MONDAY: Mississippi's miraculous scores!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2025

Mississippi's children: There was a time, for quite a few years, when we loved sifting through the reading and math scores from Grades 4 and 8 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Naep).

The Naep is the federally administered testing program known as "the nation's report card." For various reasons, it's long been considered the gold standard of domestic public school academic testing.

For many years, Naep scores were rising rather rapidly among all demographic groups. Black kids, white kids, Hispanic kids, Asian ancestry kids? Once the scores had been "disaggregated," scores from all four groups were rising. 

That said, Asian kids continued to outscore white kids, and white skids continued to outscore Hispanic and black kids. Over here in Blue America, our journalists didn't seem to want to come to terms with that lingering state of affairs. So they kept refusing to "disaggregate" scores—and if you simply looked at national averages as a whole, the growing percentages of lower-scoring black and Hispanic kids kept the overall average scores looking fairly static.

"Nothing is working," the hapless journalists would say, even as average scores for each major racial / ethnic group were going through the roof.

Sic semper incompetents! Then, progress halted around 2013, just as David Brooks described in his column last Friday. In 2020, along came Covid, and things went downhill fast.

In Brooks' treatment, we were left with Mississippi as the miracle worker state, and with California as the dumbbell Blue American state left out in the cold.

The presentation shown below is basically accurate, at least as far as it goes. Under the circumstances, the headline on the column strikes us as perhaps a bit cloying:

Why Are the Democrats Increasing Inequality?

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

In Mississippi, "a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it?" As we noted on Friday, that can create an apples to oranges type of comparison by the time the nation's kids take the Grade 4 Naep tests, with a lot of older kids in Mississippi being compared to a lot of kids in states like California who are normal age for Grade 4.

Is something "wrong" in some way with Mississippi's miraculous scores? We have no idea, but here are some of the figures we mentioned last Friday afternoon:

Above normal age for Grade 4
Naep reading test, 2024

U.S. nationwide: 39%
California: 35%
Mississippi: 54%

To what extent does that batch of older kids help tilt average scores in Mississippi's favor? At this point, we can't answer your sensible question. That said:

Looking back, Mississippi has always had an older bunch of fourth graders, even dating back before those reforms, to the years when it was a very low-scoring state.

Mississippi has always had an older bunch of fourth grader! But so you'll know, you see below the official way Mississippi's miracle has been shaping up ever since the state passed its 2013 reforms. 

According to a very roughly rule of thumb, a ten-point gap on the Naep scale is often compared to roughly one academic year. We're omitting some years for the sake of simplicity. For all test data, start here:

Average scores, Grade 4 reading, Naep
All students: U.S. / Calif. / Mississippi

2024: 214.27 / 211.74 / 218.50
2019: 219.44 / 216.48 / 219.34
2017: 220.81 / 215.42 / 215.20
2015: 221.36 / 212.68 / 214.11
2013: 220.67 / 212.55 / 208.52
2007: 219.66 / 208.52 / 207.81
2003: 216.46 / 205.63 / 205.46

Mississippi was twelve points below the national average back in 2013. It had pulled even with the national average by the 2019 testing, and the state was four points ahead of the national average by the time the smoke had cleared from the Covid shutdowns.

For what it's worth, until Covid hit, California's kids had been steadily gaining on the nation too.

(Those are the average scores for all students in the nation and in the two states. At this point, we haven't "disaggregated" those scores in the manner we've described.)

That represents a very large gain in average scores in a very short period of time. Could something possibly be "wrong" with those scores? At this pro-miracle site, we were struck by one testing expert's quoted assessment:

Four Reasons Why Mississippi’s Reading Gains Are Neither Myth Nor Miracle

[...]

Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard University and previously a member of the board that oversees NAEP, said his instinct is to question big test score gains. But in the case of Mississippi, he said, “I don’t see any smoking guns or red flags that make me say that they’re gaming NAEP.”

We agree with Ho's instinctive skepticism. Long experience has taught us to be very skeptical about miraculous score gains. 

Often, you can see that something is wrong when you start looking inside the data. Ho says he can see no sign that the system is being gamed here. To that, we would only add this point:

The fact that you can't see that something is wrong doesn't necessarily mean that nothing actually is wrong, perhaps through no bad intention.

We may continue to noodle around with those test score data. Warning:

There's almost always someone with something to gain when these "simple solutions" start getting promoted. And as the New York Times has proven in the past, journalists who aren't specialists are easily stampeded by educational experts.

We will share one final point before we're done with this resurgent topic. For years, the New York Times cared about only one thing. It cared about how many black and Hispanic kids would get into prestigious Stuyvesant High.

Forget the 99 percent of New York City's kids. The Times seemed to care about the top one percent only. They would make a big deal about this matter on an annual basis, right on the paper's front page.

That was one of the unattractive ways we Blues displayed our lack of concern about the vast bulk of black and Hispanic kids. This year, in what looked like a flight from the woke, the Times scaled that old line of reporting way, way, way, way back.

In truth, it was time for that fetish to go. But nobody ever actually cared about any of this, and when the Times changed its approach, nobody said a word.

Mississippi's children deserve the best. So do California's kids, who are very heavily Hispanic.

So do the children of Israel. So do the children of Gaza.