This was very interesting to read, and news to me. It's gratifying to see Mississippi prove that it's possible to break out of a pattern of failure. I would love to see a discussion around the specific policies and practices that MS has put in place to actually achieve these results. The article doesn't really discuss that.
They teach using proven methods, like phonics.
They actually teach math.
They test and use that as real information.
They focus on results not on ideology.
They do NOT encurage using Paulo Freire's "methods".
The article suggests that someone from Maine would be reluctant to ask Mississippi for advice, given the stereotypes and biases that all Americans have absorbed over the years.
If the Maine Secretary of Education overcame his or her reluctance and did in fact ask Mississippi for advice, imagine their disappointment if the response was "we actually teach math".
Do you have a source for your response? I'm genuinely curious about what they changed to achieve this level of success. I'd be interested first for the actual educational methods, and secondarily I'd be interested in relating it to the idea of organizational changes that can produce relatively rapid reversals of a long term trend.
You can read a bit about it here [1]. They structure reading around 5 pillars, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension which is an evidence based approach[2]. Then if by the end of 3rd grade a student isn't reading at grade level they hold the student back to give them more time to learn to read so that they will be prepared for the more advanced material in 4th grade. I don't know as much about the math instruction.
> imagine their disappointment if the response was "we actually teach math"
And yet, looking at the chart in the article, that appears to be pretty much all there is to say.
Judging by results (based on the limited evidence in the article) Mississippi doesn't seem to be doing anything revolutionary. Their scores today are still significantly worse than Maine was in 2013.
The question we should be asking is "What is Maine doing wrong?" What caused their scores to decline precipitously since 2013?
This is a straight up guess, but the timing is really close: adoption of Common Core?
What I've seen of Common Core math is very different from how it's traditionally taught, to the point that parents don't understand it. I think I can see a thread in there, that it's attempting to teach what those of us good at math end up figuring out ourselves with numbers, but the examples online are bad and lead to further misunderstandings. So I could see teachers having similar issues, and students not learning very well because of it.
To put it in more techy terms, Common Core math is like learning computer science before learning your first programming language: probably possible, but it won't work well for most people.
I'm not sure what the Common Core curriculum for reading is, although on the whole Common Core math curriculum, it's a good system. You're right that often parents don't understand that—but that's due to Americans on the whole being uncomfortable and unskilled in mathematics. It does require teacher education, however, and lots of places are cutting that back.
> Proven methods... For what? Acing standardised tests?
Phonics is the proven method for learning how to read English. Quite controversially, a lot of states ditched or de-emphasized phonics in favor of some faddish "balanced literacy" idea that took the education establishment by storm, but doesn't actually work as well and led to bad outcomes, like poor literacy. Now that the damage has been done and is visible, a lot of states are now mandating phonics again.
I think there have been similar cycles with math.
Education is probably one of the areas where our cultural obsession with innovation and change leads to bad outcomes. It's not like reading is a new technology or prior generations were full of stupid people (though there are a lot of chauvinists who assume they were). At a certain point, new educational ideas are very likely to be worse ideas, but they're pushed and adopted because people are required to be "innovators."
I wonder if other languages receive greater benefits from phonics than English?
English is wild language with plenty examples of phonetic rules being broken.
Take a simple word like 'rough'. Learning the phonetics doesn't help with the word 'cough'. Neither help with words like 'though' and 'through'.
Words like 'read' and 'lead' cannot be properly pronounced without context clues. Not to mention all the odd-ball words in English like 'colonel'.
I also think location plays a role too. Where I am from, words like 'tin' and 'ten' are not pronounced differently at all [1]. In other parts of the US, that is not the case.
I do not doubt phonics is the best method method for learning to read. All I am saying is that the other methods must truly be abysmal for phonics to be the best.
Maybe? I'm not as familiar with reading pedagogy for other languages. However there are generally 5 components[1] and one is vocabulary which is how you distinguish Lead and Lead and Led.
You're right, English is kind of wacky, but this exists in other languages as well. For example there's significant Gaulish influence in French[2] and the written and spoken language offer a number of surprises for learners.
