You act like literacy rates are an unchangeable constant. Each one of your ‘education doesn’t work’ pieces begins with the admission that there are better and worse ways to educate kids, but each time someone suggests we should try to systematically find and implement the better ways, here comes another FDB article about how actually it’s fake and a waste of time.
When has Freddie disagreed that you can teach people more stuff? From what I’ve read, he explicitly acknowledges that you can in fact teach people more stuff.
But his point is that, even upon learning more stuff, the worse student will still be the worse student. And there will never be a system solution for that reality.
Well, because "it" (all previous reform movements) has always turned out to be fake and a waste of time. But, maybe next time . . . if we just wish hard enough and clap loudly enough we can save Tinkerbell in Never Never Land!
Sure man, phonics and spaced repetition were handed to proto-humans by god. There’s a big gap between “sweeping reform movements are often less than rigorous in their self assessment” and “it is impossible to ever be better so we should stop trying and let the chips fall where they may.”
People should keep trying to come up with better ways to educate kids, but also, everyone's priors when seeing a claimed way that schools can be made massively better should be heavily on "it won't hold up," because that's what many years of experience has shown so far.
Freddie has always acknowledged that you can teach more stuff. So if you mean “literacy rate” as something meaning a certain level of absolute competence in reading, for example, then yes, education has an effect. You can teach people more words, and you should.
But Freddie’s point has always been that, by definition, half the population will have test scores that fall below the median level. The worst student at Stanford may be brilliant, but he/she is still the worst student there. And his point is that what sets people apart is NOT how much they know quantitatively, but how much they know relative to the next person (ie the competition). And his point is consistently that the system will never be able to fix that.
That’s his point in many articles, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what he’s arguing here. The Mississippi miracle isn’t about changing students relative performance, it’s about an increase in the overall percent of students reaching or exceeding a certain reading level.
Right. But the “overall percent” is dependent on the denominator. And his point, leveraging from eventual knowledge of details from the “Texas experiment”, is that there was malfeasance in how the denominator was being fudged. If you remove a whole batch of students from the sample (esp if they’re the lowest performing cohort), then your “overall percent” will improve even when nothing has actually changed.
They’re not expelling 3rd graders for not being able to read. These are also state level comparisons. Unless the students unenrolled from schooling entirely or moved away, it would show up.
It’s been going on since 2013. The PBS article is from 2023. Basically Mississippi went from their 4th grade kids being, on average, behind a grade from the national reading average to being ahead of the national average.
It’s basically phonics, teacher support, dyslexia screening, best practices, and followup and support for struggling students. Nothing trendy or flashy. Pretty common sensical.
FDB is just saying that your prior probability of these "miracles" being on the level should be extremely low, and he's right. We need a lot more data to know what's really happening.
Freddy, the Mississippi Miracle is essentially an increase specifically in early elementary reading scores, following a statewide emphasis on an increased resources and funding specifically for early elementary reading.
These are little kids. They are not dropping out to get GEDs at eight. They are not taking the SAT or ACT at eight. They are, however, hopefully getting enough reading skills to meaningfully participate in society.
Even if they fall back to the mean later in school, and the scores for middle school are improved but not ranked as high in national rankings, getting more kids to the level of being functionally literate is objectively a Good Thing.
I don’t understand your very obvious hostility to this program, which seems disproportionate to the pretty modest goals of this program. Do you get mad at Dolly Parton mailing kids books through her foundation, which has a different approach but similar goals?
I am adding some quotes from the PBS story on this from a couple of years ago explaining the approach,
“All three states have trained thousands of teachers in the so-called science of reading, which refers to the most proven, research-backed methods of teaching reading. They’ve dispatched literacy coaches to help teachers implement that training, especially in low-performing schools.
They also aim to catch problems early. That means screening for signs of reading deficiencies or dyslexia as early as kindergarten, informing parents if a problem is found and giving those kids extra support.
The states have consequences in place if schools don’t teach kids how to read, but also offer help to keep kids on track.
Mississippi, for one, holds students back in third grade if they cannot pass a reading test but also gives them multiple chances to pass after intensive tutoring and summer literacy camps.”
"Even if they fall back to the mean later in school, and the scores for middle school are improved but not ranked as high in national rankings, getting more kids to the level of being functionally literate is objectively a Good Thing."
It is indeed. There are a few problems with your righteous hissy fit.
1. Most kids are already functionally literate. You clearly believe otherwise. Mississippi's scores are due in no small part to holding back kids a year.
2. Kelsey Piper and many, many others are not saying Wow, this is great, Mississippi is doing better. Kelsey Piper and many, many others are saying--as Freddie EXPLICITLY observes--Everyone could do this and the reading crisis would be over and California parents should move to Mississippi RIGHT AWAY; I posted a mocking response to her here: https://x.com/Ed_Realist/status/1971319509798748456-- that got 45K and counting hits from thousands saying oh, you mean person, how unfair, MS hasn't had time to improve its 8th graders. But it has! The program has been in place for a decade.
There is nothing modest about the claims Kelsey Piper is making.
