A Los Angeles Times columnist got under the skin of a number of folks, including Mississippi’s former superintendent of education, by recently questioning this state’s incredible gains on a national reading test over the past decade.
Michael Hiltzik was perhaps justified in his skepticism, but for the wrong reasons. Instead of taking potshots at Mississippi for banning abortion and refusing to expand Medicaid — two issues totally unrelated to education performance — he could have said he doubted the reading scores because this state has a history of gaming the system, as when it increased the high-school graduation rates by lowering standards several years ago.
But what about reading? Are the gains in fourth grade real — going from the worst performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test to better than the national average?
The answer appears to be yes, although so far much of the improvement is transitory, largely disappearing within four years.
Hiltzik’s now discredited column was based on the research of two bloggers, who hypothesized that Mississippi’s gains in fourth grade were the result not of new teaching strategies but of holding back the lowest performers in third grade. The bloggers wrongly assumed that prior to the Literacy Based Promotion Act of 2013, which requires most third graders to pass a state reading test before advancing to fourth grade, Mississippi didn’t fail many third graders. The bloggers have since retracted their analysis after being shown that the age of fourth grade test takers had changed hardly at all since 2013.
“The Mississippi reading miracle looks to be real after all,” wrote one of the bloggers, Kevin Drum, in a headline acknowledging his error.
Russ Latino of the news site Magnolia Tribune also pointed out that Hiltzik is hardly one to tarnish Mississippi’s gains by focusing on the racial gap that persists between white and Black students. As Latino says, Mississippi can actually be proud of how much it has reduced the gap. Even though it’s still 25 points wide, that’s much better than the 37-point disparity in California, which has the second-largest gap among states that track the statistic.
Where Mississippi falls short so far is being able to sustain its progress.
Between 2019 and 2022, the state’s fourth grade reading score on the national test actually declined slightly. That happened, however, all around the country, most likely due to the classroom disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of bigger concern is the lack of improvement in the upper grades, a point in Hiltzik’s column that he does get right. Between 2013 and 2022, Mississippi students in the eighth grade, the only other cohort measured by NAEP, saw no improvement on their scores. Whatever the state has learned to do right in the early grades apparently has not translated to the middle school years.
“A teaching program whose gains evaporate over a four-year span doesn’t much warrant the label ‘miracle,’” Hiltzik wrote.
That criticism is fair. The end game for education reforms is not to get students reading at grade level in the fourth grade. That’s the starting point. The end game is to have them reading at a 12th grade level by the time they graduate, plus being competent with other academic skills, such as math and critical thinking, and having a solid foundation in literature, history, civics and technology.
Producing a well-educated, well-rounded populace is what schooling is supposed to be about. Reading is a building block for all of that to happen, and there’s no discounting its importance. But Mississippi should not be satisfied with one education miracle. It needs to produce a bunch of them.