There's an amusing way to score how consistent the language orthography is: train an LLM on it, then measure the error rates for words it wasn't trained on. English is very bad on that metric: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
"Phonics" the term is mostly something that comes up in American context because there is a controversy on how to teach reading and writing English to begin with. In many other countries, the equivalent of phonics is simply the standard methodology that has been in use for so long that most people can't think of anything else, so it doesn't need a special term to describe it.
undoubtedly. Reading languages with clear phonetic rules like spanish can be quite easily learned by speakers. You only have to remember 27 symbols and their sounds.
At every age, there's a high attrition of students participating in competitive sports, until only a tiny elite remains. Is that what we want for reading and math?
yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read. What's wrong with a tiny elite remaining if it's based on actually being able to do the work?
The biggest red flag here for me is not that the tiny elite remain, it's that life circumstances will dictate that the majority of the tiny elite will continue to come from privileged families who have the time and resources to give their kids a leg up. BUT pushing kids into places where they objectively cannot compete intellectually or physically under the auspices of fairness is the devil's work. We need constant work at creating equality and to lower barriers to social services, not "fairness" and pretending everyone is already equal.
When I was 8, in the first grade, I hummed in class. I read comic books, I napped, I generally fucked about, around, and several other prepositions. I did this to such an extent that the teacher wanted to shunt me into the shame places you want to shunt these kids into. Fortunately my mother caught wind of this and, knowing what level my intellect was at when it was allowed a little freedom and presented with a challenge, raised actual holy hell at that little Catholic school outside Pittsburgh. Thank God she did, because I ended up being tested and started along the gifted track. My brother in law, otoh, is just as smart as me and just as defiantly internal as me. He didn't have an advocate. For him, school was 12 years of no resources, no opportunities, no goals, and memorizing a copy of The Lion King on VHS. Now I make a tidy living as a software engineer and I'm pretty decent at it. He lives at home with his mom because he never graduated high school, so he stays in all day and hand-hacks NES roms literally bit by bit. He's a shitload better than me at a very valuable thing and no one can take advantage of that, not him, not some employer, not society in general, because he was disposed of by a school system that wanted to get him out of the way of all the future contributors.
This idea that school is a place where kids compete with one another, the weak are weeded out and the strong are rewarded with additional resources is a disgusting perversion of an institution we used to recognize as providing a baseline for everyone. And it simply doesn't work.
> yes, because the alternative is to have kids who can't actually read being dragged along and dragging down kids who can read.
Failing to teach kids how to read is a failure of the school system, not the kid.
Dropping kids because the school system failed them is just yet another failure of a school system, and one which is at best a self-serving failure: a way to mask the extent of which the system is broken by blaming the victims of said system.
As an exercise, invest a few minutes thinking on why most communities do not experience this failure rate.
this, absolutely. when the person you're replying to asked "What's wrong with their being a tiny elite" they seem to be purposely ignoring the fact that what we're measuring is competence in basic skills. A school isn't supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 99 droupouts and one nuclear physicist. A school is supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 100 kids who can read, write, do math and understand how their society works well enough to participate in it meaningfully.
And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
> And if the kid can't do that at a 3rd grade level at the end of 3rd grade, isn't it much better to have them repeat 3rd grade than to push then into 4th grade and hope something changes?
That's besides the point, and orthogonal to the discussion. If after 3 years a school system failed to teach kids how to read, that represents a failure of the school system. If a school system feels the need to hold kids back so early in hopes that subjecting them yet again to the same school system that already failed them will somehow improve outcomes, this means the same school system is not investing in fixing the real problem.
This is like buying bad tires. If a tire blows up, you can argue all you want that changing the tire is much better than keeping a flat tire on. But the root cause is that the tire blows up, isn't it? Changing a bad tire with yet another bad tire won't fix the problem, will it? The tire you just added will easily blow up again, and everyone else buying those tires will go through the same problem.
I repeat, advocating for holding kids back and even rejecting underperforming kids from the school system is a Hallmark of a deeply broken, unsalvageable system. The only purpose of these approaches is to falsify the actual quality of the work performed by the school system, and generating fraudulent statistics of success at the expense of throwing kids under the bus.
