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Tim Daly: This isn’t just wrong. It’s a problem. There are lessons for our education community and for both political parties. Edu-Snobbery Hurts Us All • We miss opportunities to help kids. I’m not saying we should go “full Finland” and turn Mississippi into a junket destination and object of hero worship. It’s not perfect. As […]
Helen Raleigh: The secret of Mississippi and Louisiana’s educational success is not secret at all; it is about returning to the fundamentals and following the evidence. Mississippi’s Republican-led legislature has implemented effective education reforms in 2012 that prioritize phonics — teaching students to sound out words — and enforce a retention policy for third graders who do […]
Arjun Panickssery: The “Mississippi Miracle” started in 2012 when the Republican governor/legislature introduced phonics-based instruction and began to hold back ~10% of 3rd graders per year who fail a reading test
Kaleem Caire: Mississippi is now #1 in reading among Black children while Wisconsin is #41 among all 41 states reporting scores for Black children. We have a lot more money in our state than they do in Mississippi. In Madison, we have even more. What is up with this? Our public school advocates need to […]
Joanne Jacobs: Mississippi has better schools than Massachusetts, and Texas schools outperform Wisconsin — controlling for race, poverty and non-English-speaking parents. Mississippi, New Mexico and Louisiana outperform expectations based on the challenges their students face. Texas, Georgia and Florida come next. Massachusetts, a relatively wealthy, educated and white state, drops to 26th. Wyoming ranks sixth […]
David Wakelyn: A lot of California policymakers journeyed to Finland to see what was in their special sauce when they scored well on PISA a few years ago. Mississippi’s growth has been more durable. We have a lot to learn if we bring an open mind. Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are […]
Catron Wigfall: Despite spending far less per student than Minnesota, Mississippi has a better track record than Minnesota when it comes to helping its students of color grow academically. Mississippi’s overhaul of its reading pedagogy and its investment in training educators in the science of reading became a model other states are learning from. Mississippi […]
Julia James: This growth can be attributed to several factors, but chief among them is a 2013 state law that created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn’t hit a certain benchmark. But this national test also measures students […]
David Card, Leah Clark, Ciprian Domnisoru & Lowell Taylor A school finance equalization program established in Mississippi in 1920 failed to help many of the state’s Black students – an outcome that was typical in the segregated U.S. South (Horace Mann Bond, 1934). In majority-Black school districts, local decision-makers overwhelmingly favored white schools when allotting funds from the […]
Chad Aldeman: The only reason Virginia might look better overall is because of the composition of our schools –> Andrew Rotherham: The next time someone tells you not to worry, Virginia is not some state like Mississippi, this is all a made up crisis…we don’t need an accountability system…well… —— The data clearly indicate that being […]
Bezos WaPo: “[A]n analysis homing in on the inaugural group of Mississippians subject to the state’s rule concluded that repeating third grade resulted in significantly higher reading scores in sixth grade — with Black and Hispanic students showing particular improvement…. [But i]t is impossible to disentangle retention itself from all that comes with it… after-class […]
Carey Wright: Former State Superintendent of Education Dr. Carey Wright rebuts a recent column in the L.A. Times claiming Mississippi “gamed its national reading test scores.” Like educators in Mississippi and across the nation, I was shocked by the deeply cynical column in the Los Angeles Times about Mississippi’s well documented achievements in education over the past […]
Joanne Jacob’s: Mississippi students used to rank dead last in learning, writes Phil Bryant, the former governor of the state, on Real Clear Education. Not any more. “Mississippi fourth-graders, when adjusted for demographics, are ranked as the nation’s top performers in reading and second in math,” according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Bryant […]
Nicholas Kristof visits flyover country: Mississippi’s success has no single origin moment, but one turning point was arguably when Jim Barksdale decided to retire in the state. A former C.E.O. of Netscape, he had grown up in Mississippi but was humiliated by its history of racism and underperformance. “My home state was always held in […]
Alex Tabarrok: In 2002, Florida adopted a phonics based reading strategy due to Charlie Crist. Scores started to rise. Other southern states started to following suit, including Mississippi long deried as the worst in the nation. APNews: Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and […]
Sharon Luyre: It’s a cliché that Kymyona Burk heard a little too often: “Thank God for Mississippi.” As the state’s literacy director, she knew politicians in other states would say it when their reading test scores were down — because at least they weren’t ranked as low as Mississippi. Or Louisiana. Or Alabama. Lately, the […]
