves the schooling program with the minimum level of ability required to function in society”?
Like, I’m sure it’s frustrating to see a teacher take the whole day trying to get that one (black) kid in the back of the class to add two numbers together, but if that kid gets out of high school and he still can’t add then your (white) daughters are gonna be covering his welfare checks, and is that what you’d rather have?
And if your answer is “yes, I’m OK with that” then great, be OK with it, but go into it with your eyes open instead of pretending that you’re saying anything other than “it’s not fair that the school doesn’t spend extra money on my kids”.
What happens when you end up with a Baltimore?
Point out that, even with Baltimore, Maryland has some of the best test scores in the country (based on the high achievers in Anne Arundel)?
There are plenty who consider “we tried and failed” to be morally justifiable in a way that “we didn’t try” is not.
One point that strikes me as obvious is that continuing to fail, enough times, presents identically to not trying.
Maybe we should change something.
And when the argument switches to some combination of the importance of maintaining the status quo (with a helping of “more funding”), I find the follow-up of “don’t you *CARE* about childrens’ educations?” to ring quite hollow.
I care enough to think it ought to occur, yes.
So the choice is that either my daughter gets a sub-standard education or some random kid ends up on welfare? And that’s supposed to be on me?
That’s a false choice. We don’t know how to help him so we’ll get rid of the top performers to lower the average to make him look better. My duty is to my kids. Other kids aren’t my problem.
I’ve put my kid into a majority minority school and am great with her black boyfriend. I don’t allow contact with my white dysfunctional relatives. I don’t care about skin color. I care about behavior and culture. If you want to call all that “racist” because there are more dysfunctional blacks than whites as a percentage then that says more about you than me.
The school system is a tool that I use to make my kids as successful as they can be. I can (and twice have) find other systems if there are problems.
My caste is the source of most child enrichment activities. The little league coach is normally the parent of one of the boys. The people who ran first robotics did so because their kids were in the program.
The school system needs me and my caste more than I need them because me and mine are massive positive influences. That includes my tax dollars, my high performing kids, my insistence that the school system do it’s job, and so on.
Either you allow “tracking” so my kids don’t have disruptive kids in their classes or my entire caste will flee the district and you can deal with concentrated poverty instead. -DM
So you support class warfare. Good to know.
He’s the one caring about his kids.
You’re the one supporting class warfare.
He’s the one talking about all the things his caste will
Or won’t do. Last I checked that’s class warfare language.
I’m assuming the other members in his class are equally selfish when it comes to their children.
Though I appreciate that you feel that others have a right to proximity to his kids (and the kids of others like him), I’m not certain what the mechanism of that is nor that it’s more important than the whole “care for one’s own kids” thing is.
But I say that as a cat dad.
It might interest you to know that I am fairly certain I’m in Dark’s class – both economically and in terms of the desired outcome
For my children. Where he and I diverge significantly is in his blatant unwillingness to care about anyone else’s kids while seeking the best possible outcomes for his own. You see both our sets of kids will have to live in the world we build for them, and having graduated from public schools in Louisiana after white flight did its pernicious work, I can assure you that the economic outcomes Dark seeks to engineer for his daughters will cost not his daughters immensely unless he works to ensure that not his daughters have the same systems and opportunities he demands for his kids.
It is by the way very substantially class warfare to assert that only you and people
Who look or act like you deserve the opportunities you have. Classist bordering g on racist in fact.
Where he and I diverge significantly is in his blatant unwillingness to care about anyone else’s kids while seeking the best possible outcomes for his own.
There’s this thing where people say “I CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE’S KIDS!” and then send their own kids to private school.
The president of Chicago’s Teacher Union is famous for pulling this one.
There’s another phenomenon where someone points out that a policy change has resulted in reading scores going up and someone else complains about the policy change and talks, instead, about funding and uses their emphasis on funding to demonstrate how much they care rather than on stuff like “actually making sure the kids learn to read by, for example, changing policies that result in scores going up”.
It is by the way very substantially class warfare to assert that only you and people
Who look or act like you deserve the opportunities you have.
Everybody deserves the best, of course. But we can’t deliver the best to everybody. The best we can do is the best for our own kids.
Help with reading, help with math, do a little homeschooling to help with the real stuff given by the people who send their own kids to private schools.
For my part, since I want the best for all kids, I think we should change policies. I think that, if you have bad policies, it doesn’t matter how much funding you have.
Indeed, you can be in the top quintile of funding and, if you have bad policies, you can move from having a five or six schools without a single proficient student to having nine or ten schools without a proficient student.
And if leadership’s response to such a thing is to demand more funding without changing any policies? You’d better believe that I’d white flight my ass out of that situation.
You may have a “right” to my tax dollars but I don’t understand why you have a right to access to my kids.
And, no, it’s not racist to want my kids to be proficient. If you’re worried about racism, maybe change the policies that have resulted in growing numbers of schools without a single proficient kid.
“I CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE’S KIDS!” and then send their own kids to private school.
Putting your kids first is called “good parenting”.