That's how it used to work. But people noticed that some groups got held back at higher rates than others, and there were accusations of isms, and so most schools decided it would be better for everyone involved to stop doing that. Also, holding a kid back came to be seen as cruel since the other kids would make fun of him, which was probably true.
For the same reason, they mostly got rid of "tracks," where an age group would be divided into different classrooms according to test scores and previous grades rather than random chance, so the 'A' fourth grade room could go at a different pace from the 'B' fourth grade room. All that's left of that is gifted programs, which people somehow accept even though they're just the mirror image of holding kids back.
There's really not a good answer, because like it or not, learning ability varies, so if you put 25 kids in the same classroom for no reason other than their being the same age and living in the same neighborhood, some are going to struggle and fail and some are going to cruise and be bored.
I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what. That there's nothing you actually need to learn in 3rd grade in order to be advanced to 4th grade.
I would say that the point is that you can't just look at one datapoint, especially if there are other things affecting it.
The most obvious case of this is comparing private vs public schools, where the private schools can be selective and kick out anyone who doesn't perform or they don't like, but the public schools have to accept everyone by law.
Obviously failing anyone who cannot read from getting to 4th grade will greatly improve 8th grade reading scores.
Those failing kids eventually make it to the 8th grade, however, and affect statistics. Still, having lived there and attending one of the better middle and high schools near Vicksburg, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were gaming the system in some way (I hope they aren’t and these gains are real, though).
If a kid achieves a great 8th grade test score at age 18, is that a success or a failure of the system?
What we care about is the level of achievement by a given age. To determine that, we need to be comparing states using standardized tests given to age groups, not grade levels. It is fine to hold students back, if we think that will do them more good than advancing them. But they still need to be tested the same way as their age group if we want to do a meaningful comparison between states.
You are strawmanning my argument as I didn't say anything like that. I said that if you are going to evaluate a policy with statistics, you need to compare apples to apples because statistics are easily biased.
See this example of a paradox that applies a lot in educational settings: you can raise the average level of two classes just by shuffling students from one to another:
> So explain to me what "eliminating bad data points" in this context means. Should MS schools not hold back failing 3rd graders
The data point is the number of 3rd graders failing. If you insist in filtering out those 3rd graders, limiting your analysis to the subset of kids who didn't failed does not represent a success story. It represents an attempt to arbitrarily remove inconvenient data points to portray a false idea if success.
I disagree, I think it points to a core educational policy difference between states. Some states will not fail a 3rd grader, and Mississippi will. This has an obvious impact on 4th grade scores, yes, but I'm willing to bet if you followed those "failed" 3rd graders in MS and compared to other states where they were pushed ahead, holding under-achieving students back is a net positive.
> (...) holding under-achieving students back is a net positive.
Even if we assume that's the case, that's not the problem.
The problem is that the school system fails to provide the necessary and sufficient services that would prevent a statistically significant number of 3rd graders from being held back. Feeling the need to hold kids back is a symptom of the problem, not a solution.
This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results.
I strongly suspect that Mississippi should be allocating more resources to education. But this is a political problem and the schools have nearly no say in whether the legislature does or does not increase funding.
So. Do we close down the schools and wait until it is resolved?
Or do the schools do the best they can with the resources they have? Do you have evidence that placing kids in the most skill-appropriate classroom is a worse use of available resources than placing them in the “correct” classroom based on age or previous cohort?
> This way of thinking is how we end up with a ton of spending and not a ton of results.
"Ton of spending" are weasel words. "Not a ton of results" is already the problem.
If your school system fails to teach kids how to read after 3 years, this is a school system that fails at it's primary and most basic responsibility. These third-graders are not the problem, they are the canary in the coal mine.
Advocating for holding back third graders and expelling underperformers is a kin to advocate for getting rid of canaries because they are a nuisance when assessing health and safety.
An obvious comparison seems like it would be to compare age cohort rather than grade cohort. Your question confuses a comment on objective methodology with one a more subjective one on the response to that.
> I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what.
If a school system is designed so that the average kid in 3rd grade is expected to be in 4th grade the following year, the fact that a statistically significant subset of kids is not able to meet that bar is a sign that the system is failing those kids.