Kerry McDonald We really couldn’t find what we were looking for. We tried several different schools,” added Funchess, who has a master’s degree in computer science and is a certified mathematics teacher. “We decided that if we can’t get the table, we’ll build the table.” The result is Harper Academy, a mixed-age, K-12 microschool for […]
Kerry McDonald: The result is Harper Academy, a mixed-age, K-12 microschool for children who benefit from a smaller school setting with a customized curriculum approach. The microschool currently has 14 students and two classroom teachers, along with Harper and Funchess who serve as administrators while continuing to do their consulting work. Indeed, it’s the consulting […]
David Kaufman: Indeed, 32 percent of Mississippi students hit literacy targets in 2019, up from 27 percent in 2017 and just 17 percent in 1998, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Despite the successes so far, Ms. Wright — who retired from education this year — believes there are plenty of challenges left to […]
Érica Hensley and Teresa Ervin-Springs: The farm had been in Kevin’s family for four generations; it’s a place he visited as a child, but he hadn’t exactly picked up the skills to be a farmer. In June of 2016, as Kevin’s mother’s health failed, she transferred the property deed to him, as no other family […]
Mississippi passed a literacy act in 2013 that requires 3rd-graders to pass a reading test before they can move up a grade. Students have multiple chances to pass the test and those who fail the first two tries can have access to summer reading camps and other resources. — Sharon Lurye (@sharonlurye) May 31, 2022 […]
Sarah Ulmer: The American Federation of Teachers-Mississippi chapter claims that the national AFT (affiliated with the AFL-CIO) helped cover up the questionable financial transactions of funds by the Jackson Federation of Teachers (JFT) and JFT President Dr. Akemi Stout. They have taken their claims to court in a federal lawsuit. According to an article written by Jackson […]
Mississippi’s remarkable NAEP progress was dismissed by some as “nowhere to go but up.” This regression to the mean theory often gets used to dismiss progress in previously low performing states, including AZ and FL. There however is **nothing** inevitable about progress/THREAD pic.twitter.com/fQDhBEpdnh — Matthew Ladner (@matthewladner) June 21, 2021 2017: West High Reading Interventionist […]
Emily Hanford: “Thank God for Mississippi.” That’s a phrase people would use when national education rankings came out because no matter how poorly your state performed, you could be sure things were worse in Mississippi. Not anymore. New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure […]
Matthew Ladner: While last week’s NAEP news was glum nationwide, Mississippi students performed relatively well. You have to dig into the details to see just how well. First, a bit of backstory. Mississippi is one of the nation’s poorest states and has the largest African-American student population in the country. The state has ranked at […]
Emily Hanford: Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading,” said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the book “Language at the Speed of Sight.” “It succeeded in keeping the science at bay, and it allowed things to continue as before.” He says the reading wars are over, and science […]
Ashley Bateman: In the heart of the Mississippi Delta stands a city that has overcome an economy built and sustained on slave labor, a cotton industry built on the backs of field hands, and now a high school that has integrated itself more equitably than any school in the Delta. But while Cleveland, Mississippi, has […]
Steve Wilson: Under House Bill 4, also known as the Parent Involvement and Accountability Act, teachers would be required to grade parents’ involvement with their children’s education. The legislation, by state Rep. Gregory Holloway (D-Hazlehurst), would mandate a section be added to each child’s report card on which the parents are graded on their responsiveness […]
Deborah Fallows: Jim and I returned to Columbus, Mississippi, recently to see how development in the Golden Triangle was progressing, and to visit one of our favorite schools, The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. The MSMS is a two-year public residential school for students of all races, ethnic groups, and economic backgrounds from all […]
Andrew DeGraff: America may be the land of the free, but the two leading contenders for the title of “great American novel” actually take place on the water. For Melville, the ocean contained all of humanity’s great secrets (and metaphors); but for Twain, it was the water itself that was the key. In Adventures of […]
Deborah Fallows: One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin. In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, […]
James Fallows: Over the months Deb Fallows has reported on a variety of impressive and innovative public schools around the country. For instance: the Sustainability Academy in Burlington, Vermont; the Grove School in Redlands California; the Shead School in Eastport, Maine; several English immersion schools in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the Governor’s School for the […]
Debate is raging this year in Mississippi about whether state legislators should agree to start public pre-k programs for the first time. They’re also arguing about school funding and charter schools.