Actually, an estimated 28% of US adults are not functionally literate.
72% functionally literate technically is most, as in >50%, but it is not an acceptable percentage, since missing basic literacy strongly disadvantages one’s ability to function in society. Voting, employment, even driving are affected.
A kid retained still has to go through the same tests again the next year. They don’t magically disappear. If it takes a year longer to make a kid literate, I don’t see that extra effort as a problem. It’s a good thing to get them there, not a bad one.
Mississippi is a poor, largely rural state with an 18% poverty rate and the highest percentage of Black residents in the US. The very high ranking reported is from the results adjusted for demographics. (It’s first for adjusted, ninth IIRC for raw numbers.)
The article I cited is from PBS, not Kelsey Piper. Kelsey’s statements do not affect the value of the program either way, good or bad. Twitter hits don’t either.
The point is that many MANY people do in fact believe that Mississippi's scores will persist and they will have better results and everyone else is failing.
There are decades of research on retention.
28% of US adults includes millions of immigrants who weren't educated by American schools, and since my claim was 20% of kids who went through American schools (or should have been understood as such by non-morons), you aren't refuting anything.
That does not appear to be the point most people are making. You are getting your panties in a bunch over nothing.
Your post I responded to does not reference 20% anywhere.
The functional illiteracy rate for immigrants is about 34% of the 14% of Americans born elsewhere, or a bit under 5% overall. It’s also worth noting many immigrants immigrated as children, not as adults.
The 28% figure is thus primarily US born, not immigrants. 28-5=23%
“In 1870, 53.9% of Mississippians were illiterate. Though that number went down to 17.2% by 1920, only Louisiana’s rate was worse. The state’s illiteracy rate kept decreasing throughout the 20th century, but pockets of illiteracy persisted. It disproportionally existed in Mississippi’s rural, African American, and impoverished communities.
A 1998 study estimated that 30% of the state’s inhabitants did not possess functional literacy skills and 34% possessed extremely low reading skills. Adult literacy programs in Mississippi still seek to address the underlying literacy gaps shown in PIAAC research.”
I just read the article and I think that’s a great summary of the program’s focus. And the program doesn’t kick failing students out but requires them to repeat a grade if their test scores are not passing. But it does seem that the program relies on tweaks like teaching phonics. That’s been around since the Cretaceous era when my teachers used it to teach me reading! I think the program needs more rigorous testing and long term commitment like Freddie is suggesting. And I think the article was definitely suggesting that poor cities like Oakland should look at the results from these southern states and adopt them when we have a lot better data about their programs.
If they fall back to the mean later on, why would we care that they did better in reading for a few years as little kids? "We got improvements on test scores in 4th grade but when they graduate they can't read any better than kids 20 years earlier" doesn't seem like a big win to me.
Because the first goal needs to be basic literacy. If you can read at a fourth grade level, you can read traffic signs and follow simple written instructions. Miss that window for that ability and you never catch up.
If you are a grade behind in 8th grade, you are still reading at a 7th grade level.
You have to be able to read to pass a tradesman licensing exam. You may not go to college, but your future is better if you have options.
This is a basic life skill that helps regardless of your “rank.”
Though the article does obfuscate it it does acknowledge the catch, they’re just holding back third graders until they can read enough to pass the fourth grade tests.
On one hand that’s cheating as surely as all of your other examples, but on the other hand it’s worth considering on the merits as a least-bad tradeoff that does seem to be “working”
I thought it was interesting that holding kids back after 3rd grade (allegedly) changes behavior for everyone, including families, because they don’t want their kids to be held back. I hadn’t considered that point before. I had mainly thought about it in terms of whether it benefits kids who are retained.
Of course, I’m not in a position to evaluate if this is true, but it’s an interesting argument.
There are literally decades of research and results on holding kids back. Do you actually believe that it never once occurred to anyone "hey, let's give the kids another year and they'll improve"?
The decades of research show no long-term improvements because of retention.
My understanding was that holding kids back doesn’t help the kids who are retained (longterm) but I thought it was interesting that she argued there’s an effect on the kids who can pass with some extra effort
One counterexample doesn’t erase those decades of research, but this is in fact a data point of success worth studying.
I guess that’s my pushback, to credulously accept the framing of this as an education miracle is porridge too hot, rejecting the whole thing out of hand with an eyeroll is porridge too cold.
These southern states made a calculated reality-accepting tradeoff here, and the results seem like an improvement on the alternative all things considered.
The iron law, “further study needed”, applies as always.
They also provide additional coaching and summer school for kids at risk of being held back, and individual plans to get improvement if they are held back.
Not often mentioned, this ideology of 'ever child can achieve the same level of excellence' is also deeply professionally dispiriting as a teacher when forced to deal with the cold reality that all students are not equally academically talented. Here in the UK, I've taught English to the lowest prior-attaining group of GCSE students and helped to get them above their predicted grades. Many of my students received grade 2 when they received 0 in every other or almost every other subject. Grade 4 is pass so they are them required to retake the exam (sometimes multiple times) even though probabilistically if a student didn't pass the first time, they are unlikely to pass the second time. However, those teachers in the department whose students received grades 8s and a couple of 9s were far more praised and celebrated (and thus ultimately considered for promotions and pay raises) even when their students had not made significant relevent gains.
