SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2026
Eighth-graders bypass Lourdes: We'd call it one of his weak spots.
As we noted in Monday's report, Nicholas Kristof has endorsed the claim of that "Mississippi miracle" in a recent column for the New York Times.
(To his credit, he didn't use the term "miracle," nor has he done so in the past. Almost everyone does.)
The miracle involves the miraculous Naep scores produced by that state's (good, decent, deserving) public school kids. As you may know, the Naep is a highly regarded federal program which tests reading and math, every few years, in Grade 4 and Grade 8.
(For most purposes, there are reasons to skip the Grade 12 scores.).
The Naep is a highly regarded program. On Tuesday, we focused on this miraculous finding, as cited in Kristof's column:
These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling
[...]
Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).
Say what? Mississippi's black fourth graders outperformed their counterparts in Massachusetts?
At least on its face, that claim is correct! Whatever the explanation might be, here are the relevant scores from the most recent testing:
Average scores, 2024 Naep
Black kids, Grade 4 reading
Massachusetts: 202.86
Mississippi: 205.93
If genuine, that may or may not constitute a miracle. But given the circumstances mentioned by Kristof, it looks like a major accomplishment.
(According to a very rough rule of thumb, a gap of 10-11 points on the Naep is often said to correspond, very roughly, to one academic year.)
As if to prove that everyone makes mistakes, we then uncorked a whopper. (As we've mentioned several times, the incessant flooding of the zone has had us feeling overwhelmed. Plus, the Super Bowl!)
As of today, a double groaner has been corrected in Tuesday's report. What we had meant to present can be seen below—Mississippi's white fourth graders also came fairly close to matching the kids up north:
Average scores, 2024 Naep
White kids, Grade 4 reading
Massachusetts: 233.21
Mississippi: 230.85
(By the way: When we look at the giant gaps between white and black kids in each of those states, do we really want to claim that anyone's producing a miracle at this point in time?)
At any rate, there you see the fourth grade scores from the most recent Naep. Mississippi's black kids outscored their peers in Massachusetts. Mississippi's white kids came close.
If nothing is "wrong" with those test scores, that result would seem to represent a substantial, surprising accomplishment. That said, adult life doesn't begin after fourth grade—and here are the corresponding scores from that same year for eighth grade students in those two states:
Average scores, 2024 Naep
Black kids, Grade 8 reading
Massachusetts: 252.03
Mississippi: 242.94
Average scores, 2024 Naep
White kids, Grade 8 reading
Massachusetts: 275.88
Mississippi: 263.83
Borrowing from the early Dylan: But oh, what kind of miracle is this, which goes from great to worse?
There you see a puzzling aspect of this alleged miracle. Over the course of quite a few years, Mississippi's fourth graders have been racking up surprising, nearly miraculous test scores. But by the time the state's kids reach Grade 8, the scores continue to look quite a bit like what they were in the past.
Quickly, let's state the obvious:
The fourth graders who performed so well in 2024 may still be performing that well when they reach the eighth grade and are tested in 2028. But Mississippi's well-intention education reforms have been in place for a long time, and this same pattern keeps showing up:
A miracle seems to be present in Grade 4. But there's no sign of any such phenomenon when you look at the scores from Grade 8.
Why might such a pattern obtain? After fifty years of flogging varieties of this horse, we won't waste our time going there today. For today, we'll only ask you this:
If kids are doing well in fourth grade, but have regressed by the time they finish eighth grade, then what good was that early achievement—assuming it really existed?
Kristof cited the Grade 4 scores; he didn't cite Grade 8. In the process, he retold a type of story which has been told ever since the 1960s, when we the people began to pretend that we actually care about black kids.
It's the story of the (alleged) public school miracle, allegedly produced by the handful of people who actually care! Versions of this story have floated around at least since 1967, when 36 Children appeared.
In the early 1970s, by total coincidence, we stumbled upon one of the ways miraculous test scores will sometimes appear. (Two friends described the outrageous cheating taking place in their high-scoring, low-income school—a school which was endlessly praised in the Baltimore Sun.)