In decades of debate on school reform in Mississippi, though, one issue is ever-present but draws little public discussion: race.
The state’s public schools remain nearly as segregated, in some cases, as they did in the 1960s. In many communities across the state, especially in towns where black children are in the majority, white children almost exclusively attend small private schools founded around the time of court-mandated desegregation in the late 1960s.
Black children, by contrast, usually attend the public schools in these communities. This is also true in Jackson, the state capital. The consequences have been devastating for the state in terms of educational attainment and economic disparities.
White students are a minority in Mississippi’s public schools: Only 44 percent of the students in the state who attended public schools in 2010 were white, compared with 51 percent of whom were black and 3 percent who were Hispanic (a growing population), according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ annual Condition of Education report. This is one of the lowest percentages of white students attending public schools in the nation–and remember that the majority of Mississippi’s population is white.
The parents of three 15-year-olds who were strip-searched and jailed for three days after a trespassing charge expressed outrage Thursday during a press conference and called for the removal of Tate County Youth Court referee Leigh Ann Darby.
“If we don’t stand up for our rights, no one else will,” Dexter Burton of Senatobia, father of Lakiya Burton, told reporters at the Church of Christ at 401 W. Gilmore.
The three youths, who had not previously been identified because of their ages, were at the gathering with their parents and the families’ attorney, J. Cliff Johnson II of Jackson. They are Larandra Wright of Southaven, and Lakiya Burton and Kevonta Mack, both of Senatobia.
Burton and Mack are 10th-graders at Senatobia High School; Wright is a 10th-grader at Southaven High. None had prior brushes with the law before they crossed a renter’s yard at a duplex that faces Morgan Drive in Senatobia this summer.
The advisory committee Gov. Haley Barbour appointed to study K-12 school consolidation voted Monday to hire an outside consulting firm, using $72,000 in private funds from unnamed sources.
Bringing on board a Denver-based firm that specializes in public education systems and policies will allow the committee to have data-driven discussions as opposed to ones mired in emotion and politics, said Johnny Franklin, Barbour’s education policy adviser.
Committee Chairman Aubrey Patterson, the CEO of BancorpSouth Inc., said he did not have permission to release the names of the one individual and two organizations that have agreed to pay the contract with Augenblick, Palaich and Associates Inc.
He described the donors as “interested supporters of public education” and would not say where the donors were from.
Monday’s meeting at the Capitol marked the initial gathering for the Commission on Mississippi Education Structure appointed in late December to study the best way to go about consolidating the state’s 152 districts.
Economic development officials on Wednesday announced the first project to use funds from a $50 million education endowment pledged by Toyota Motor Corp.
The project is a curriculum management audit of eight school districts in the area surrounding a Blue Springs site where Toyota plans to build a car plant. Toyota will make its first $5 million payment in May to the education fund being run by the Tupelo-based CREATE Foundation.
Work on the plant, meanwhile, is stalled because of the recession.
“Certainly, we hope this will be another reassurance to the people who have been very patient and understanding that we are coming and we are committed,” said Barbara McDaniel, external affairs manager for Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America.