Heads of department almost always (from my experience) give themselves the top sets (the students in which also tend to present the least behavioural challenges) and then talk to their team about how everyone should be adopting their successful pedagogic methods. So, my old head of department, for instance, had her students do all the readings of 'Jekyll and Hyde' at home so they could just focus on analysis in the lessons. We were told we should all be doing this with our students. My low prior-attaining (we're not supposed to say low-ability because all students are capable of excellence) were simply //not able to do this//. They didn't have the vocabulary for starters. They needed to hear me model the reading aloud for them to get anywhere. But the academy trust had a policy of "only silent independent reading" allowed. Great for the kids who can read and even read in their free time at home, but try teaching Shakespeare like this to kids who have the reading age of an 8-year-old. Erg.
You are the only person worth reading on education. It’s crazy how so many journalists and lay people listened to the Sold a Story podcast and are now positioning themselves as Educational Experts.
I was a teacher for many years—one year (my last) at a Mastery school, incidentally—but also at the fanciest private schools & the worst of the worst inner-city schools. So I’m wondering what your thoughts are on Hirsch’s theories of education & the efficacy of more robust and coherent knowledge based curriculums. When I taught at fancy private schools, I had a handful of kids who couldn’t read on grade level (not as many as at the inner city schools, for sure), but I only had 14 kids in my classes and we had unlimited resources, which meant that we were able to read 18 novels as a class. My low readers grew astronomically. Unfortunately, there was no standardized testing to prove that, but given the amount of content we were able to cover and the amount of text the kids were able to consume & discuss (including and independently of our 18 shared texts!), I am extremely confident that if there had been standardized tests, there would have been meaningful growth across the board.
In contrast, the way I had to teach ELA in urban schools was the typical Reading Anthology, Skills in a Vacuum model. Unsurprisingly, basically all my kids remained stagnant. My most successful classes were ones in which we were able to do a lot of read alouds and focus on building vocabulary and knowledge. When I MAP and STAR tested those classes, they grew at the 75th and 87th percentiles. Their PSSA data was also impressive.
I know anecdotes are not particularly significant, but I am wondering if you think there are *any* models of education that might work to just improve basic literacy across the board. I subscribe to most of your views on education, but I just can’t bring myself to sincerely believe that we necessarily need to live in a society where most adults can’t read beyond a 6th grade level.
As I always say: she certainly is selling that story!
Remember that basic literacy is what we have now. Probably 80% of kids can read at 8th grade level, this is about as good as it will ever get. Most of the 20% can in fact read, but not at 8th grade level and very little will get them above that point.
If you think large chunks of kids can't read at 8th grade level, you're buying the bullshit.
idk man… I’m speaking anecdotally but when I quit teaching and was looking for work, i went through probably half dozen jobs workshops catered to chronically unemployed/low income people, and listening to rooms full of adults (most of whom were moms) trying to sound out the words on the most basic stuff was extremely eye opening. Happy to admit that my anecdotal experience is statistically meaningless, but I do have a hard time believing that these groups of people (those who were motivated enough to go through a weeks long program to find work) don’t exist or are representative of nothing.
We basically stop teaching reading in 8th grade. While the big hooha about "kids aren't reading BOOKS!" is moralizing nonsense, I agree we could be doing more to develop reading ability in high school than we are allowed to.
Concur. From my pov as a teacher at the time and until 6/24, NCLB’s orientation toward snappy metrics, a precondition of the business major concept of accountability that permeates much politicized critique of public ed., dealt the kibosh to independent reading programs (thinking Accelerated Reader, which worked well at my inner city MS in the late 90s). Because they didn’t tend to produce ample enough immediate score bump they were deemed insufficiently valuable, even though - in my limited experience, anyway - they clearly addressed the need to encourage reading in a way that both required students to absorb longer texts and develop reading as a persistent habit. The effort to establish a higher level of literacy among inner-city kids through a skill-building approach was never going to deliver permanent gains because nobody has ever been motivated to read by a desire to raise their test results. But the kind of people who make strategic instructional decisions, having long ago left the classroom for greener pa$tures, live in denial of that inconvenient fact.
I agree about that, Freddie actually wrote a pretty good book about education reform The Cult of Smart. I think he’s pretty qualified to write about this tough subject.
...I don't think this is a fair analysis of the Piper piece.
She lists what she believes to be three components of the "Mississippi Miracle," only one of which - the last - is "accountability." The other two are sub-aspects of a very specific, narrow-bore, hypothetically-actionable claim: phonics instruction works, other currently-popular strategies for teaching kids to read don't work, so make sure that every teacher who's supposed to be engendering literacy knows how to teach phonics and is actually doing it.
