It turns out that the much ballyhooed improvement in test scores in Mississippi is as a result of teaching to the test, outright fraud, and holding back the 3rd graders who would otherwise have lowered the 4th grade scores:
The term has been shooting around the education field and news reports lately with increasing frequency: “the Mississippi miracle.”
The reference is to that benighted state’s surprising success in improving reading scores for its fourth-graders through a focused program of literacy instruction for teachers and pupils alike. It’s now 10 years old, an anniversary that may have inspired the most recent assessments.
Statistics show that Mississippi’s children have gone from having almost the worst scores on the standardized national reading test for fourth-graders in 2013 to narrowly exceeding the national average in the most recent test, administered last year.
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Education writers and the New York Times jumped on the bandwagon. (“Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education,” was the latter’s headline.)
The Times article in question is (of course) written by Nicholas Kristof, whose perspective on everything can be reduced to, "White saviors need to keep n*****s in line."
As an old journalism adage has it, the story is “interesting, if true.”
And it ain't true.
A close examination of the numbers suggests that it’s not true. Bob Somerby and Kevin Drum, two of the most adept myth busters in the blogosphere, have done yeomen’s work deconstructing the statistics. Their conclusion is that Mississippi’s program isn’t nearly as successful as its fans assert and may not have produced any improvement at all in fourth-grade reading scores. The apparent gains may be a statistical illusion.
Basically, if you make it a requirement that kids score well on the NAEP to get out of 3rd grade, then the numbers for 4th grade go up, because you have eliminated the bottom tenth of your scores.
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Returning to the reading issue, Mississippi implemented what appeared to be an aggressive attack on its literacy shortcomings in 2013. Its Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) required that pupils who failed to pass a reading test at the end of their third-grade year be held back.
See, there's the statistical trick. It's kind of like how Eva Moskowitz and her intentionally ironically named Success Academy post mindbogglingly college admission rates after graduation because they systematically force people out who put them at risk of not making those numbers.
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Moreover, whatever gains had shown up in Mississippi’s fourth-grade scores had vanished by the eighth grade, when all students notched exactly the same scores in 2022 as they had in 2013. A teaching program whose gains evaporate over a four-year span doesn’t much warrant the label “miracle.”
What’s the real story? Drum and Somerby focused on the so-called “third-grade gate” implemented by the literacy program — the requirement that third-grade underachievers repeat third grade. In Mississippi, almost 10% of third-graders have been getting held back, a higher proportion than in any other state. (Some may have been held back more than once.)
The statistical result of this policy should be obvious. If you throw the lowest-ranking 10% out of a statistical pool, the remaining pool inevitably looks better. Drum went so far as to add those dropped pupils back into the calculation. He found that the gains from 2013 to 2022 completely disappeared. “In other words,” he remarked, “the 2013 reforms had all but no effect.”
That's because those 3rd graders do eventually become 4th graders, and eventually 8th graders, and the effect of the age difference diminishes with, well, age.
It also happens because the children held back are not educated in the repeat, they are drilled on the test, because that is how high stakes testing works.
High stakes testing is a corrupt racket. It has been since Shrub got No Child Left Behind passed.
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