INSTANT ASSESSMENTS: Kristof and Ravitch penned instant assessments!

TUESDAY, JUNE 6, 2023

At this site, the search goes on: The search in which we're now engaged began in the distant past.

More precisely, it began on May 17, 2023. It began in the wake of the publication of a lengthy AP report.

We'll be suspending our search for the next few days, during which time we'll be off campus. At this point, it might be a good idea to summarize the current state of the search, in the course of which we've been confronted with a pair of instant assessments.

The search began on May 17, 2023. On that historic date, the Associated Press published an upbeat report under this upbeat headline:

‘Mississippi miracle’: Kids’ reading scores have soared in Deep South states

Test scores have soared in three Gulf Coast states, the AP's Sharon Lurye reported. 

The performance has been strongest in Mississippi, Lurye accurately said. Indeed, "the country has taken notice of what some have called the Mississippi miracle," the AP's reporter said.

Through fifty years of long, hard experience, we've learned to be extremely skeptical concerning claims of this type. For the reason, we set out on our latest search, scrutinizing the relevant data to see how impressive Mississippi's Naep scores might actually turn out to be.

We're still engaged in that search! Along the way, though, a highly unusual event occurred:

A member of the upper-end, mainstream press corps displayed an actual interest in this important matter.

Through fifty years of long, hard experience, we've learned a basic fact. No one cares about public school kids, especially low-income public school kids.

Also, no one cares about public school kids who are said to be black. No one cares about their academic achievements. No one care about their interests, or about their daily happiness—their sense of progress and pride—within their public schools.

It has long been clear that our own blue tribe, as a general matter, has no interest in such matters, or in such underclass kids. 

To his credit, and unsurprisingly, it was Nicholas Kristof who broke the mold. On June 1, he published a lengthy essay in the New York Times under another upbeat headline:

Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education

Kristof had gone to Mississippi to see this thing for himself. He saw second-graders who could read the word "vegetable." Also, he largely seemed to believe the various things he'd been told:

KRISTOF (6/1/23): I had heard Mississippi cited for its progress, but frankly, I was skeptical until I visited. On my second day in Jackson, where 98 percent of public school students are people of color, mostly from low-income families, I visited a second-grade classroom.

The class was reading a book, “The Vegetables We Eat.” The children read aloud and debated what vegetables were. Things that are green? Foods that don’t taste good? I was startled to see second graders read words like “vegetables” and “eggplant” fluently and still more astonished to see the entire class easily read the sentence “Where does nourishing food come from?”

"Thank God for Mississippi," Kristof wrote right at the end of his essay. 

For ourselves, we've often thanked God for Kristof's values, but we haven't always been impressed by his analytical skill in the realm of public education. 

In the first three paragraphs of this June 1 essay, he made some apparent mistakes—and so our search continued. But even as we continued our search, progressive education writer Diane Ravitch landed on Kristof like a ton of sunbaked bricks made from Mississippi mud:

Nicholas Kristof Does Not Know How to Fix Education

Ravitch landed on Kristof like a ton of sunbaked bricks. 

As she started, she said that Kristof "is terrific on many issues but consistently wrong when he writes about education." (We can't say that's flatly wrong.) She raised some valid objections to Kristof's assessments, but she made astonishing errors of her own as she pursued her attack.

So it tends to go, in this red and blue nation, on the rare occasion when the interests of low-income public school kids briefly swim into view. Let's get clear on how this works:

It has been three weeks since that upbeat AP report first appeared. Except for a clownishly bungled ninety second pseudo-discussion on the next day's Morning Joe, we've heard nothing about it on our own blue tribe's "cable news" TV programs:

Except for the occasional person like Kristof, our blue tribe's tribunes quit on black kids decades ago. We quit on black kids when it became clear that erasing our nation's educational "achievement gaps," the product of our brutal history, wouldn't be an easy task.

When we liberals learned that fact, we stopped discussing the problem. Simply put, our blue tribe doesn't care about any of this, and it never has. 

(Few things could be more clear.)

