Mississippi's (lower income) Hispanic kids!

TUESDAY, JUNE 6, 2023

In Grade 4 reading and math: Just this once, we're going to let you ask us about Mississippi's Hispanic kids.

More specifically, we'll show you the average scores achieved by those kids on last year's Grade 4 reading and math tests—on the Naep, of course!

Like their black and white classmates, they outscored their counterparts from around the nation, in this case by rather wide margins. The average scores look like this:

Grade 4 reading, Naep 2022
Lower income Hispanic students
U.S. public schools: 198.70
Mississippi: 210.58

Grade 4 math, Naep 2022
Lower income Hispanic students
U.S. public schools: 219.02
Mississippi: 237.32

They outscored their peers by substantial margins. That said, those same nagging questions remain:

To what extent did Mississippi gain a (misleading) statistical advantage from its third grade retention policy?

To what extent does that higher performance still exist by the time the Naep tests the nation's kids again, at the end of the eighth grade?

As we continue our search, we'll try to help you answer those questions. We're trying to stay away from Storyline. We're trying to stick to the search.

For all Naep data, start here.