I do not, myself, have the expertise to evaluate that claim fully. I have some intuitive sense that it sounds right, because it's so easy to tell a cogent story about how context-based reading strategies are cargo-cult nonsense, but "some intuitive sense" goes only so far. And while I may not be *quite* as reflexively skeptical as you are, I'm happy to say - OK, maybe the data's being fudged or faked, such things have been known to happen, we should look into the matter critically.
But "phonics works better than rival pedagogical methods" is not at all the same kind of assertion as "we can get any educational results we want, all it takes is willpower."
(I would be genuinely shocked to learn that Kelsey Piper doesn't believe in underlying basically-ineradicable differences in academic talent.)
As for your "very specific, narrow-bore, hypothetically actionable claim":
America has cycled through the sight reading to phonics to sight reading to phonics at least 3 times in 70 years. SEVENTY YEARS. The Dr Seuss book, The Cat in the Hat, was written ON SPEC in, I think, 1957 to teach kids the 200 most used words by sight. This was two years AFTER "Why Johnny Can't Read" was published. Why couldn't Johnny Read, you ask? PHONICS. California went through a whole phonics vs whole language debate in the 80s. Then again the country did in the 90s. And yet time and again, idiots pretend we discovered something new.
Fact: Somewhere between 40-60% of kids will learn how to read regardless of method.
Fact: American schools *today* teach enough phonics that most of the rest of the kids get enough phonics to learn how to read.
Fact: The kids who *can't* learn to read easily *MUST HAVE PHONICS*. These are the kids inevitably hurt by the swings back to "jesus, this phonics shit is boring and the kids can read anyway". Most of them are very low intellect, some of them aren't and have dyslexia. (although we are hurt by people claiming that all low readers have dyslexia). Mississippi has more than its share of low intellect kids. They benefit from systematic instruction. But any effort to take that nationwide will run into the reality that most of the kids are black and there will be Talk. (Lisa Delpit wrote a major essay about this back in the 80s, saying that black kids need phonics but black parents and white teachers don't like admitting this and want to give them "white" education. She was right, but ruined her case with "but black kids can do just as well, just give them both".
We teach phonics today in American schools. Most American kids can read. The phonics debate is incredibly old and Mississippi has done nothing new. they have improved and systematized phonics instruction just like states have done in the past. This is useful for their weak kids and may result in marginal improvements to their reading scores--as *appears* to have happened with the ACT scores of 2024. But it's not going to make them better, and most states have already caught up or surpassed MS by 8th grade.
Exactly. But the one thing you can do (and is entirely worth doing) is to educate the stupid to the highest level of stupidity that is possible. I believe Mr deBoer is doing valuable work toward that end.
I read the piece in question with a healthy dose of skepticism in large part due to FdB's pieces on this subject, and accordingly have started to assume anything in education, like other areas, that sounds to good to be true probably is.
To me the underlying issue is less about education itself and more about the narrowing of pathways to a minimally successful life and standard of living. Were there more avenues a lot of this becomes well... academic.
To the extent I differ at all it may be that I think Freddie is too easy on on the teachers unions, and the embrace of various forms of academic wokery. My suspicion is that these things do some harm on the margins but, by the same logic FdB applies to school reform, aren't having much influence on aggregate population level outcomes. What unions and some of these other educational fads do achieve is a widespread damaging of trust and credibility in public school systems generally, which in turn erodes political buy in from Jane and Joe Normie. That's how public education eventually dies.
The issue isn’t the unions as much as it is the colleges of education that propagate these weirdo ideologies instead of actually teaching teachers how to, you know, Teach. I worked in union & non-union environments and all of them embraced the weirdo social-emotional shit, and all of them embraced all the Anti-Racism trainings that probably made me a worse teacher lmao.
I see them as two separate issues. To the degree unions protect poor performing members (or members with other serious issues) and/or bargain for concessions that result in annoying the larger public they serve they also lay the groundwork for political problems, and maybe their own destruction. It's an issue for all public sector unions in that their interests by their nature tend to bump up against the interests of those they serve. That can be true regardless of whether and what sort of politics or values are inflected in the pedagogy.
Now I do think it's possible to manage this tension in more and less successful ways. In a perfect world it doesn't have to be totally zero sum. However the impression I get is that very few teachers unions are operating with much, if any, awareness of this dynamic.
I don’t think it’s the unions that are the problem, and I don’t think it’s fair to throw the baby out with the bath water. Plenty of shitty teachers keep their jobs without union protections, and plenty of good teachers lose their jobs despite union protection—if an administrator wants to see you gone, they’ll get you gone.
Yeah the unions fucked up during Covid and their uncritical embrace of a lot of crazy shit, but guess what? People are critical of public schools and teachers even in non-union states. Also I think there’s likely to be some sort of reckoning within the unions, given how much the national dialogue has shifted more broadly.
Yea I don't want to overstate my opinion. The idea that we could disband teachers unions and that in itself would revolutionize education in a positive way strikes me as clearly wrong. But they showed their asses during covid and for that reason I can't ever see myself looking at them in anything but the most skeptical way.
Targeted reading instruction can be explicitly taught (methods, scope and sequence…) but behavior management and rapport—which are arguably the most important elements of contemporary education—are learned through experience.