Our blatant lack of interest in low-income kids helps explain why we haven't seen that AP report discussed—not by Rachel, not by Lawrence, certainly not by Nicolle and her favorite friends.

Those people don't care about any of this! Either that, or to the extent that they do care, their corporate owners aren't willing to let them bore us with analyses of this tedious topic.

At any rate, no one is going to talk about this, except an outlier like Kristof. At that point, along comes a partisan warrior like Ravitch, and she suffuses the discussion with gigantic errors as she blasts out her points.

(In comments, Ravitch is praised by blue tribe true believers for her ideological takedown of Kristof. These commenters have no way of knowing about the errors she has made, or about her highly selective presentation of material.)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we're still just a bunch of people! In all honesty, we don't care a whole lot about "underclass" kids—and to the extent that we do care, our analytical skills are woeful.

The Naep presents an amazing array of statistical information derived from its testing program. You'll see a major journalist jump to the moon before you'll see a major journalists sift through that wealth of information—including the wealth of information about Mississippi's good, decent black and white kids.

For today, we'll leave you with some basic data—some data which may be misleading. We'll show you how certain groups of Mississippi fourth graders performed on the Naep's most recent reading and math tests.

(Those most recent tests were administered last year, not in 2019. Reading the essays to which we've linked, it isn't clear that Ravitch or Kristof is aware of that fact.)

How did Mississippi's kids perform on last year's tests? After performing a few obvious statistical adjustments, here are some basic results:

Grade 4 reading, Naep 2022
Lower income black students
U.S. public schools: 193.42
Mississippi: 202.76

Grade 4 reading, Naep 2022
Lower income white students
U.S. public schools: 211.49
Mississippi: 224.45

Grade 4 math, Naep 2022
Lower income black students
U.S. public schools: 212.16
Mississippi: 218.80

Grade 4 math, Naep 2022
Lower income white students
U.S. public schools: 232.07
Mississippi: 241.74

"Lower income" refers to kids who are eligible for the federal lunch program. Further statistical adjustment is possible, but for today, let's leave it right there. 

(For all Naep data, start here.)

For starters, it must be said; those data do not constitute a "miracle." On the other hand, Mississippi's lower income fourth graders did in fact outperform their counterparts across the nation, in both reading and math, on last year's Naep. 

On the surface, they outperformed their counterparts by rather decent amounts. (By a very rough but conventional rule of thumb, ten points on the Naep scale is often said to represent roughly one academic year.)

Those data suggest that something good is happening in Mississippi. But could those data be misleading? A few things must be said:

For starters, you can see that Mississippi, like the nation as a whole, hasn't erased the wide achievement gaps which obtain between white and black public school kids. To appearances, our blue tribe finds those gaps embarrassing, and so they go undiscussed.

Aside from that, the following questions remain—appropriate questions raised by Ravitch in her vastly flawed takedown of Kristof:

To what extent do Mississippi's Grade 4 scores result from its Grade 3 retention policy, in which nine percent of the state's kids get an extra year of graded instruction before they take those tests? 

That retention policy may or may not be a good idea. Either way, it seems to create an unlevel playing field when we compare Mississippi's Grade 4 scores to those of other states.

Ravitch raised that basic question. Also, she asked this:

To what extent do these score gains persist into later school years? More specifically, how well do Mississippi's eighth graders perform when compared to their counterparts? 

Ravitch raised this perfectly valid question, then offered two absurdly misleading sets of data as she pretended to answer. When we resume our search after a hiatus of several days, we'll show you what Mississippi's Grade 8 Naep scores looked like last year.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our big stars don't care about this. 

Borrowing from Yeats, silence invades the suburbs when topics like this pop up. In the few cases where major figures do seem to care, they will typically offer instant assessments larded with technical errors, including errors by omission.

This is the way the national discourse works in this most delusional of all worlds. We'll post on a different topic tomorrow. After an absence of a day or two, we'll then continue our search.

All in all, we just thought that you should see what an actual search might look like. Searches virtually never occur within the discourse created by our high-end, Storyline-driven press, but also by our experts.

Tomorrow: A "raucous" school board meeting