Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times opinion piece, Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education, showcases a troubling disregard for segregated schooling and the poverty in which children find themselves.
Mississippi’s Segregated Public Schools
His article also begs questioning due to its focus on the agenda of ExcelinEd, former governor Jeb Bush’s education lobbying group, which has sway in directing the course of public schools.
ExcelinEd has an agenda for vouchers and online instruction. Once told vouchers would only be for the poor, we now learn they’re meant for the wealthy.
According to The Washington Post:
. . . for the first time in Florida, the vouchers will be available to children from wealthy families, even those who are home-schooled or who already attend private or religious schools.
Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. Education has never been well-funded, and according to NBC News, 32 school districts in Mississippi still need federal desegregation orders.
Jessica Washington for The Root, in What Year is this? In Mississippi, The Fight for School Desegregation Continues, notes:
So in case anyone was curious, it’s not a good sign to be under a desegregation order, and Mississippi is a pretty bad offender.
Retention and the Science of Reading
Kristof writes about how retention and the Science of Reading have created young readers in Mississippi who bumped up test scores. However, this deserves scrutiny.
He links to a Boston University study promoting retention, sponsored by ExcelinEd.
Jeb Bush has bulldozed retention into states besides Florida, including Mississippi, even though research is heavily against it.
The problem is that it’s well established that when students are held back in third grade, fourth graders test well. Students show progress for a while, but they eventually slide. Socially promoted students have been found to do as well as those who are retained.
Massive third-grade retention based on a test is a huge concern. Students may need support to learn to read, but there are kinder alternatives to holding them back. *See below.
Bush also promotes the controversial Science of Reading (SoR).
The Reading First (RF) program of his brother, former President George W. Bush, was mismanaged and had conflicts of interest, but it found that children who participated could sound out letters and words. Still, they didn’t comprehend what they read and did no better than students without the RF programs.
Yet Reading First was called “scientifically based.” The Science of Reading (SoR) is Reading First reincarnated.
“No Excuses” is Back
The longtime-held troubling belief that getting tough on poor children especially in poor charter schools closes the achievement gap seemed to have disappeared, as noted by Joanne W. Golann in this 2021 Hechinger Report, Why are no-excuses schools moving beyond no excuses?
Golann writes:
Loosening tight controls to give students more voice and autonomy is not a death knell for school culture but can deepen learning.
Even discipline-focused KIPP charters dropped their motto Work Hard. Be Nice.
But Kristof’s piece reflects the no excuses essence. He writes:
“Mississippi is a huge success story and very exciting,” David Deming, a Harvard economist and education expert, told me. What’s so significant, he said, is that while Mississippi hasn’t overcome poverty or racism, it still manages to get kids to read and excel.
“You cannot use poverty as an excuse. That’s the most important lesson,” Deming added. “It’s so important; I want to shout it from the mountaintop.” What Mississippi teaches, he said, is that “we shouldn’t be giving up on children.”
The revolution here in Mississippi is incomplete, and race gaps persist, but it’s thrilling to see the excitement and pride bubbling in the halls of de facto segregated Black schools in some of the nation’s poorest communities.
If you’ve never worked in a poor school, it might seem like learning to read is the only gateway to a better life. And no one can say that reading isn’t essential; it is, and children who read will hopefully be able to do better in school and life.
But poor children have many needs and Kristof seems to promote success with the reform ideas that have failed children for years.
For example, children who test well get bikes in Mississippi. How does this work for children who cannot help having problems learning?
Kristof brags:
Mississippi has achieved its gains despite ranking 46th in spending per pupil in grades K-12. Its low price tag is one reason Mississippi’s strategy might be replicable in other states.
Large class sizes it’s implied are fine if test scores show improvement, showing little understanding about why smaller class sizes are important for children to address the many problems that might face in their lives.
The reading programs in Mississippi classrooms described in Kristof’s piece also seem age-inappropriate, where a student can’t sit still in class. And they lack warmth and personalization.
In classrooms, I saw charts on the wall showing how each child — identified by a number rather than a name — ranks in reading words per minute. Another line showed which children, also noted by number, were green (on track to pass) and which were yellow (in jeopardy). Then there were some numbers representing children who were red and urgently needed additional tutoring and practice.
This and no excuses and looking to deny schools funding that will lift children out of poverty is troubling.
It has always been challenging for teachers who work in poor schools, who know and understand that children have serious reasons aside from academics that must be addressed in order to freely learn.
Currently:
- One in five children faces hunger in Mississippi.
- Between 2020-2021, there were 7,635 homeless children and youth in Mississippi.
- In Mississippi, 6.2% of the children do not have health insurance.
Kristof has co-written several books about the poor, so he should know better. The lessons he describes in this opinion piece aren’t good. In the article he kindly discusses his homeless friend who died. I sadly wondered, did they know how to read?
References
Kristof, N. (2023: May 31). Mississippi is offering lessons for America on education. The New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/opinion/mississippi-education-poverty.html.
Alvarez, L. (2023, June 5). In DeSantis’s Florida, it’s vouchers-for-all, even the wealthy. The Washington Post, Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/05/desantis-florida-school-voucher-program-costs/
Alternatives to Retention
Instead of retention, there are other ways to help children without lowering their self-esteem or stressing them out. Here is an example of what could be done, and it would be less costly probably too.
- Lower class size in K-3rd grade. If policymakers don’t want to lower class size in every class, they should, at the very least, look at lowering class sizes in just K-3rd grade. One of the best studies ever done in education was Tennessee Project STAR which showed lowering K-3 class sizes as beneficial. That study should be revisited.