"Meanwhile, large-scale performance gaps between groups with profoundly different social and economic conditions cannot be closed on the school side; we have thrown an immense amount of money, effort, time, and manpower at those gaps at the school level for a half-century, with close to nothing to show for it."
As someone who teaches at a school with kids from wildly different backgrounds (our students include the governor's daughter and her mansion-dwelling friends as well as kids who live in by-the-week motels), I feel this all the time. What exactly am I supposed to do about the kid who misses my class 2-3 days a week to care for siblings or do under-the-table landscaping work? We have a family graduation advocate who does a lot of outreach to students who are flagged as at-risk, and I will help individual students to the best of my ability while I am at school, but we can't magically fix their life circumstances. And a lot of the educational gaps are at least partially a consequence of those circumstances--these are the students who switch schools multiple times a year, who disappear for two weeks, get dropped, and have to reenroll when they return. They are dealing with very real problems that cannot be fixed by more engaging teaching methods. (In fact, the spottier the attendance, the fewer fun engaging activities I can do--they all have to be stuff that's easy for students to make up--but I digress.)
The work our graduation advocate and social worker do is good and meaningful and improves many students' lives to some extent, and they do help some kids who might have dropped out make it to graduation. It's not that there's no value to it. But ultimately the gaps persist, and I don't see how schools can reasonably be expected to fix it.
The sad truth is if you adopt one of those kids into Matt's family at birth the kids end up much more like their biological parents than they end up like Matt. There is the great hope that all this can be fixed but these problems are the result to deep genentic differences.
Well, my point was about the influence of circumstances. On the other side, I work with a lot of wealthy students who are reasonably successful in school, but who I would expect to fare very differently if they weren't raised in mansions and hadn't benefited from private tutors since kindergarten.
It's impossible to prove anyway, but I was not at all suggesting that my students who miss 50% of my class due to circumstances outside their control are victim to "deep genetic differences" that prevent their success.
It's totally possible to prove. Adopt them at birth into Matt's family and see how they do. The results are what they are. The missing school is a symptom of the problem and not the cause.
It's possible to take one of my struggling high school students, turn them back into a baby, raise them in a different family, and compare? Or is there some data showing that infants adopted into supportive, financially stable families frequently have different life outcomes than that of the same families' biological children--and that this difference is attributable to "deep genetic differences"?
I listened to the Yglesias Lovett podcast to see if the left was finally converging on the FdB view of the limits of education and I got the impression that Lovett simply refuses to consider that “academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population.” Yglesias seemed to accept the proposition but his reluctance to state it outright told me it’s still a third rail issue. It will be the right’s endless obsession with selection that drives education policy.
Another thing that did not work, shoveling money at an already failing system: Federal District Judge Russell Clark ordered a significant increase in Kansas City local property taxes for the 1991-92 fiscal year to finance capital improvements and experimental education and cultural offerings in the schools ("larger-than-Olympic-size swimming pool, college-caliber field house, and weight rooms, 25-acre wildlife sanctuary and actual zoo, television studios, computer and science labs, classes in garment design, ceramics, and Suzuki violin--and students from outside the urban district were offered free taxi rides to and from school daily). Failing then, failing now 33 years later. Problem, same urban pool of school district students.
Freddy, Sorry that I can’t join in Middletown next month.Always enjoy meeting with authors and discussing their work and the influences on them. Reside in CT and graduated from college in Middletown in 1963 ( yrs, I have now reached middle age) but am now in SC and won’t return to Ct until after your event.
BTW- while recognizing individual differences in academic ability ( as differentiated from differences in intelligence) of course there are common sense tried and tested ways to improve academic achievement. One of the best ways is to hire teachers who love and excited by their subject matter and have mastered it rather than for some reason just want “to teach” .
What in the world does this mean, "while recognizing individual differences in academic ability (as differentiated from differences in intelligence)" . . . except as the attempt to find a pretty way of saying the unpalatable to modern taste? And my heavens, it's "tried and tested" that the way to improve schools is to "hire teachers who love and excited by their subject matter." Codswallop. What has been tested and proved is that while it's much more fun for a student to have a good teacher than a bad one . . . it does not change the student's (or plural students') long-term outcome.
I haven’t read the Piper article but am absolutely in agreement that if it focuses narrowly on phonics vs whole language, the benefits are probably real. That said, this is all outside of the context of the coming world —where the qualifications for “success” (with literacy undoubtedly being crucial, regardless)will likely need to be radically redefined. Just curious what ppl think about that.
And I think that probably should work but it needs more testing and auditing to really make sure that the people who run the system are not manipulating the results! That happens 🤨
"Differences in educational talent are real." Will this euphemistic formulation turn out to be more palatable to the educational reform crowd than "differences in IQ"?
"Here I must again point out the stark reality. Academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable. Not all students are equally talented, and this can never change. Differences in educational talent are real."
So, based on education outcomes, Asians in general are more academically talented, and blacks in general are less academically talented. Do I have that right?