What's the goal here? Is it to get pretty metrics by filtering out the failures, or is it to provide an effective education to all kids?
How do you know its statistically significant? Nothing in the article (or anywhere else I looked) suggests a "statistically significant" portion of 3rd graders, whatever that means, are being held back.
> Who would have thought that not pushing kids forward into an academic environment they're not prepared for would be beneficial?
I think the point is that the school system is outputting kids that are not prepared for the academic environment they create themselves for these kids. So instead of fixing the problem, they are eliminating the bad results to inflate the success statistics.
The author posted a link to an article[1] showing that Mississippi's retention policies were not responsible for the increase in scores.
> But I've gotten some plausible pushback from researchers who say that Mississippi has always held back lots of kids. In practice, the 2013 law didn't change anything.
> ...
> In 2017, the average age of a fourth grade class is a minuscule 0.01 higher than the 1998-2013 average. That's no difference at all. This proxy is strong evidence that Mississippi's retention policies never changed in practice, which means it's entirely kosher to just compare their scores normally before and after reform.
The scores are adjusted for some demographic factors, so one explanation could be that they use exactly the same strategies as everybody else but the “demographic factors” adjustment works out for them.
Children of similar demographics are getting better absolute reading scores in Mississippi. How would it "work out" for them in a way that isn't explained by performance?
Mississippi's average ACT scores are tied for last (edit: tied for second to last). I’m sure some of their educational outcomes are improving, but the demographic-adjusted stats from elementary school students are misleading. Holding kids back for poor performance can really pump their numbers inadvertently. Even if that’s not a very prevalent practice, performance in high school is more important and far more predictive of life outcomes.
You know what’s crazier? Mississippi’s average ACT was higher before some of their education policy improvements.
ACT scores trail education outcomes by ~10 years, as students in school in the middle of a shift don’t get the full benefit from it - they’re often not included in policy changes for the sake of continuity (you may not be able to suddenly change the way you teach math in 5th grade).
State-based ACT scores are also highly influenced by who takes the ACT. If more students choose to take the ACT, the scores might go down even it's because your education system is doing a better job because more kids are trying for college.
For the same reason, you'll see some surprising state scores for SAT/ACT. If you're in a state that prioritizes the ACT, the main students taking the SAT are the strongest students who are looking at out-of-state schools.
Aside from the time lag, I don't think you can look at voluntary test scores and draw many useful conclusions from it.
The main changes to reading instruction were made around 2013, and math instruction in 2016. I wouldn’t expect a decrease in ACT scores 12 and 9 years later respectively, even when considering that it takes some time for instructors to master the new approach.
Indeed they are towards the bottom, but not "tied for last".
Talking about statistics, take a look at the "Estimated % of Grads Tested" column. the top 20 do not break 20%, while the bottom is near 100% with the exception of Hawa'ii.
Thanks for pointing that out, they’re actually tied for second-to-last.
As for % tested, states that don’t mandate the ACT tend to have higher performance in general. They don’t have as compelling of a need for the mandate, and they have many students who’d rather just take the SAT on its own. There is an effect going the other way though - if you don’t mandate the ACT, then students who don’t want to take any standardised testing at all…won’t, and so they won’t depress the average score.
> By the way, if you control for HN comments made by me on 5/7/25, this is the #1 ranked comment.
I have nothing to add. I just wanted to show that I helped contribute to make keenmaster's 5/7/25 comment on this thread his #1 comment on this thread for the day, 5/7/25. Hello to all of the future historians looking back on this moment!
Just to clarify to those reading the comments first, the political point he's making is not to ignore Mississippi just because it's Mississippi.
He has warnings for both Democrats and Republicans at the end and is pretty clearly not a fan of the way either party is approaching education at the national level right now. He is drawing attention to the fact that some red states with historically bad schools have started pulling ahead of some blue states with historically good schools, but his interest is in making sure we learn from that, not scoring culture war points.
That's not what he says. He dedicates most of the section that's directed at Republicans critiquing the administration's wholesale dismantling of the Department of Education and warning that they could run on education in the future if they, you know, didn't do that.
I think people just have an idea of what his political slant must be because he's defending the indefensible state of Mississippi.