McDaniel said the Mississippi education endowment is the largest ever given by the company.
“I think we wanted to make a strong statement that education is very important to Toyota, and we wanted the money to not just benefit the future for Toyota-related employment, but we wanted it to benefit the entire Mississippi region,” she said.
A task force formed by the Legislature to improve underperforming schools has decided to take on the touchy subject of school district consolidation.
During a recent hearing of the task force, the story was told of an agency in the 1980s that had advocated Mississippi’s 152 school districts be consolidated into 82, basically along county lines. The task force was told, perhaps jokingly, that the agency was eliminated by the Legislature the next session.
Senate Education Chair Videt Carmichael, R-Meridian, the co-chair of the task force, responded, also perhaps jokingly, “I think I might disappear if consolidation happened in some of my school districts.”
For years, an array of groups has touted the virtue of school consolidation as a way to save money and increase efficiency in the public schools. The only problem has been finding agreement on how to do it.
“It’s been my observation everybody wants to consolidate everybody else’s district, but not their own,” said House Education Committee Chair Cecil Brown, D-Jackson, the other co-chair of the task force.
A state-by-state analysis by The New York Times found that in the 40 states reporting on their compliance so far this year, on average, 4 in 10 schools fell short of the law’s testing targets, up from about 3 in 10 last year. Few schools missed targets in states with easy exams, like Wisconsin and Mississippi, but states with tough tests had a harder time. In Hawaii, Massachusetts and New Mexico, which have stringent exams, 60 to 70 percent of schools missed testing goals. And in South Carolina, which has what may be the nation’s most rigorous tests, 83 percent of schools missed targets.
Related:
- Much more on Wisconsin’s state exam; the WKCE, here.
- The Madison School District’s “Value Added Assessment” program is based on the WKCE.
- The Fordham Foundation gave Wisconsin’s standards a “D”.
- The Death of WKCE? Task Force to Develop “Comprehensive Assessment System for Wisconsin”
- Alan Borsuk has more
Gov. Haley Barbour has signed several bills into law, including one that would require additional training for school board members in low-performing districts.
The bill becomes law July 1. It would affect local school boards that serve in districts with one or more underperforming schools or in districts with serious financial problems.
The members would undergo training geared toward improving learning and promoting effective financial management. The training would be provided annually by the Mississippi School Boards Association.
Sen. Alice Harden, D-Jackson, a former teacher and a member of the Senate Education Committee, said the bill doesn’t go far enough. She said the additional training should be required for school board members in all districts.
She said many of the state’s school board members are elected, and while they’re committed to supporting the district, “they don’t exactly understand their responsibilities.”
“What they do is set the philosophy of what a district should be doing,” Harden said Wednesday. “The teachers are teaching, the environment is conducive to learning and the school is up to par.”
