FRIDAY: This is the faltering horse we rode in on!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2025

Has statistical bungling won? This new column by David Brooks discusses a topic which is important, or at least it's important in theory.

The topic is important if our flailing nation will continue to function in anything like a normal way. It's also important to the extent that our "educational experts," and the journalists who echo them, don't engage in the latest wave of statistical bungling.

Nationally, test scores are down on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Naep). There is no real doubt about that fact. According to Brooks, similar trends are appearing around the world. 

As usual, the experts have fingered the usual suspects, and they've come up with a trio of winners. In this passage, Brooks repeats what some experts have said:

Why Are the Democrats Increasing Inequality?

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We’ve now had 12 years of terrible education statistics. You would have thought this would spark a flurry of reform activity. And it has, but in only one type of people: Republicans. When it comes to education policy, Republicans are now kicking Democrats in the butt.

Schools in blue states like California, Oregon and Washington are languishing, but schools in red states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, traditional laggards, are suddenly doing remarkably well. Roughly 52 percent of Mississippi’s Black fourth graders read at grade level, compared with only 28 percent in California. Louisiana is the only state where fourth-grade achievement levels have returned to pre-pandemic levels. An Urban Institute study adjusted for the demographics of the student bodies found that schools in Mississippi are educating their fourth graders more successfully in math and reading than schools in any other state. Other rising stars include Florida, Texas and Georgia.

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The so-called Southern Surge came about because the red states built around a reading curriculum based on science, not ideology. The schools provide clear accountability information to parents and give them more freedom to choose schools. They send coaches to low-performing classrooms. They use high-quality tutoring, and they don’t promote students who can’t read, reducing the bureaucratic strings that used to control behavior in the classroom. They also hold schools and parents accountable. In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it.

Mississippi is painted as the big winner. This recitation has been going on for the past several years, but a problem may lurk in this passage:

"In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it."

For today, let's stick with Mississippi. For starters, let's say this:

Making a child repeat third grade may or may not be a good idea; there have always been differing views. That said, when it comes time to take a test like the Naep, this practice does tend to create an apples-to-orange type of comparison between the various states.

Using the voluminous data provided by the Naep, we just looked at the range of ages of Mississippi's fourth grade students compared to the range of ages of fourth graders in California and across the nation. As the data instantly show, Mississippi has a much larger percentage of fourth graders who are older than the typical age for that grade. That suggests the possibility that Brooks' experts are comparing kids in Mississippi who have had four years of graded instruction to kids in California who have had only three.

This critique of the Mississippi miracle been around for years. Have experts been putting their thumbs on the scales, with non-specialists like Brooks getting dragged along?

We'll examine the data in more detail and try to report back with specific statistics. That said, this is very much the horse we rode in on, way back in the 1970s, when we ourselves were teaching fifth grade in the Baltimore City Schools.

Simply put, our educational experts all too frequently aren't. Also, our national journalists tend to follow them along whatever trail they're stampeding down, especially when the experts believe they've found a miracle cure or perhaps just a simple solution.

In various spots around the country, cheating was rampant on statewide testing programs until USA Today and a couple of local newspapers finally figured it out. The educational experts were lost in space. No one at the New York Times ever quite managed to notice that this had been going on.

We first wrote about that phenomenon in the miid-1970s. We heard horror stories about the practice from the highest-ranking editor at one of the biggest "tests of basic skills" of that earlier day.

Decades went by before USA Today finally blew the whistle on this practice. The giant brains at our biggest news organs never quite figured it out.

 (We're speaking here about outright cheating, not about a simpler version of "teaching to the test.") 

We humans! We love love love the simple solution. Also, we're willing to write about a simple solution, though possibly only once.

We've seen a wave of clueless editorials and columns about this new situation of late. We don't know why anyone would avoid teaching phonics, but this editorial by the Wahington Post provides the type of simple-minded assessment we mean:

The reading wars are ending. Phonics won.
California belatedly follows Southern states in abandoning a failed teaching method.

Phonics instruction strikes us as amazingly basic, but the gods of simple solutions pretty much never quit.

Four years of graded instruction may tend to beat just three. To what extent does some such construct lie at the heart of this chase?