MONDAY: Kristof affirms Mississippi miracle!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026

We seek "proof of life:" In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof offers a lengthy column affirming the Mississippi miracle.

A certain class of educational expert has been reporting this alleged miracle for quite some time. For the record, Kristof doesn't use the term "miracle." 

Many others do and have.

Headline included, Kristof's column starts as shown. For today, we'll cite only one of the upbeat claims about the Mississippi public schools:

These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling

A ray of hope is emerging in American education.

Not among Democrats or Republicans, each diverted by culture wars. Not in the education reform movement, largely abandoned by the philanthropists who once propelled it. Not in most schools across the country, still struggling with chronic absenteeism and a decade of faltering test scores.

Rather, hope emerges in the most unlikely of places: three states here in the Deep South that long represented America’s educational basement. These states—Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi—have histories of child poverty, racism and dismal educational outcomes, and they continue to spend less than most other states on public schools.

Yet, consider:

[...]

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).

On average, are Mississippi's black fourth graders better readers than their counterparts in Massachusetts? We can't say that we're sure, one way or the other.

Claims about the Magnolia miracle have been around for some time. At one point in today's column, Kristof refers back to a column he wrote in May 2023:

I wrote about Mississippi’s educational successes in 2023, but many of my fellow liberals then scoffed at the notion of learning from a state so tainted. Skeptics, mostly on the left, have made many critiques of the gains, including that they fade in upper grades, that the states are cheating, that this is all a temporary blip and that any progress is simply a result of holding back weak readers.

The critiques have been effectively rebutted—for starters, they can’t explain the continuing gains in Mississippi or the magnitude of the gains. Just as striking, the Mississippi gains increasingly are being replicated in Alabama and Louisiana, as they follow similar approaches. That’s enormously encouraging...

We ourselves are one of the liberal skeptics who questioned these claims back then. In this morning's column, Kristof links to a report which cites a column by Michael Hiltzik, who was then a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times. 

Writing in July 2023, Hiltzik offered this:

How Mississippi gamed its national reading test scores to produce ‘miracle’ gains

[...]

A close examination of the numbers suggests that it’s not true. Bob Somerby and Kevin Drum, two of the most adept myth busters in the blogosphere, have done yeomen’s work deconstructing the statistics. Their conclusion is that Mississippi’s program isn’t nearly as successful as its fans assert and may not have produced any improvement at all in fourth-grade reading scores. The apparent gains may be a statistical illusion.

There is a lesson here, however. It’s not about how to effectively teach kids to read, but how difficult it is to teach journalists how to scrutinize statistical claims.

Kristof's source cites Hiltzik's column; Hiltzik cited us. (May Kevin rest in peace. He remains on our list of "favorite sites.")

In fact, we're fairly sure that we didn't reach a conclusion, at that or at any other point, about the claims of a Mississippi miracle. If memory serves, we said that no, we didn't believe the claims—but that we also didn't necessarily believe that the claims were bogus.

(Two days after Hiltzik's column appeared, we headed off to the hospital for some shoulder work. After that, we were shipped to "The Warehouse" for almost a month. For that reason, we didn't see Hiltzik's column until quite a bit later.)

We're big admirers of Kristof's work. Except perhaps at moments like this. 

As for ourselves, we've been aware of, and have reported on, statistical scams involving public school test scores dating all the way back to the early 1970s. The mainstream press—and the nation's "education experts"—finally caught up with this embarrassingly widespread phenomenon roughly thirty years later.

Based on long and astounding experience, we never believe implausible claims of the type Kristof cites. Also, though, just because the claims seem implausible on their face, that doesn't necessarily mean the claims are bogus.

Are the claims about Mississippi true? Even today, we can't tell you. That said, we took a quick look at some NAEP scores today after reading Kristof's new column.

(Kristof's claims are based upon results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the NAEP. It's a highly regarded federal testing program which is administered in reading and math in Grade 4 and Grade 8. Not that anyone cares!)

More precisely, we looked at the most recent Grade 8 reading scores for Mississippi and Massachusetts. Before the week is done, we'll show you what we found.

The practices which allegedly produced Mississippi's fourth grade miracle scores have been underway in that state for a fairly long time. If Mississippi's fourth graders have been making those kinds of gains, the gains should be showing up among the state's eighth graders by now.

(Also, if the gains have all disappeared by the time kids reach Grade 8, then, borrowing from the early Dylan, But oh what kind of miracle is this, which goes from bad to worse?)

By the end of the week, we'll show you how some of these numbers look. As we noted this morning, we're seeking "Proof of Life" this week. Here's a possible spoiler alert:

When it comes to upbeat claims of this type, there's been little proof of skeptical life among this failing nation's elites over the past sixty years!