Reuters: Results of a pilot program in Mississippi hints that distributing apples, oranges and other fresh fruit free of charge at school may be an effective part of a comprehensive program aimed at improving students’ eating habits. During the 2004-2005 school year as part of the Mississippi Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Pilot Program, 25 secondary […]
Alex Gutentag: On May 17, the Oakland, California, teachers union ended a two-week strike—the union’s third strike in five years. The district offered a substantial salary increase for teachers before the strike even began, but negotiations remained deadlocked for days over the union’s other demands. The Oakland Education Association (OEA) put forward several “common good” proposals that included drought-resistant […]
Dave Cieslewicz: But the district is not holding itself accountable where it matters: student performance. For whatever reason, Madison taxpayers have never demanded that the school board set goals for the results of all that investment. Last November voters overwhelmingly approved two referendums, totaling $607 million, the largest increase in MMSD history. And they did […]
Jill Tucker: San Francisco school officials killed plans Wednesday to test out alternative ways to grade some high school students after politicians and parents panned the proposal in the wake of misinformation about it. An estimated 70 teachers in 14 high schools — about 10% of the educators in grades nine to 12 — were […]
John Trasviña Without seeking approval of the San Francisco Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Maria Su plans to unveil a new Grading for Equity plan on Tuesday that will go into effect this fall at 14 high schools and cover over 10,000 students. The school district is already negotiating with an outside consultant to train teachers […]
Kyla Scanlon This is a misalignment problem. The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with […]
Tim Daly: This has made it awkward in recent years, as Mississippi has become the fastest-improving school system in the country. You read that right. Mississippi is taking names. 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, […]
Chad Aldeman: “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. Tim Daly: Mississippi Can’t Possibly Have Good SchoolsAnd yet it does. Are we ready to deal? Underperforming states escape scrutiny. Our biases prevent us from asking, for […]
Matthew Gault: U.S. District Juste Miranda M. Du rejected this argument, but wouldn’t suppress the evidence. “The Court finds that a tower dump is a search and the warrant law enforcement used to get it is a general warrant forbidden under the Fourth Amendment,” she said in a ruling filed on April 11. “That said, […]
Will Flanders That Mississippi–a state with far more challenging demographics–has surpassed Wisconsin on the NAEP in 4th grade reading ought to be a five alarm fire for the education establishment. The answer instead from DPI was to lower student expectations–accepting failure. —— The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery… The data clearly indicate that being […]
Philip Greenspun Harvard University is in the news right now for its showdown with the Trump Administration. Remember that inequality is bad and also that the federal government should spend taxpayer dollars at the nation’s richest institutions in the richest states rather than at, for example, University of Mississippi, Ohio University, or University of Michigan […]
Summary The report highlights sobering 2024 statistics: only 5.8% of Black 11th-graders in Madison—22 out of 310 students—were prepared for college-level reading and writing, compared to 27% of Black students nationally and 10.3% statewide. In math, just 7.1% of Madison’s Black 11th-graders were college-ready, lagging behind 8% nationally and 6.4% across Wisconsin. Wisconsin ranks last […]
Adam Steinbaugh: Wow: The City of Clarksdale, Mississippi, got a court order yesterday directing a newspaper to delete an editorial criticizing city officials — without a hearing. Here’s the TRO issuing the prior restraint:
Joanne Jacobs Summary: Louisiana, never known for education excellence was the big winner on the 2024 NAEP when it comes to progress in the last few years, writes Chad Aldeman. “It was the closest state to recovering from COVID-related declines in 8th grade reading and math, and it was the only state in which fourth-grade […]
Jill Barshay More than 450,000 fourth and eighth graders, selected to be representative of the U.S. population, took the biennial reading and math tests between January and March of 2024. Depressed student achievement was pervasive across the country, regardless of state policies or instructional mandates. Student performance in every state remained below what it was in 2019 on at least one […]
Rick Rojas: But first, Ms. Hooper stood before the student body at Abundance Educational Academy in Mississippi and closed her eyes. “I ask in Jesus’s name that our students supernaturally learn everything presented before them on today,” Ms. Hooper, a longtime teacher who founded the small private school about three years ago, said in a […]
