Southerners are illiterate and ill-educated?
Sorry, Hoss, you mean California and other blue states are illiterate and ill-educated.
This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation's Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage.
In my home state of California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level -- which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad.
These numbers have been tumbling downhill in California and more widely across the U.S. for years now, and not just because of school closures during the pandemic. Nationwide, reading scores for fourth graders peaked back in 2015, and while the especially ugly 2022 outcomes were dismissed at first as COVID-19 outliers, scores have fallen further since. The decline is the worst for the kids who were already struggling; the test scores of the bottom 10% of students have dropped catastrophically.
But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California's on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.
The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it's not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation's best performers when you look at students who are not "economically disadvantaged."
Consider this the latest chapter of the "Mississippi Miracle," which has seen the state climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally. This rise has received a great deal of coverage in publications ranging from The New York Times to The New York Post. And yet, it still feels as if what's taking place in the Deep South still has been grossly undersold.
First, it's not just Mississippi -- Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements.
Second, many people who aren't too focused on education policy seem to imagine Mississippi has simply stopped underperforming, that they're now doing about as well as everyone else.
This is not true. They haven't just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools. Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)
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To fail [in teaching children to read] is to lastingly abandon a significant fraction of our children to a lifelong struggle. And blue states have been failing. We have been spending lots of money on schools, but we have not been willing to muster the political will and effort necessary to hold those schools accountable for results and adopt teaching practices that actually work.
For a while, there was the excuse that it was hard to know what did work. But over the last 15 years, as Mississippi has scaled the state rankings and other southern states have mimicked its success, it has become clear that we do know -- or we could, if we wanted to.
"People are at a loss and would rather refer to it as the "Mississippi Miracle" than look under the hood to see what is really happening," Kareem Weaver, the executive director of FULCRUM, a literacy advocacy group here in Oakland, told me. "They aren't doing anything that others can't do. In fact, they are doing it with far less money than most state departments of education have at their disposal."
We just have to ask ourselves: Are we going to do it, or is it unimportant to us whether our children learn to read?
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[T]here are some obvious commonalities among the Southern Surge states. White names three, the first of which sounds obvious in retrospect but was in fact novel: The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research. This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked "whole language" method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound.
I've banged the drum about this a lot. Educrats are Cargo Cultists who see what the faster-readers are doing and think, "Hey, we'll just tell the slow-readers to do what the fast-readers are doing!"
If you're good at redanig, and I asusem most of you are, you read alstmo words by a glance. You know the conxtet of the sectecen, you note the first letter of the wrod, and you see the legthn of the word. You don't read the word letter-by-lrtetel. You scan it at a glnace.
In fact, studies have shown that it doesn't matter how many misspellings occur in the interior of a word. If the first letter is right and the length is right, you'll blip right over the misspelled word and read it as the right one. As you did in the last paragraph, in which every fourth word was deliberately jumbled.
So this is what experienced readers do -- people who have read millions of words.
Fast-reading kids do this too, but with the much-smaller vocabulary they've already become very familiar with.
But before that -- they used the phonics method, reading letter by letter and sounding out the words. You use phonics to learn to read. Once you know how to read, you can start reading words-at-a-glance.
But stupid, incompetent educrats decided to stop teaching phonics to the slower readers and tell them to just read whole words via the "whole language" method the way that faster-readers do. The problem? The faster readers didn't start with reading whole words at a glance, they started with phonics.
And stupid educrats decided to saw off the first five rungs of the reading ladder and tell slower-readers to just jump up to the sixth run.
They did this with math, too, which is why parents cannot help their kids learn math any longer. Kids who are good at math begin noticing little patterns and making shortcuts in math. Like, the most simple sort of shortcut: If the problem is 350 divided by 30, you don't divide 350 by 30. You notice that both numbers are divisible by ten and divide everything by ten first, to get 35 divided by 3. A much easier problem to work out. (You might also see that 3 goes into 36 12 times evenly, so that the answer will be just a scotch lower than 12.)
But before kids can learn to do this, they have to take math step-by-step. You can't skip steps until you know the actual steps.
But just like with reading, idiot incompetent educrats decided that the kids who are bad at math should be taught the grab-bag of little tricks and short cuts the kids who are good at math have intuitively learned after doing lots and lots of math by the step-by-step approach.
This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention -- teach phonics! And you should, indeed, teach phonics.
That's what I just said.
But making schools adopt the approach took more than a mere nudge. The Southern Surge states have tried earmarked funding, guidance to districts, and outright mandates to accomplish universal adoption.
In other words: the states had to force teachers to stop using a method that didn't work and start teaching a method that does work.
They didn't want to teach phonics because they didn't want to have to learn phonics themselves to teach it. They want to just tell kids to just look at word and magically divine its meaning. Because it's easier for them.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach for the US public school system.
"Those states all made a commitment to rigorous reviews of the highest quality published materials for students and some level of incentive -- whether it was voluntary or involuntary -- for districts to implement those curriculums," White said.
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The third pillar is everyone's least favorite, but it's equally crucial. "Number three is clear accountability at the district level, at the school level, at the educator level, and at the student and parent level," White said.
Accountability, of course, means standardized tests, requirements that students master reading before they are advanced to the fourth grade, and rankings of schools on performance. Accountability is no fun; when there aren't active political currents pushing for it, it tends to erode. But it's badly needed.
"Schools have gotten very distracted," White told me. "And at the same time, many states have been loosening the incentive structures that exist to focus on reading and math knowledge and skills. I think you have to question that. I think you have to see that these states have all had stringent accountability as a core tenet and have done it over successive administrations even when it wasn't a popular thing to do."
Hm, what have they gotten distracted by?
Maybe on teaching that there are 57 genders with new genders being scientifically discovered every day?