The education establishment convinced itself that the progressive social contract contributes as much to student performance as scholastic fundamentals.
Charlie’s piece on the paradigmatic revolution in Mississippi that has produced dramatic improvements in students’ test scores is vital. So, too, is Rich’s column detailing the steps Magnolia State educators took to achieve what its proponents are calling the “Mississippi Miracle.” Both are based on a report in The Argument bylined by Kelsey Piper, an intrepid journalist who has made a noble habit of confronting her compatriots on the left with discomfiting information about the world around them — often the sort that has long been known to conservatives. As Frederick Hess recently explained in National Review, Mississippi is one of four Southern states that are seeing a surge in student achievement.
Mississippi students’ impressive improvements are not exactly unknown to the left. They have just been ignored by those who are disinclined to take the state’s test results at face value. Not long ago, however, that was not the case.
The educational trends in Mississippi are not exclusive to Mississippi. “In 2019, blue states had higher average NAEP scores on all four major tests (4th and 8th grade reading and math),” Tim Daly observed in the Education Daly. “By 2024, red states had taken the lead in three of the four.” That story receives little attention in mainstream pedagogical circles because “these are SEC states,” he notes. And as Charlie observed, in blue states where teachers’ unions hold sway, educational success stories in which the unions are written out of the story have recently failed to elicit the attention of progressive social commentators.
Initially, however, some on the left who were invested in repairing the teachers’ unions’ unsalvageable reputations set out to discredit the notion that anyone not beholden to that monolith could possibly know the first thing about education. That was what L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik set out to do two years ago, as the Mississippi Miracle was only just becoming a thorn in progressives’ sides.
At the outset of Hiltzik’s July 3, 2023, piece, he casts a skeptical eye on the results emanating from Mississippi and implies that Jackson has succeeded only in manipulating statistics to make it appear as though students were outperforming their peers in blue America. He cites the work of the late columnist Kevin Drum, who, along with a colleague, showed that the “apparent gains may be a statistical illusion.”
That was what Drum found, at first. But he subsequently revised his opinion that same month. “It looks like I might have been wrong again,” Drum admirably admitted. “Something really did happen in Mississippi. After the switch to phonics, their kids could read a lot better than before.” That seems rather straightforward, but Hiltzik was too invested in his own prejudices to similarly revise the record.
And those prejudices are laid bare.
To “consider the social and political landscape in Mississippi” is to gaze into a “black hole,” he wrote, and not just when it comes to educational policy. Hiltzik spends the remainder of the column castigating Mississippi’s abortion laws. He scolds Mississippians for its health-care policies, specifically its reluctance to expand access to Medicaid under Obamacare. He takes an especially dim view of Mississippi’s minimum wage schedule and its laws protecting the right of non-union workers to work in typically unionized fields.
What does any of this have to do with education? Hiltzik explains why “the focus on instructional technique” when attempting to boost student performance is hopelessly flawed:
Education expert Paul L. Thomas has identified the key factors as “food and work security, healthcare, [and] class size.” Those get largely ignored in the literacy debate, he observed, “even though these conditions combined would dwarf any measurable impact of teacher quality or program/standards quality.” [Emphasis his.]
Mississippi’s answer to Hiltzik’s supposition is quite simple: no, they don’t.
Indeed, the impossibly obtuse supposition that students suffer wherever the entire suite of progressive desiderata is not at the forefront of the social contract is illustrative of the problem facing the American education establishment. Its members — particularly an activist class that is drawn to political organizing at least as much as to actually educating — seem to have genuinely convinced themselves that ensuring universal access to health insurance, for example, contributes as much to student performance as the scholastic fundamentals.
That is a nifty trick to play on yourself if you’re looking for permission to abdicate your professional duties and pursue flights of fancy that are more exciting than the rote mundanities of daily life in a classroom. It is an abdication, nonetheless.
Hiltzik did his best to reinforce the activists’ delusion in his readers. But the data speak for themselves, and Hiltzik has not revisited his conclusions. Perhaps he never will. To do so would be to concede that the most pilloried state in the Union — the butt of every progressive joke about the hill folk who populate flyover country — is beating the left at what it believes is one of its core competencies.
Kelsey Piper deserves credit for acknowledging the evidence of her own eyes. You can’t say the same for everyone in her ideological cohort. And it’s not hard to see why.
If the left was wrong when it convinced itself that aggregate educational success is impossible in the absence of a progressive social contract, what does that say about the teachers’ unions? What does that say about their enablers in high office? Indeed, what does it say about the value of that progressive social contract?
Who wants the answers to such questions? It’s better not to ask them at all.