Planet Word: Join Planet Word and our journalist-in-residence, Emily Hanford, for a candid conversation with Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Carey Wright. Their discussion will explore Dr. Wright’s vision for Maryland schools and lessons she brings from her success in implementing evidence-based literacy practices in Mississippi. Under her leadership, Mississippi fourth graders made enormous […]
Alan Blinder: But after Mr. Sewer signed up, he said that Caltech was almost nowhere to be found. Mr. Sewer said his primary instructor, who sometimes vanished during class sessions, lived in Mississippi, not Southern California. A course facilitator, he said, was in India. Neither had any meaningful ties to Caltech, which Mr. Sewer had […]
Andrew Crocker: In a major decision on Friday, the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” Closely following arguments EFF has made in a number of cases, the court found that geofence warrants constitute the sort of “general, exploratory rummaging” that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment intended to outlaw. EFF applauds […]
Alec MacGillis: School leaders in Hardin County — with its cornfields, solar panel installations and what was once one of the largest dairy farms east of the Mississippi — are deeply worried that vouchers stand to hurt county residents. Only a single small private school is within reach, one county to the south, which means […]
Douglas Carnine: To fill this void, our 84 volunteer experts are creating guidance for decisionmakers in the form of evidence-based resources. These are being vetted, curated and organized based on scientific research and on data from high-performing schools, districts and states that consistently produce strong results, especially for marginalized populations. These resources, focused on academic achievement and social-emotional […]
By Paul Caron According to the letter’s signatories, the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) “changed the constitutional landscape when it comes to the consideration of race in higher education,” which, the letter asserts, “requires significant adjustments to your current Standards and Rules of Procedure for […]
Bobby Harrison: House and Senate members often adjourn a legislative day in memory of a constituent or other well known person who recently died. On the day the Mississippi House took its final vote to adopt a new school funding formula, Rep. Karl Oliver, R-Winona, asked “to adjourn in memory of the Mississippi Adequate Education […]
Abbey Machtig: Still, at least once major American leader of the balanced literacy movement, Lucy Calkins, has rolled out changes to her reading curriculum under pressure from the science of reading movement. And initial test scores from around the country show this science of reading model seems to be working. Mississippi was one of the […]
Joe Barrett: A dead horse and crash debris were still strewn along a country road when a woman in a black jacket approached a sheriff’s deputy and said she had been driving the SUV that struck an Amish buggy. Deputies took her statement but grew suspicious. Petersen matched the witness description of the driver as […]
Aaron Garth Smith, Christian Barnard And Jordan Campbell Public education is grappling with an unprecedented set of challenges in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. For starters, nationwide public school enrollment is down by over 1.2 million students compared with pre-pandemic levels, including losses exceeding 5% in New York, Oregon, and Mississippi. Research suggests that […]
John Tillman: Ten Republican-led states have passed universal school choice since 2021, yet much of the South is lagging. There’s a simple explanation: Many Republican lawmakers are teachers-union allies and likely need to be defeated in primary elections for school choice to pass. Republicans against school choice have largely couched their opposition by asserting that […]
Matt Barnum: In the long-running reading wars, proponents of phonics have won. States across the country, both liberal and conservative, are passing laws designed to change the way students are taught to read in a way that is more aligned with the science of reading. States, schools of education, districts, and — ultimately, the hope is — teachers, are placing a […]
Julia Holmes: When Icelandic filmmaker Jón Karl Helgason hears that there are an estimated 11 million swimming pools in the United States, he nearly spits his hand-rolled cigarette out of the Zoom frame. Put end to end, American swimming pools would make up a river five times the length of the Mississippi; emptied all at once, they’d […]
WILL This bill comes at a critical time for literacy in Wisconsin. According to the most recent data from the Forward Exam, only about 37% of Wisconsin students are proficient in reading.i And this is not just a problem in the largest cities. Districts that “Exceed Expectations” on the state report card often have proficiency […]
