The Washington Post visits Mississippi!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Errors wherever you look: Finally, the Washington Post editorial board has weighed in on the Mississippi miracle.

Our own semi-apology follows. First, this is the way yesterday's featured editorial began:

Holding kids back can’t explain Mississippi’s education ‘miracle’

The so-called Mississippi miracle in education really isn’t one. The state’s surge in student achievement results not from divine intervention but from careful policy applied by committed human beings. One of these policies has received extra attention: the decision to hold back third-graders who don’t meet state reading standards. But by focusing too much on this rule alone, reformers risk missing what makes the broader program successful.

Local officials all over the country are attempting to unspool the story of Mississippi’s journey from worst in the nation in test scores to the middle of the pack. Schools everywhere are struggling to catch up students after learning loss from the pandemic. Most states have been unable to match pre-2020 levels of achievement. Mississippi, however, set a personal record in reading this year, and its gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exceed every one of its peers’. 

Does anyone actually care about this general topic? Those first two paragraphs feature factual bungles as far as the eye can see. 

How many errors have the editors made? Let us count the ways:

For starters, no one did anything on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Naep)  "this year." 

The Naep was last administered in 2022. That would actually be last year.

That can be viewed as a minor error. A larger misstatement is this:

The state of Mississippi did not "set a personal record in reading" on the 2022 Naep. Also, the state didn't "match [its] pre-2020 level of achievement" on those first post-pandemic tests.

In fact, Mississippi "set a personal record in reading" on the 2019 Naep. As in almost every state, its statewide reading scores dropped in 2022.

Adding to the factual chaos, the editors link to this report as they say that Mississippi "set a personal record in reading this year, and its gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exceed every one of its peers’." 

So the editors said, and so the editors linked! But as you can see by clicking that link, the report to which they link is a report from 2019 about Mississippi's gains on the Naep as of that earlier year.

Everyone can and does make mistakes. That said, the editors seem to have no idea what they're talking about as this editorial begins. 

We've told you for years that no one in the mainstream press corps actually cares about any of this. In our view, the gong-show performance in this editorial tends to support that claim, which is built from long experience.

Now for our own apology:

A few weeks back, we (unwisely) set out to finish our earlier discussion of these Mississippi test scores. We haven't continued with that (extremely complex) task.

There are several reasons for that. In part, it involves the complexity of Kevin Drum's two posts on this topic, in the second of which he reversed himself on what he had said in the first.

In this July 3 essay for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik referred to the first of those two posts, and to our own work on this topic. (We underwent surgery on July 5 and didn't see Hiltzik's piece.)

For ourselves, we've never understood either of Kevin's posts on this topic. That includes his initial post, the post to which Hiltzik referred, in which Kevin declared that we had been right about this topic all along.

For the record, we still don't know what we think about Mississippi's improved scores. We do think this delicate thought should probably be floated:

It's routinely said—correctly, as far as we know—that teachers and principals have no reason or incentive to cheat on the Naep. As far as we know, teachers and principals wouldn't even have a way to cheat on the Naep if they wanted to do so.

An additional impression would be this:

It's our impression that state superintendents could conceivably put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to the administration of the Naep within their individual states. 

We aren't sure if that is true, and you can be sure that no American newspaper will ever bother to report it out. But we suspect that it may be the case.

In this brave new era, state superintendents do have an incentive to drive up statewide Naep scores—and, for better or worse, there is a direct tie between Mississippi's statewide administration in the past decade and the gruesome test score cheating debacle which occurred in the D.C. Public Schools during the tenure of Chancellor Michelle Rhee. 

(For the record, Rhee had achieved that lofty position on the basis of long-standing test score claims which were transparently, clownishly phony.)

We've often said that no one ever went broke doubting miraculous test scores in the public schools. Nor is there any reason to think that our journalistic or academic elites would ever go to the trouble of conducting a full exploration of surprising test scores of this type, or of the pleasing Storylines which emanate from such scores.

Are Mississippi's kids really outperforming their peers across the nation by the substantial margins we've described in the past? In our view, it's a possibility, but we'd be inclined to recommend a good healthy dosage of doubt.

Meanwhile, there's the embarrassing, error-riddled presentation by the editorial board of the Washington Post. Recommended translation:

No one actually cares about any of this, and no one ever has. 

An anthropology lesson is lurking here. It remains forever unlearned.