You act like literacy rates are an unchangeable constant. Each one of your ‘education doesn’t work’ pieces begins with the admission that there are better and worse ways to educate kids, but each time someone suggests we should try to systematically find and implement the better ways, here comes another FDB article about how actually it’s fake and a waste of time.
When has Freddie disagreed that you can teach people more stuff? From what I’ve read, he explicitly acknowledges that you can in fact teach people more stuff.
But his point is that, even upon learning more stuff, the worse student will still be the worse student. And there will never be a system solution for that reality.
Well, because "it" (all previous reform movements) has always turned out to be fake and a waste of time. But, maybe next time . . . if we just wish hard enough and clap loudly enough we can save Tinkerbell in Never Never Land!
Sure man, phonics and spaced repetition were handed to proto-humans by god. There’s a big gap between “sweeping reform movements are often less than rigorous in their self assessment” and “it is impossible to ever be better so we should stop trying and let the chips fall where they may.”
People should keep trying to come up with better ways to educate kids, but also, everyone's priors when seeing a claimed way that schools can be made massively better should be heavily on "it won't hold up," because that's what many years of experience has shown so far.
Freddie has always acknowledged that you can teach more stuff. So if you mean “literacy rate” as something meaning a certain level of absolute competence in reading, for example, then yes, education has an effect. You can teach people more words, and you should.
But Freddie’s point has always been that, by definition, half the population will have test scores that fall below the median level. The worst student at Stanford may be brilliant, but he/she is still the worst student there. And his point is that what sets people apart is NOT how much they know quantitatively, but how much they know relative to the next person (ie the competition). And his point is consistently that the system will never be able to fix that.
That’s his point in many articles, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what he’s arguing here. The Mississippi miracle isn’t about changing students relative performance, it’s about an increase in the overall percent of students reaching or exceeding a certain reading level.
Right. But the “overall percent” is dependent on the denominator. And his point, leveraging from eventual knowledge of details from the “Texas experiment”, is that there was malfeasance in how the denominator was being fudged. If you remove a whole batch of students from the sample (esp if they’re the lowest performing cohort), then your “overall percent” will improve even when nothing has actually changed.
They’re not expelling 3rd graders for not being able to read. These are also state level comparisons. Unless the students unenrolled from schooling entirely or moved away, it would show up.
That’s true.
As Freddie says, these results require independent confirmation, not controlled by the state. We shall see if those pan out.
The point of the Mississippi program is improving literacy, with talk of expanding next to focus on numeracy.
These are life skills that are beneficial regardless of competition.
Freddie has a valid point re competition, but literacy is good regardless.
No question that those are net societal goods.
The question is whether they’re “real”….and the baseline prior is rather pessimistic, based on Freddie’s arguments.
We will see with time whether this replicates in future years, and whether unseemly details trickle out over time.
It’s been going on since 2013. The PBS article is from 2023. Basically Mississippi went from their 4th grade kids being, on average, behind a grade from the national reading average to being ahead of the national average.
It’s basically phonics, teacher support, dyslexia screening, best practices, and followup and support for struggling students. Nothing trendy or flashy. Pretty common sensical.
MS is the poorest state in the US.
FDB is just saying that your prior probability of these "miracles" being on the level should be extremely low, and he's right. We need a lot more data to know what's really happening.
Freddy, the Mississippi Miracle is essentially an increase specifically in early elementary reading scores, following a statewide emphasis on an increased resources and funding specifically for early elementary reading.
These are little kids. They are not dropping out to get GEDs at eight. They are not taking the SAT or ACT at eight. They are, however, hopefully getting enough reading skills to meaningfully participate in society.
Even if they fall back to the mean later in school, and the scores for middle school are improved but not ranked as high in national rankings, getting more kids to the level of being functionally literate is objectively a Good Thing.
I don’t understand your very obvious hostility to this program, which seems disproportionate to the pretty modest goals of this program. Do you get mad at Dolly Parton mailing kids books through her foundation, which has a different approach but similar goals?
Doable but not really a miracle 🙂
I am adding some quotes from the PBS story on this from a couple of years ago explaining the approach,
“All three states have trained thousands of teachers in the so-called science of reading, which refers to the most proven, research-backed methods of teaching reading. They’ve dispatched literacy coaches to help teachers implement that training, especially in low-performing schools.
They also aim to catch problems early. That means screening for signs of reading deficiencies or dyslexia as early as kindergarten, informing parents if a problem is found and giving those kids extra support.
The states have consequences in place if schools don’t teach kids how to read, but also offer help to keep kids on track.
Mississippi, for one, holds students back in third grade if they cannot pass a reading test but also gives them multiple chances to pass after intensive tutoring and summer literacy camps.”
From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/kids-reading-scores-have-soared-in-mississippi-miracle
Also, scores have dipped slightly recently, with charter schools especially showing lower performance. Plans to address the dip have been put forward.
See https://mississippitoday.org/2025/09/25/mississippi-schools-backslide-on-academic-progress/ from a state nonprofit news organization.
It seems like a common sense, non flashy approach.