Emily Hanford notes the “surge in legislative activity” amidst our long term, disastrous reading results [link]. via NAEP 4th grade results 1992-2022. Longtime SIS readers may recall a few of these articles, bookmarking our times, so to speak: 2004: [Link] “In 2003, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored proficient or advanced on the WCKE in […]
Will Flanders and Matt Levene: Forward Exam scores show that Wisconsin students are struggling in reading. Currently statewide, only about 36.8% of students scored proficient or higher on the Forward Exam, meaning the majority of students are falling behind. Reading problems cut across all socioeconomic and racial lines. Much attention has been focused on the […]
I wonder if your average Wisconsinite knows how much better Mississippi’s students are doing than Wisconsin’s. READING White: 0.5 years ahead Black: 2.0 ahead Latin: 1.0 ahead MATHEMATICS White: tied Black: 2.0 ahead Latin: 1.5 ahead Not insulting him; I wouldn’t have guessed! https://t.co/TOT3CtG3WG — Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) May 12, 2023 “More than 30 states […]
📖HUGE Wisconsin reading update📖 A bill’s coming that will do bold, Mississippi-style reforms to save Wisconsin’s kids! But some pieces aren’t funded, colleges have no compliance consequences, and low-scoring 3rd graders can pass. Do you think that it’ll work? Videos below! pic.twitter.com/gmJtmNsoHK — Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) April 25, 2023 “Well, it’s kind of too bad […]
Sarah Mervosh: About one in three children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, according to a key national exam. The outcomes are particularly troubling for Black and Native American children, nearly half of whom score “below basic” by eighth grade. “The kids can’t read — nobody wants to just […]
Transcript: $pending, K-12 Governance, Ed Schools and Reading Outcomes [00:00:00] Senator Duey Stroebel: Actually looking at, uh, US census data, all funds, all sources. Um, Wisconsin’s at about $13,000 and Mississippi is about $9,200. So there’s significant that’s per the US census data, all funds, all sources. So pretty clear there. I think it’s, uh, […]
Transcript mp3 audio www site Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse DPI 3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel
Scott Girard: “Most teachers are still learning how to teach reading from the commercial materials that they’re being supplied,” he said. “These materials are defective. What teachers have traditionally learned from them is poor practices. “What’s the effect? Some kids are going to learn to read anyway, but for a lot of children it makes […]
Mike Stobbe: The new numbers suggest that as many as 275,000 kindergartners lack full vaccine protection. Falling vaccination rates open the door to outbreaks of diseases once thought to be in the rearview mirror, experts say. They point to a case of paralytic polio reported last year in New York, and to recent measles surges […]
Students of all backgrounds are having academic success in Mississippi. Our state is in the top of the nation in 4th grade reading gains for black students! Thank you to our teachers, parents, and students for working so hard to get us here. pic.twitter.com/7Jw3wkj47H — Governor Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) November 4, 2022 The data clearly indicate […]
Will Flanders: Recently, results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) have caused shockwaves around the country. At least partially-related to teachers’ union-led shutdowns that kept schools closed well past when it was reasonable to do so,[i] decades of progress in scores were erased over the course of three years.[ii] Despite declining scores across the […]
Andrew Van Dam: You might want to look at corporal punishment of children in schools. — Lucien Lombardo, New York As a means of controlling classrooms or improving academic performance, corporal punishment has an uninspiring track record. Last year, a review of 69 studiespublished in the medical journal the Lancet found “physical punishment is ineffective in […]
Charles Smith: The percentage of students who performed at or above the proficient level in reading was 36% in 2019, 35% in 2017 and 34% in 1998. While Wisconsin’s numbers remain higher than Mississippi’s, the trend line is flat. Further, Black fourth-graders in Mississippi are outperforming Black fourthgraders in Wisconsin in reading, portending what’s to […]
Tyler Cowen: I am now reading quite a few analyses of the problem, and so few mention price! Even when written by economists. I find this article somewhat useful: “We are a city with very high levels of poverty, and it’s difficult for us to raise the rates enough to do large scale replacement type projects and […]
Where the IRS audits more:https://t.co/SuSwyHjHCZ Note that it is almost the inverse of the per capita income per county. pic.twitter.com/4Jak2KqT3o — John Robb (@johnrobb) August 9, 2022 Humphreys County, Mississippi, seems like an odd place for the IRS to go hunting for tax cheats. It’s a rural county in the Mississippi Delta known for its […]
Michael Walsh: Before 1776 what eventually became the U.S.A. was a collection of British colonies; in 1619, when black Africans aboard a Portuguese slave ship, taken as bounty by English privateers (aka “pirates”), came ashore in the New World, they did so near Hampton in the British colony of Virginia. At that point, there was […]
