How capable are our upper-end journalists?

WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2024

How well do they deal with ideas? This week, we've been talking about the basic capability, or lack of same, within our upper-end press corps.

We've also talked about their interest, or lack of same, when it comes to dealing with ideas. 

Do they really prefer to spend the day talking about who may have had consensual sex on one occasion ten years in the past?  Is that what our journalists are like? Does this perhaps even involve a secret fact about us?

Do journalists want to talk about policies, issues, ideas? How much capability do they display when they decide to give it a try?

As a way of examining those questions, consider a new guest column in the Washington Post by former governor Mitch Daniel (R-Indiana). 

We assume that Daniels wrote the essay in complete good faith. Our interest lies in the fact that the Washington Post, a high-ranking major newspaper, decided to publish the piece.

Daniels is writing about public schools, a topic in which he has long taken interest. More specifically, he's writing about a basic tenet of the movement which is now called "the science of reading."

Daniels wants to outlaw "social promotion" when children move from third to fourth grade. Headline included, he starts to outline his thesis starts in the manner shown:

How to help third-graders struggling to read: Don’t socially promote them

In 1961, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow got a virtual trademark on the term “vast wasteland.” So, although highly apt, it isn’t available now for application to K-12 public schools in the United States.

[...]

In the K-12 wasteland, the good news is that we know not only where to apply the leverage, but also when. The critical skill is reading, and the critical juncture is third grade, or more precisely the transition from third to fourth grade.

No other variable is more important; whether a fourth grader can read is the “pivot point” in their education. As the saying goes, by then children must learn to read, because afterward they will have to read to learn. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, a children’s welfare organization, has found that kids who leave third grade without reading proficiency are four times less likely to finish high school, with all the handicaps that places on their lives as adults.

Our K-12 schools are a wasteland, Daniels gloomily says. Then again, so is our upper-end press corps, what with its general lack of basic analytical skill.

In the passage we have posted, Daniels says this about "kids who leave third grade without reading proficiency:" 

He says that such kids are "four times less likely to finish high school," as compared to kids who leave third grade with basic reading proficiency.

Should some such fact seem surprising? Should it be surprising to hear that kids who are struggling at the end of third grade end up doing less well later in school, when compared to the kids who were doing well all along?

That doesn't sound surprising! Since Daniels is going to recommend that struggling kids repeat third grade, the actual question should probably be something like this:

How many kids who are required to repeat third grade end up failing to finish high school? Does repeating third grade actually increase the eventual graduation rate?

Will kids do better if they're forced to repeat? Daniels presents no data concerning that question, nor do his editors at the Post seem to notice or mind.

Full disclosure! At one point, it was commonly held that forcing kids to repeat a grade increased the likelihood that they would fail to finish high school. 

We have no idea if that standard claim was true or was false, but it's a possibility which Daniels blows past. From there, he offers this data-based argument in favor of Grade 3 retention:

We know not only what to do and when to do it, but also how. Ending the pernicious, self-defeating practice known as “social promotion” is the key. Schools must be prevented from shuffling kids who do not yet have basic reading skills on to the fourth grade and likely failure in the years beyond...

This reform left the realm of theory long ago. In Indiana, when I was governor, a 2010 statute prohibited social promotion of students flunking the statewide reading exam, absent clearly defined potential exceptions for English learners and special education students, or if “good cause” could be shown.

A year after the law was passed and a new reading test was instituted, the third-grade pass rate was 85.7 percent. The following school year, 2012-2013, the pass rate hit what turned out to be an all-time high, 91.4 percent, and held above 91 percent for two more years. Analyzing the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, singled out Indiana’s improvement as one of the nation’s bright spots.

But if no good deed goes unpunished, no education reform goes unopposed by the special interests that dominate the space. In 2012, a union-funded campaign evicted the state’s reformist superintendent of public instruction, and he was replaced with someone—an elementary school librarian and teachers union official—whose assignment seemed to be to throw sand in the gears of all the changes the legislature had approved in the previous two years.

The number of social promotion exemptions granted began to swell. From 4 percent in 2013, the percentage of nonreaders passed to fourth grade had doubled by 2017 and reached 17 percent by 2021. The 81.9 percent reading test pass rate for third-graders in 2022-2023 was an almost 10 percent plunge from a decade ago.

In that passage, Daniels describes what happened after third grade "social promotion" was outlawed in Indiana, and then after the practice was largely restored:

After social promotion was outlawed, he says the third grade "pass rate" in reading proficiency quickly jumped from 85.7 percent to 91.4 percent. As he does, he makes no attempt to explain why the new policy would have produced that result.

He then suggests that the "pass rate" fell all the way back to 81.9 percent after the "no social promotion" policy was largely abandoned. He slides past a secret which is there for all to see in a data set to which he offers a link.

As you can see in this link from within a link, the bulk of the drop in the Grade 3 reading "pass rate" occurred in the aftermath of 2020—that is to say, in the aftermath of the first Covid year. 

From the 2012-2013 school year to the 2018-2019 school year, the "pass rate" fell from 91.4% to 87.3%—a rather modest drop. 

After that, a larger deluge! The pass rate dropped all the way to 81.2% for the 2020-2021 school year. There is no figure for the 2019-2020 school year—the year when Covid upended the basic operation of many public school systems.

In short, the drop in the pass rate was rather modest until Covid came along. Especially when you consider the various factors which can affect such a statistic, it's absurd to suggest that this modest drop in pass rate meant that "the science of reading" had come up with the one correct way to deal with kids who are reading poorly by the end of third grade.

It certainly doesn't justify this silly happy talk:

"In the K-12 wasteland, the good news is that we know not only where to apply the leverage, but also when...We know not only what to do and when to do it, but also how."

Daniels may truly believe those claims, but based on the evidence he supplies, the claims are hard to credit. That said, so what?

At the Post, they threw the happy talk into print. That said, our big newspapers have taken this feckless approach to issues of public school achievement levels since Hector was a pup.

Daniels' essay is a very weak imitation of capable analysis. At the Post, they almost surely didn't notice. It's clear that they didn't care.

Full disclosure! It's much more fun for journalists to spend their days and their nights talking about who's zoomin' who. As in the late Bronze Age, so too today:

We humans, including our "well-educated" journalists, are strongly inclined to focus on matters like that. When it comes to public schools, occasional charades of the type offered by Daniels have long been the hapless norm.

What's the best way to deal with third graders who are struggling? We don't have the slightest idea, in part because newspapers like the Post and the Times aren't comfortable with serious policy issues or with basic ideas. 

You will, of course, never hear any such topic discussed on Blue America's favorite "cable news" channel. It simply isn't done.

Ideas are boring, and they're hard. Who's zoomin' who is fun!