"Even if they fall back to the mean later in school, and the scores for middle school are improved but not ranked as high in national rankings, getting more kids to the level of being functionally literate is objectively a Good Thing."
It is indeed. There are a few problems with your righteous hissy fit.
1. Most kids are already functionally literate. You clearly believe otherwise. Mississippi's scores are due in no small part to holding back kids a year.
2. Kelsey Piper and many, many others are not saying Wow, this is great, Mississippi is doing better. Kelsey Piper and many, many others are saying--as Freddie EXPLICITLY observes--Everyone could do this and the reading crisis would be over and California parents should move to Mississippi RIGHT AWAY; I posted a mocking response to her here: https://x.com/Ed_Realist/status/1971319509798748456-- that got 45K and counting hits from thousands saying oh, you mean person, how unfair, MS hasn't had time to improve its 8th graders. But it has! The program has been in place for a decade.
There is nothing modest about the claims Kelsey Piper is making.
Actually, an estimated 28% of US adults are not functionally literate.
72% functionally literate technically is most, as in >50%, but it is not an acceptable percentage, since missing basic literacy strongly disadvantages one’s ability to function in society. Voting, employment, even driving are affected.
A kid retained still has to go through the same tests again the next year. They don’t magically disappear. If it takes a year longer to make a kid literate, I don’t see that extra effort as a problem. It’s a good thing to get them there, not a bad one.
Mississippi is a poor, largely rural state with an 18% poverty rate and the highest percentage of Black residents in the US. The very high ranking reported is from the results adjusted for demographics. (It’s first for adjusted, ninth IIRC for raw numbers.)
The article I cited is from PBS, not Kelsey Piper. Kelsey’s statements do not affect the value of the program either way, good or bad. Twitter hits don’t either.
The point is that many MANY people do in fact believe that Mississippi's scores will persist and they will have better results and everyone else is failing.
There are decades of research on retention.
28% of US adults includes millions of immigrants who weren't educated by American schools, and since my claim was 20% of kids who went through American schools (or should have been understood as such by non-morons), you aren't refuting anything.
.
That does not appear to be the point most people are making. You are getting your panties in a bunch over nothing.
Your post I responded to does not reference 20% anywhere.
The functional illiteracy rate for immigrants is about 34% of the 14% of Americans born elsewhere, or a bit under 5% overall. It’s also worth noting many immigrants immigrated as children, not as adults.
The 28% figure is thus primarily US born, not immigrants. 28-5=23%
I wanted to add this article on historically low levels of literacy in Mississippi and why this is so important.
https://www.wjtv.com/news/education/mississippi-among-states-with-lowest-adult-literacy-numeracy-rates/
“In 1870, 53.9% of Mississippians were illiterate. Though that number went down to 17.2% by 1920, only Louisiana’s rate was worse. The state’s illiteracy rate kept decreasing throughout the 20th century, but pockets of illiteracy persisted. It disproportionally existed in Mississippi’s rural, African American, and impoverished communities.
A 1998 study estimated that 30% of the state’s inhabitants did not possess functional literacy skills and 34% possessed extremely low reading skills. Adult literacy programs in Mississippi still seek to address the underlying literacy gaps shown in PIAAC research.”
Only the ones in Oakland though, if you’re in Berkeley you gotta stay in Berkeley 😎
Had to laugh at this. When I got to that line in the Piper article, I thought, "You do you, but I'll be staying in Berkeley, thanks."
Linking to X on substack really undermines whatever argument you were trying to make.
I just read the article and I think that’s a great summary of the program’s focus. And the program doesn’t kick failing students out but requires them to repeat a grade if their test scores are not passing. But it does seem that the program relies on tweaks like teaching phonics. That’s been around since the Cretaceous era when my teachers used it to teach me reading! I think the program needs more rigorous testing and long term commitment like Freddie is suggesting. And I think the article was definitely suggesting that poor cities like Oakland should look at the results from these southern states and adopt them when we have a lot better data about their programs.
If they fall back to the mean later on, why would we care that they did better in reading for a few years as little kids? "We got improvements on test scores in 4th grade but when they graduate they can't read any better than kids 20 years earlier" doesn't seem like a big win to me.
Because the first goal needs to be basic literacy. If you can read at a fourth grade level, you can read traffic signs and follow simple written instructions. Miss that window for that ability and you never catch up.
If you are a grade behind in 8th grade, you are still reading at a 7th grade level.
You have to be able to read to pass a tradesman licensing exam. You may not go to college, but your future is better if you have options.
This is a basic life skill that helps regardless of your “rank.”
Though the article does obfuscate it it does acknowledge the catch, they’re just holding back third graders until they can read enough to pass the fourth grade tests.
On one hand that’s cheating as surely as all of your other examples, but on the other hand it’s worth considering on the merits as a least-bad tradeoff that does seem to be “working”
I thought it was interesting that holding kids back after 3rd grade (allegedly) changes behavior for everyone, including families, because they don’t want their kids to be held back. I hadn’t considered that point before. I had mainly thought about it in terms of whether it benefits kids who are retained.