If you’re planning on eliminating tracking, then you need to explain how my kid doesn’t deal with disruptive students or accept that I’m going to leave.
Any school system and/or school reform needs to deal with good parents who are focused on their children.
Arguing against that is like arguing against a natural law. You can call gravity “racist” but it won’t care.
I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
very substantially class warfare to assert that only you and people Who look or act like you deserve the opportunities you have
My bottom line is disruptive children should not be allowed to subtract from my kids’ education. That’s not an unreasonable request.
For several years I had a negative income. Thus by gov definition I was “very poor”.
That opened doors. My kids got lots of free enrichment opportunities. We took advantage of that. When we showed up there wouldn’t be many people.
The gov can’t replace involved parents. If the parents aren’t willing to lift a finger then their kids have a massive disadvantage compared to mine.
Any complex reasoning which comes down to “My kids are not going to reach their potential for the good of the collective” is a non-starter.
blatant unwillingness to care about anyone else’s kids while seeking the best possible outcomes for his own
The coach of the baseball team creates spots for 8 other children in addition to his own. The den mother of the cub scout group does the same. First Robotics uplifted dozens of students in addition to the head guy’s pair.
My caste adds a lot to any system which has us. You’re not complaining about me being there, you’re complaining about me not being there.
I have seen the school system fail my kids too many times for me to support it unconditionally. It works for me, I don’t work for it.
Classist bordering on racist in fact.
The real shit show stories I have are of whites. Dysfunctional behavior doesn’t become more acceptable (or less self destructive) if it’s done by blacks. It is not “racist” to point this out.
Class warfare? Valuing education and having the resources to move selects for a certain class, but “class” isn’t my motivation.
I have explained my priorities, and how I will behave depending on the school’s actions. Everyone with the same priorities (i.e. my “caste”) can be expected to behave the same.
Claiming I’m responsible for some other parent’s kids because they lack my values or I’m a racist is nonsense. I disagree and/or I don’t care.
My priority is my kids. The local school system will treat them right or I’ll find some other system that will.
In practice that means tracking. So when I have gone to talk to the VP and told him a math class is too easy and there are disruptive students, he transferred my daughter to the harder class with the serious students.
If you have a different way to do the right thing for my kids, then great. But my kid’s education doesn’t get sacrificed for someone’s ideological purity.
The good news is I’m predictable and bring resources to the table (not the least of which are my kids). The bad news is my kids’ needs come first or imho the school isn’t doing their job and I’m a bad parent.
By the way, tracking isn’t an elementary thing. It’s middle and especially high school. By then you have kids that are interested in learning and others which are not.
Put me in the group who wants the slow kid (black or white) to master basic math skills and wants the kid (black or white) who is going to go on and invent mRNA vaccines to get what they need.
Collectively, we refuse to fund/staff public schools to the level that deals with all the students’ needs. Historically — last 30-50 years, say — one of the reasons that suburban K-12 schools got better results than inner city or rural schools is that they had a (relative) ton of parent volunteers, who would do everything from added supervised practice for slow kids to scoring tests to free up the teachers’ time.
I recall a semester where I was volunteering and the teacher told me, “Mr. Cain, you suck at dealing with slow students, but if you could mark these math quizzes you give me an extra hour to work with the slow readers.”
we refuse to fund/staff public schools to the level that deals with all the students’ needs.
How much does it cost to replace parents setting bad examples?
Clearly more than we are willing to pay. Hence Michael’s observations.
Society doesn’t have infinity resources. It’s less “not willing” and more “not able”.
“Concerned, involved parents” do a lot more than just give the teacher more time. They set examples and fix their kids when there are problems.
If that’s the case we’re going to destigmatize “racism” in my lifetime.
I mean, if we’re OK with that then that’s OK, but we need to remember why it was that we aren’t already doing it.
We have tracking because the alternative is concentrated poverty.
Insisting my kid can’t get a good education if I stay in the district is also insisting I leave. Me leaving means I take my tax dollars with me along with whatever else I do for the school system.
That will scale up to my entire caste. My attitude is common although I’m more willing than most to talk about it.
This is not the first time I’ve heard that tracking should be eliminated for the good of the collective but it should be viewed as a non-starter because we’re parents, not ants.
“Insisting my kid can’t get a good education if I stay in the district is also insisting I leave. Me leaving means I take my tax dollars with me along with whatever else I do for the school system.”
from the sound of things you aren’t interested in Your Tax Dollars going to anyone else’s kids anyway, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m interested in my Tax Dollars going to someone else’s kids.
I’m not interested in it going to someone else’s pension plan.
“But that pension plan is teaching children!”
“Look at these test scores.”
“Um… you’re racist.”
you aren’t interested in Your Tax Dollars going to anyone else’s kids anyway
I always sent my kids to public schools. The State has a big bag of tax money stapled to their forehead. There was also property taxes and various others.
All my kids also did sports which was pay-to-play and required parents “volunteer” to assist.
And then we have the massive issue that my kids also raise the averages of the classes they were in. That is the reason to get rid of tracking. High functioning kids are assets and low functioning kids learn best if they’re next to them.