Sheila Sundar In March of 2020, shortly after my final interview for a tenure-track position in creative nonfiction at Mississippi State University, I received a note of welcome from the department chair — an affable man named Dan, with whom I’d been in consistent contact throughout the process: At a meeting today we voted to […]
Anna Nordberg, via a kind reader: California’s reading scores are dismal, with 68% of fourth-graders reading below grade level. This is the result of the disastrous decision in the 1980s for the state to embrace whole language, the idea that children should learn to recognize words and phrases through context, guessing and memorization. But evidence […]
Indira Dammu and Bonnie O’Keefe: Nationwide, English learners (ELs) are a fast-growing and diverse student population in the K-12 public school system. Today, the Southeast region of the U.S. is home to more than 710,000 EL students, who speak about 400 different languages and account for 15% of EL students in the country. This number […]
Dale Chu: Amid the raging culture fires engulfing our politics and schools comes a concerted push among some conservative groups to codify a “parents’ bill of rights.” House minority leader Kevin McCarthy rolled out his proposal last November, as did U.S. Senator Josh Hawley. Although neither measure is likely to get much traction in Congress, at least not […]
I recently saw a sign prominently posted in a Madison restaurant that said: “Wear a Mask, it’s the law”. This is a teaching moment. The current Dane County Madison Public Health mask requirement is a mandate, not (yet) a law. The status of said mask requirement is the subject of law fare and activism. Some […]
The Economist: This means that states are competing for a limited resource: the people that comprise their tax base. And many states are losing the fight. Between 2019 and 2020, 24 lost more Americans than they gained. Over the past decade, Illinois, Mississippi and West Virginia saw their populations decline. The implications for funding pensions […]
Todd Collins: How do we know if a school district is doing one of its most basic jobs—teaching students to read? That’s one of the main questions the California Reading Coalition, which I helped organize earlier this year, set out to answer with the California Reading Report Card, released in September. Early reading achievement has […]
“1993: Wisconsin Students #3 in the Nation in Reading 2019: #27 If Mississippi can do it, we can do it”. 2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results. My Question to Wisconsin Governor […]
Joanne Jacobs: Only 45 percent of would-be elementary teachers pass state licensing tests on the first try in states with strong testing systems concludes a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality. Twenty-two percent of those who fail — 30 percent of test takers of color — never try again, reports Driven by […]
Beth Schwartzapfel AND Tony Plohetski: When Taylor sued the officers who put him in those cells and ignored his cries for help, federal judges agreed that the conditions were unconstitutional — but they threw out his lawsuit, citing qualified immunity. The issue has come up again and again as the country grapples with what accountability […]
The Economist: Mississippi, often a laggard in social policy, has set an example here. In a state once notorious for its low reading scores, the Mississippi state legislature passed new literacy standards in 2013. Since then Mississippi has seen remarkable gains. Its fourth graders have moved from 49th (out of 50 states) to 29th on […]
Juan Perez, Jr. COVID ‘CONVEYOR BELT’ — A generation of U.S. kids is in the midst of what educators worry will amount to a largely lost school year. Will they be ready for the next grade? Hundreds of thousands of children continue to catch the coronavirus each month, complicating plans to return to in-person instruction […]
Ian Bogost: American colleges botched the pandemic from the very start. Caught off guard in the spring, most of them sent everyone home in a panic, in some cases evicting students who had nowhere else to go. School leaders hemmed and hawed all summer about what to do next and how to do it. In […]
Jon Miltimore: The Atlantic recently asked PredictWise, an analytics firm, to rank US counties based on partisan prejudice (“affective polarization”). The results are now in, and they are fascinating. The most intolerant country was not Rabun County in northeastern Georgia, where the film Deliverance was shot. Nor was it in Albany County, Wyoming, where Matthew […]
Colin Kalmbacher: Former Republican Rep. Justin Amash (L-Mich.) and progressive Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) have joined forces to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives that would eliminate the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity for police officers. “As part of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Congress allowed individuals to sue state and local officials, including police officers, who violate […]