Two years ago came a big admission from none other than the head of New York City Schools that the “whole language” method of teaching kids to read had failed and they were going for the phonic method:

The chancellor of New York City Schools, David C. Banks, announced a dramatic overhaul of the city’s reading curricula on Tuesday. He admitted that the current system, which is based on progressive ideas of “whole language” instruction, is “fundamentally flawed” and scientifically unsound.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault,” he said of New York’s disastrous reading scores, which show that only 49 percent of children in New York public schools are proficient in reading. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.”

Now the evidence is coming in, and from a state long disparaged not just within America but around the world, Mississippi.

Demographic adjustment means they accounted for gender, age, race, ethnicity, special-education status, English-language-learner status and even whether the kids were getting free lunches or merely “reduced-price”:

[Mississippi] has lately reached the middle of the pack with a 245, for 29th place, ahead of much richer [states]. Mississippi’s students are 43% white, 47% black, and only 1% Asian…The Mississippi Miracle is number 1 after adjusting for its unpromising demographics, with comparable Louisiana in second.

I wondered about the mathematics, but that looks good too (“4th grade” maps to our “Year 4” designation):

No. 9 in the nation for overall 4th grade reading scores and No. 16 for 4th grade math scores (up from No. 49 and No. 50 in 2013)

Mississippi is one of only 13 states with gains in 4th grade math, which is the only subject and grade nationally that showed statistically significant improvements since 2022

WRT the demographics was that African American, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged Mississippi 4th graders outperformed their peers nationally.

The thing is that there’s nothing that the State did that’s stunning and new. Back in 2013 they enacted three major education reform laws that:

  • Established the state’s first state-funded pre-K program
  • Made reading instruction a major focus in pre-K through grade 3
  • Re-trained thousands of teachers in the science of reading – meaning phonics.
  • Mandated that schools and districts earn annual A-F grades based on their students’ progress and achievements. No more pass-through bullshit.
  • Sent literacy coaches to underperforming and failing schools.
  • Allowed up to 15 charter schools a year to start in low-performing, D- and F-rated districts, without local school board approval.

Florida led the way on this in 2002 (they just ranked number one in education) and so the Mississippi acts were based on them. You would think that other states would learn from this and obviously some, like New York and Louisiana have done so, with Alabama to follow with legislation this year. But there are too many who haven’t and they’re the usual suspects, starting with Whiter Than White Oregon.

Oregon, with the lowest demographic-adjusted scores, has a Board of Education that has indefinitely ‘paused’ since 2020 the use of any standardized test as a graduation requirement.
…
In Detroit, nearly two-thirds of eighth graders are “below basic” readers.  In Baltimore, 71% of eighth graders are “below basic” in math. It is a sad irony that the districts most loudly dedicated to “equity” are the districts where minority students are suffering the most. There is no “equity agenda” that does more for minority kids than teaching them how to read and do math. Sadly, inner-city schools are failing miserably at their core mission

But it’s the same in a lot of other parts of the USA:

“America’s public schools are plunging our country into an epidemic of illiteracy and innumeracy.”  The starkest result found that “one in every three 8th graders are functionally illiterate,” which should be a national scandal. “As ‘below basic’ readers, millions of teenagers struggle to extract meaning from words on a page,” the piece explained. “As a result, putting a textbook in front of them is pointless. These students are on the brink of adulthood, and yet they stand no chance of understanding an employment contract or a lease agreement. They cannot comprehend articles like the one you’re reading right now.”

Even amidst this list of failure, Illinois, where I’m so glad my wife no longer teaches in the Chicago Public school system, sticks out:

There are no longer any excuses for such failure. Illinois and the others have the example of poorer states than them doing better and need to learn from it. The fact that they haven’t so far, and are refusing to do so, shows up in the learning of the kids they teach.