I don’t expect the other kids in the class to add to my kid’s educational experience, I just insist they not subtract from it.
“[W]e have the massive issue that my kids also raise the averages of the classes they were in. That is the reason to get rid of tracking. High functioning kids are assets and low functioning kids learn best if they’re next to them.”
Yes, that’s exactly what the current thinking says should happen.
Look, if you want to say “my kids ought to get the best even at the expense of the rest” go for it, that’s what I’d expect a parent to do. There’s no moral valence to that. The issue is that public schools aren’t anyone’s parent and are considering things from a whole-population perspective, and based on their weighting of outcomes they’ve concluded that lifting the tail produces a more positive overall integral-under-the-curve result than pushing the peak, and so that’s where they’re putting their efforts. If you want to keep saying “yeah but MY KIDS aren’t doing as well as they might,” well, yeah! “[T]he choice is that either my daughter gets a sub-standard education or some random kid ends up on welfare?” Your daughter isn’t getting a “sub-standard” education, she just isn’t taking college prep at age eight, and in return yes, we keep more “random kids” off of welfare, and the latter is what primary schooling is for.
You’d really think that more people would be willing to take one for the team.
Not me, though. I mean you.
*shrug* if they give all the teaching time to the smart kid in class, that means the dull ones are “taking one for the team”. So maybe we should move past “taking one for the team” as our attitude here, because it goes both ways.
If they’re in different classes then they both get education which is appropriate for them.
There are also massive side effects to telling me that the school won’t educate my kid to her potential. She’s a massive positive to the system and so am I. Forcing us to flee leaves the system worse off.
Sounds like the best solution is to move to a place where the smart kids are in one school and the differently-smart kids are in another and that way the teachers can teach to the class rather than to the students.
Yes, that was the idea for a while:
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/156064674128/thinking-like-a-school-district
So, technically, those schools in Baltimore aren’t a problem.
They’re a solution.
You are claiming all of the following:
1) We should have the college bound and the not-college bound in the same classroom.
2) Limiting the instruction in the classroom to the dumbest and least interested students is a good thing.
3) This isn’t a sub-standard outcome for my kid.
All of those can’t be correct. In practice my kid has to sit and study in the hallway because the teacher has so little control over the classroom.
DensityDuck: based on their weighting of outcomes they’ve concluded that lifting the tail produces a more positive overall integral-under-the-curve result than pushing the peak
Nonsense. This decision was made based on politics and connivance of the system, not any sort of rational evaluation.
They want to claim they’re going to raise up all students to some high standard, and they can’t do that. So instead the standard will be lowered and high performance eliminated, thus lowering the definition.
The actual choice is whether the system wants me and mine in it at all. If the answer is “no”, then don’t call it “racist” when we get concentrated poverty.
If the school system will only provide an education appropriate for someone who isn’t college bound, then all parents with college bound children must leave.
“1) We should have the college bound and the not-college bound in the same classroom.
2) Limiting the instruction in the classroom to the dumbest and least interested students is a good thing.
3) This isn’t a sub-standard outcome for my kid.”
Yes?
Why are you so arrogant to think that the entirety of the school system should be specifically tailored to the needs of your kid? School is for the average kid. If you don’t like that, if you think your kid is Above Average in a way that’s harmed by getting only schooling tailored to the average kid, then get your kid out of school.
School is for the average kid.
Is that the average kid who is college bound or the average kid who isn’t? And why are they supposed to be in the same classroom?
…should be specifically tailored to the needs of your kid?
Let me repeat. My base requirements are that the other students in the classroom NOT subtract from her education.
If we have a 9th grade student who can’t read, the solution isn’t to have the Teacher ignore the rest of her English class to focus on him.
If there are 5 disruptive students in the class then no one in the class will learn anything so that’s 20 kids suffering so that we can pretend to help those 5. The ideal number of disruptive students in the classroom is zero, especially in middle and high school.
Pretending that I’m the unreasonable one is a non-starter. I’m making very reasonable demands.
The data here is interesting because if you look at the rankings (linked in the article) for 8th and 12 grade, it looks pretty much like you’d expect: “Blue” states at the top, with a smattering of small red states (Utah, the Dakotas) near the top as well. But if you go to 4th grade, it’s all mixed up. I don’t know how to explain this, and I suspect 4th graders were the kids most significantly affected by the COVID years, so it could be that some red states had better COVID schooling results? It’ll be interesting to see if this holds up for 4th graders in 5 years, say.
If it’s sticky then maybe we’ll regress back to the mean and we won’t have to worry about anything.
Are previous generations sticky?
30+ years ago now, I was doing research on multi-party multi-media real-time communication over internets. One of the most interesting use cases was education. Middle school is where you start to see the teaching model, “Read this material on your own and in class we’ll discuss it.” By 12th grade, there’s a lot of that and little/no drill.
Watching granddaughter #1, who was in 1st grade for COVID, the memorization and rote learning seems to be something that you can recover from.