Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

Debating the Test Metrics and Adjustments

• Large chunk of the thread questions the Urban Institute’s demographic adjustments (race, gender, lunch status, SPED, ELL).
• Critics argue:
  • Adjusted rankings can make heavily white states “fall off a cliff” and diverse states surge, suggesting possible modeling artifacts.
  • Focusing only on adjusted scores can obscure that Mississippi’s raw NAEP scores are still bottom-tier.
  • “Removing bad data points” (e.g., struggling students) can manufacture an illusion of success.
• Defenders respond:
  • Adjustments are standard if the goal is to measure school impact rather than parental income, tutoring, or neighborhood effects.
  • Comparing a poor Mississippi district to a wealthy coastal one on raw scores is meaningless for policy.
  • Poverty/lunch status is a reasonable proxy for socioeconomic status, not a causal claim about lunches “making kids worse.”

Retention, Testing, and the “Miracle”

• Mississippi’s policy of retaining 3rd graders who can’t read is a focal point.
• Some see retention as obviously helpful—don’t advance unprepared kids; others see it as gaming cohorts and masking a system that failed to teach reading in three years.
• One linked analysis suggests retention rates didn’t change much post‑2013, implying it can’t explain the gains.
• Several note that big 4th‑grade reading gains don’t fully persist into 8th grade, raising doubts about long‑term impact and “teaching to the test.”

What Mississippi Actually Changed

• Commenters fill in omissions from the article:
  • Heavy investment in early literacy; K–3 teacher training; phonics and “science of reading” (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension).
  • Focus on core academics (reading, math) over broader ESSA “whole child” or ideological initiatives.
  • A tuition‑for‑service program to attract new teachers, despite very low pay ceilings and difficult working conditions.

Comparisons and Broader System Problems

• Maine: steep declines attributed by some to stagnant teacher pay, aging staff, and administrative bloat and gimmicks, not lack of total spending.
• Oregon: poor adjusted scores amid high spending; explanations offered include underfunded supports for struggling students, rural staffing crises, covid closures, and discipline changes.
• Several argue spending has risen nationally without proportional gains, often because money flows to administration rather than classroom instruction or teacher salaries.

Politics, Culture, and Interpretation

• Some see the article as using Mississippi to bash “blue states” and flatter conservative approaches (phonics, basics, skepticism of education schools).
• Others emphasize the real signal: poor Southern states improving while some rich, liberal states regress—worth studying without stereotypes.
• A long subthread debates coastal contempt for the rural South, whether DEI and empathy should extend to “deplorables,” and how class and culture biases distort both education policy and how these results are received.