MISSISSIPPI'S KIDS: For one brief, shining (illusory) moment...

THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 2023

...these Naep scores can look very good: Below, you see one of the sets of Naep test scores which helped launch a thousand ships.

If you're prepared to suspend disbelief, these numbers can look very good:

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 216.11
Mississippi: 217.16

For all Naep data, start here.

Say what? Mississippi's fourth graders outperformed their peers from across the nation on the most recent Naep test? They managed to do so despite the many demographic challenges in their economically challenged state?

On its face, a result like that can have the feel of a revolution—possibly even a miracle. And let the word go forth to the nations:

When we perform some thoroughly normal "statistical adjustments," Mississippi's performance on that test looks even better still.

Mississippi has an unusual number of kids who hail from lower income homes. It has more black kids than the average state—and black kids typically underperform white kids and Asian kids on measures of educational achievement.

Despite those demographic challenges, Mississippi's good and decent fourth grade kids outscored their nationwide peers! And here's the way the numbers look when we perform one basic set of statistical adjustments:

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
White kids, 2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 226.03
Mississippi: 229.53

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
Black kids, 2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 198.12
Mississippi: 204.41

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
Hispanic kids, 2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 204.34
Mississippi: 213.71

Say what? Mississippi's good and decent black fourth graders outscored their peers around the nation by roughly two-thirds of an academic year?

(By a very rough but widely used rule of thumb, ten points on the Naep scales is said to be, very roughly, the equivalent of one academic year.)

Citizens, can we talk? The more we perform these very basic statistical adjustments, the better Mississippi looks! Here you see how the data look when restrict ourselves to fourth graders from lower-income homes:

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
Lower-income kids, 2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 202.67
Mississippi: 211.74

Mississippi's lower income kids outscored their counterparts nationwide by almost one full year!

And not only that! After another basic adjustment, we're left to marvel at such data as these:

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
Lower-income white kids, 2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 211.49
Mississippi: 224.45

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
Lower-income black kids, 2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 193.42
Mississippi: 202.76

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
Lower-income Hispanic kids, 2022 Naep
U.S. public schools: 198.70
Mississippi: 210.58

In all three racial / ethnic groups, Mississippi's lower-income kids outscored their nationwide peers by roughly one year—or more!

On their face, statistics like these may have the look of a miracle. After adjusting for Mississippi's unmistakable demographic challenges, it looks like the good and decent kids of that state are outperforming their national peers by very substantial margins.

In our next installment of this report, we're going to show you how Mississippi's fourth graders performed in 2022 on the Naep math test. For today, we're going to take you back to that challenging passage from the Great American Novel. 

We posted the passage yesterday. The passage goes like this:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Tom and Daisy Buchanan were careless people, Fitzgerald famously said. In our view, so are the "education tourists"—journalists and experts alike—who look at pleasing data like these and ask no further questions, turning instead to pleasing Storyline.

For one brief, shining (illusory) moment, those Naep scores from Mississippi can look very good! We can look at those surprising numbers and do what journalists have done for at least the past fifty years:

We can talk about a revolution, even about a "Mississippi miracle." We can talk about "Schools That Wotk," or about The Little Low-Income State  That Could.

That's how Tom and Daisy would have done it. In our view, that's very much what the Associated Press, and then Nicholas Kristof and the Times, happily hauled off and did.

Mississippi is full of good, decent kids. By all accounts, it's also full of good, decent people who are working very hard to improve that state's public schools.

That said, for reasons we started to explain before our recent surgery, those numbers strike us as highly illusory. Almost surely, those numbers are highly misleading.

Beyond that, let us add this:

Before we start saying that "we know how to teach reading," we badly need to slow our roll. We need to look at a data set like this:

Average scores, Grade 4 reading
Mississippi, 2022 Naep
White kids: 229.53
Black kids: 204.41
Hispanic kids: 213.71

That black / white "achievement gap" is enormous—and those kids are just in the fourth grade! If you can see a "miracle" there, we'll have whatever you're having.

Tom and Daisy would have walked away at this point. They would have walked away while enjoying the latest happy talk.

In our view, Nicholas Kristof did much the same thing in his essay for the Times. We'd say that the Associated Press, and then the New York Times, were having some fun with Storyline—and were being uncaring and careless.

Mississippi's kids are decent and good. Our major elites, maybe not!

Tomorrow or Saturday: For some perhaps slightly peculiar reason, the Grade 4 math scores in Mississippi were almost as good!