I'd heard about Mississippi's tremendous improvements in education in the past, but I'd never seen the data assembled in such an easy-to-consume way before this.
Mississippi has become the fastest improving school system in the country...
In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi. By 2024, only four states had fewer.
When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results for student demographics, this is where Mississippi ranked:
- Fourth grade math: 1st
- Fourth grade reading: 1st
- Eighth grade math: 1st
- Eighth grade reading: 4th
How about Black students? ... Black students in Mississippi posted the third highest fourth grade reading scores in the nation. They walloped their counterparts in better-funded states. The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.
That's fantastic news! As I understand it, it was done through a return to traditional teaching methods. Think phonics instead of whole language for reading. It was also done with accountability for the children.
Across the South, the story is similar.
Mississippi has fellow southern stars. Louisiana was the only state to fully erase pandemic learning loss among fourth grade readers. It ranked in the top five for all four NAEP grades/subjects in the demographically adjusted results. Alabama was the only state whose fourth graders beat their pre-COVID performance in math. In years past, notable gains have been posted by Florida, Tennessee and Texas.
A Shot Across Harvard's Bow
Keeping with the theme of book larnin', the Department of Education has made it clear to Harvard that racism is unacceptable, even if it's racism against Asians, Jews or even, gasp, whites. From the letter sent to Harvard by the DoE:
Perhaps most alarmingly, Harvard has failed to abide by the United States Supreme Court’s ruling demanding that it end its racial preferencing, and continues to engage in ugly racism in its undergraduate and graduate schools, and even within the Harvard Law Review itself. Our universities should be bastions of merit that reward and celebrate excellence and achievement. They should not be incubators of discrimination that encourage resentment and instill grievance and racism into our wonderful young Americans.
The above concerns are only a fraction of the long list of Harvard’s consistent violations of its own legal duties. Given these and other concerning allegations, this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided. Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni. You have an approximately $53 Billion head start, much of which was made possible by the fact that you are living within the walls of, and benefiting from, the prosperity secured by the United States of America and its free-market system you teach your students to despise.
Boom! I love the absolute cutlass slash of prose at the end of that.
This blog has been dedicated to whining, carping and predicting doom much of the time. It's great to see some real turn-arounds for education and the culture.
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| "Avast there, ye scurvy Harvard dogs! Belay that DEI or the next shot will strike ye amidships!" |
2 comments:
It looks like Harvard's problem is likely to be that the Supreme Court is pretty much tied between Harvard and Yale (4 each), with Barrett from Notre Dame as the tiebreaker. I wonder if this is at least partly a case of university rivalry?
Forgive me if I've told this before --
My father, born in 1927, in the rural Alabama-Tennessee border area, was not sent to school as a child because the attitude of "po' white trash" Southern women of the time was, "If you keep your sons dumb, the Army won't take 'em".
When my father was 16, living in rural Missouri, he started formal schooling -- against the wishes of his mother -- and graduated with an 8th-grade education after a total of 19 months. And, he was better educated than most people of my own generation, on whose alleged educations vastly more tax monies were spent.
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