By the early 1980s, we had stumbled into a telephone relationship with a top executive at one of that era's major testing companies. He was the first to tell us how bad this phenomenon can sometimes get.
(He told us that school districts can pay to have their students' answer sheets scanned for unusual erasure patterns. Three decades later, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution blew the whistle on the "erasure parties" staged within Atlanta's schools, in which teachers gathered to change reams of wrong answers on students' completed answer sheets to the answers which was correct.)
We know of zero reason to assume that any such fraudulent behavior ever took place in Mississippi. As far as we know, no such misconduct is even possible with respect to the Naep, given the way the Naep is administered.
That said, one event after another, through many long years, convinced us that no one should ever accept these miracle claims on their face. Simple story:
Our journalists love to tell these stories—and repeatedly, these stories turn out to be bogus.
We the humans have pleasing stories we simply love to tell! The story of the educational miracle engineered by the handful of people who actually care is one of these treasured tales.
Note to Kristof, whose overall work we marvel at and greatly admire:
Our "education experts" were endlessly asleep at the switch, down through the many long years, as these feel-good stories came and went. So was the New York Times! When the whistle was finally blown on major cheating scandals in Atlanta and (apparently) in D.C., it was the Atlanta paper, and the much-maligned USA Today, which finally did the work.
(When Michelle Rhee was nominated to be chancellor of the D.C. schools, it was obvious that something was crazily wrong with the test score gains she was claiming from her short teaching career. It was obvious that her claims didn't make statistical sense—but so what? The Washington Post agreed to roll over and pretend that nothing was wrong.)
(Also, Philadelphia.)
Yes, Virginia! We were even present, behind the scenes, when Dr. John Cannell unveiled his Lake Wobegon Reports in the late 1980s—when he reported, perhaps a bit inaccurately, that every state in the nation was reporting that their statewide test scores were, in fact, above average!
That was a wonderfully comical narrative hook, and the nation's journalists briefly took note. After that, our education journalists went back to sleep, snoring loudly alongside our education experts.
(Back in 2006, we demonstrated that the miracle story concerning one Washington area elementary school was in fact horribly wrong. The Washington Post's Jay Mathews, with whom we share the old school system tie and whose work we greatly admire, told the tale right here.)
Full disclosure: There are certain feel-good stories we humans love to tell! We continue to tell those stories, no matter how often such stories turn out to be bogus.
As to the apparent anomalies in Mississippi's scoring patterns, we know of zero reason to think that overt acts of fraud have ever been part of the story. (Repeat—we know of zero reason.)
That said, the scoring pattern doesn't seem to make sense. Still, the story lives on.
Anthropologists crowd our dreams at night, telling us things like this:
This is who, and this is what, we actually are as a species!
For the record, there's a different possible explanation for those anomalous Mississippi scoring patterns. We don't know if it's right or wrong.
(Then too, we can think of one or two more.)
We're no longer going to bother with such maddening explorations. That's especially true at this point, as the entire American political structure may be crashing to the ground.
Is something "wrong" with those Grade 4 scores? To this day, we can't answer that question. We can say that Mississippi's eighth grade scores don't seem to be playing along.
Again, we apologize for Tuesday's dispiriting blunder. We've corrected the blunder in Tuesday's report. The flooding of the zone!
Now for the rest of the story: Still in the early 1980s, that high executive told us that he was leaving the testing business. He said that his company was losing market share to a rival testing company—and he said they felt they couldn't compete, because the rival company was allegedly faking its data (its "norms") so as to produce better test scores.
The executive, who is no longer living, went on to a different public career. Just for the record:
At that time, it was publicly reported that the Iowa Test of Basic Skills was losing substantial market share to the California Achievement Test. At some point, the switch was made here in Baltimore, perhaps because it was widely bruited that urban systems ended up with better scores on the latter test.
We're telling you what the executive said. We don't know if his suspicions were accurate.