- Looping. Looping keeps young students with the same teacher for two years. The teacher can assist a student who works slower without making them stand out as failing in a repeat class.
- Multiage grouping. Multiage grouping can help younger children grow with older children. It is reminiscent of the one room schoolhouse. Here, it can be done with just a couple of grades.
- Resource Rooms. Children often fail in one weak area and that drags them down in general. A resource class where they get more individual assistance or remediation for their area of difficulty might help them boost their ability all around!
- Individualization. This is most important. Looking more closely at the strengths and weaknesses of all children, and providing interventions for the weak areas, would be a plus. Why not provide an individual plan for every child?
- Tutoring. Not tutoring to replace teachers and stick children on screens, but schools could provide tutoring by older students for service credit.
In the 1980s educators toyed with the concept of portfolio assessment. At the time, I thought that would be cumbersome although as an art teacher that was exactly what I was doing. After 30+ years of standardized testing I wish we would reconsider portfolio strategies with small class sizes. What people like Kristoff fail to understand is that hammering early literacy from Kindergarten creates students who follow a self fulfilling prophecy of failure reinforced by reminders of failure. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Kristoff’s writing is that he thinks he now grasps the issue because he was led by the nose through classrooms chosen by those benefiting from the narrative. Kristoff spends time analyzing discrete incomplete data to come to misguided conclusions. That might be our greatest challenge to overcome inequality in schools.
I totally agree. Instead of retention, which is expensive, lowering class sizes where teachers can truly understand what children need, and how they’re working, is what’s needed.
Thank you, Paul.
Mr. Bonner. You clearly are uninformed about Kentucky’s VERY INTENSIVE attempts to use portfolios for assessments back in the 1993 to 2008 or so period. In the end, this turned out to be a massive failure. Just a few problems included the inability to keep scoring consistent and finding enough scorers. As an educational tool, portfolios can be useful, but they are just not suited for state assessment programs.
Why do you claim Kentucky was a massive failure? Always used to see them rallying around their schools in some places. You seem to be heavy on the assessment.
I live in Kentucky. I watched the failure of Performance Events, Math Portfolios, Writing Portfolios and numerous separate assessment programs over the years. I also watched state tests get inflated while NAEP showed far less progress. Multi-age classrooms faded away. Most of the reforms didn’t work and have now been abandoned.
Finally catching up on my mail.
I said the writing (and math) portfolios for assessment were massive failures because they were. Math portfolios only lasted from 1993 to 1996. Teachers hated them and the state’s math performance was dismal.
Writing portfolios were also a struggle from the beginning. The state suffered on with them until 2008, if memory serves. They never were scored with anything close to needed accuracy for assessment purposes and finally were thrown out of assessment all together.
The performance events program also died at the same time as the math portfolios. It proved impossible to replace these events with new items that assessed the same material in a consistent manner as required by an assessment program. I cringed when Common Core launched the same mistake on all the rest of the country. It turned out no better in the end because you just cannot replace these items with new tasks that maintain any sort of consistency and scoring standards.
I wonder how large class sizes were at the time. Also, I agree that Commmon Core has not been successful. Thanks for your comment, Richard. I may disagree sometimes, but I respect your insight.
RE: Kentucky Class Sizes – Found some data in the NCES website. In 1993-94, elementary class size for Kentucky was 24.4. In 2007-08 it was 22.0. In 2020-21 it was 19.8. Not much change during the 1990 to 2000 era when the reforms I mentioned earlier crashed.
RE: Common Core – I was really concerned about it by 2013 when several correspondents who were on the Common Core Review Committee started discussing issues of major concern. When the two testing consortia announced their plans, I got even more concerned. They were going to repeat some of Kentucky’s expensive mistakes from the 1990s, and did so. Lots of money down the drain because people were ignorant of what had already happened in education, a problem that continues to this day.
He’s talking about READING. The failure of U.S. schools to teach children (particularly poor children) to read is a human rights issue. Those other things are important but deflecting the discussion from KNOWING HOW TO READ is exactly how we rationalized this failure for more than 50 years.
Universities have, for the most part, not taught teachers a legitimate method for reading (and orthography and writing) instruction, thereby perpetuating this fraud.
We should be ashamed and alarmed.
I question how well the children are learning to read in Mississippi. And I disagree with you. Many teachers have been teaching reading well for years. Children who come from poor homes deserve great public schools that have what wealthier public schools have. He’s justifying cutting costs to public schools that work with children who are poor, keeping class sizes large etc. And the people he’s hitching his star to want vouchers. I fear that these children will wind up in poor charters. It’s also hard to separate the problems children face out of school with how they do in school.
To be clear, I don’t think Mississippi has all of the answers, but their performance to date, including during the COVID period, absolutely demands attention.
Here are some links to a few of the blogs I have written about Mississippi.
“Kentucky education can’t say thank goodness for Mississippi anymore!” https://tinyurl.com/2ybxx35w
“Some more food for thought on the Mississippi NAEP situation”
(This one deals with the issue of whether 3rd Grade retention explains MS performance on 2019 NAEP)
https://tinyurl.com/5n8ccjxx
“The story about improvement in reading in Mississippi continues to get better”
(I was surprised by what I found in this one. I didn’t think lower elementary-focused reforms had enough time as of 2022 to show up in Grade 8 results, but I was wrong)
https://tinyurl.com/bd2fcfsf
Richard, when third graders are retained, the new 4th grade is bound to do better on the tests.
https://dianeravitch.net/2023/07/02/nancy-bailey-eviscerates-the-mississippi-miracle/
And see:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-07-03/how-mississippi-gamed-national-reading-test-to-produce-miracle-gains