Of course, I’m not in a position to evaluate if this is true, but it’s an interesting argument.
There are literally decades of research and results on holding kids back. Do you actually believe that it never once occurred to anyone "hey, let's give the kids another year and they'll improve"?
The decades of research show no long-term improvements because of retention.
My understanding was that holding kids back doesn’t help the kids who are retained (longterm) but I thought it was interesting that she argued there’s an effect on the kids who can pass with some extra effort
The “effect” being what—trying harder on a test?
Presumably they identify students who still can’t read for whatever reason and work with them.
Being a year more mature?
One counterexample doesn’t erase those decades of research, but this is in fact a data point of success worth studying.
I guess that’s my pushback, to credulously accept the framing of this as an education miracle is porridge too hot, rejecting the whole thing out of hand with an eyeroll is porridge too cold.
These southern states made a calculated reality-accepting tradeoff here, and the results seem like an improvement on the alternative all things considered.
The iron law, “further study needed”, applies as always.
They also provide additional coaching and summer school for kids at risk of being held back, and individual plans to get improvement if they are held back.
It isn’t just “keep trying.”
Right but this is not a miracle and no one should move their kids on that basis 🙂
Not often mentioned, this ideology of 'ever child can achieve the same level of excellence' is also deeply professionally dispiriting as a teacher when forced to deal with the cold reality that all students are not equally academically talented. Here in the UK, I've taught English to the lowest prior-attaining group of GCSE students and helped to get them above their predicted grades. Many of my students received grade 2 when they received 0 in every other or almost every other subject. Grade 4 is pass so they are them required to retake the exam (sometimes multiple times) even though probabilistically if a student didn't pass the first time, they are unlikely to pass the second time. However, those teachers in the department whose students received grades 8s and a couple of 9s were far more praised and celebrated (and thus ultimately considered for promotions and pay raises) even when their students had not made significant relevent gains.
Heads of department almost always (from my experience) give themselves the top sets (the students in which also tend to present the least behavioural challenges) and then talk to their team about how everyone should be adopting their successful pedagogic methods. So, my old head of department, for instance, had her students do all the readings of 'Jekyll and Hyde' at home so they could just focus on analysis in the lessons. We were told we should all be doing this with our students. My low prior-attaining (we're not supposed to say low-ability because all students are capable of excellence) were simply //not able to do this//. They didn't have the vocabulary for starters. They needed to hear me model the reading aloud for them to get anywhere. But the academy trust had a policy of "only silent independent reading" allowed. Great for the kids who can read and even read in their free time at home, but try teaching Shakespeare like this to kids who have the reading age of an 8-year-old. Erg.
You are the only person worth reading on education. It’s crazy how so many journalists and lay people listened to the Sold a Story podcast and are now positioning themselves as Educational Experts.
I was a teacher for many years—one year (my last) at a Mastery school, incidentally—but also at the fanciest private schools & the worst of the worst inner-city schools. So I’m wondering what your thoughts are on Hirsch’s theories of education & the efficacy of more robust and coherent knowledge based curriculums. When I taught at fancy private schools, I had a handful of kids who couldn’t read on grade level (not as many as at the inner city schools, for sure), but I only had 14 kids in my classes and we had unlimited resources, which meant that we were able to read 18 novels as a class. My low readers grew astronomically. Unfortunately, there was no standardized testing to prove that, but given the amount of content we were able to cover and the amount of text the kids were able to consume & discuss (including and independently of our 18 shared texts!), I am extremely confident that if there had been standardized tests, there would have been meaningful growth across the board.
In contrast, the way I had to teach ELA in urban schools was the typical Reading Anthology, Skills in a Vacuum model. Unsurprisingly, basically all my kids remained stagnant. My most successful classes were ones in which we were able to do a lot of read alouds and focus on building vocabulary and knowledge. When I MAP and STAR tested those classes, they grew at the 75th and 87th percentiles. Their PSSA data was also impressive.
I know anecdotes are not particularly significant, but I am wondering if you think there are *any* models of education that might work to just improve basic literacy across the board. I subscribe to most of your views on education, but I just can’t bring myself to sincerely believe that we necessarily need to live in a society where most adults can’t read beyond a 6th grade level.
"Sold a Story"
As I always say: she certainly is selling that story!
Remember that basic literacy is what we have now. Probably 80% of kids can read at 8th grade level, this is about as good as it will ever get. Most of the 20% can in fact read, but not at 8th grade level and very little will get them above that point.
If you think large chunks of kids can't read at 8th grade level, you're buying the bullshit.
nah dude I don’t know what populations you interact with regularly but plenty of adults are totally functionally illiterate.
You are wrong.
idk man… I’m speaking anecdotally but when I quit teaching and was looking for work, i went through probably half dozen jobs workshops catered to chronically unemployed/low income people, and listening to rooms full of adults (most of whom were moms) trying to sound out the words on the most basic stuff was extremely eye opening. Happy to admit that my anecdotal experience is statistically meaningless, but I do have a hard time believing that these groups of people (those who were motivated enough to go through a weeks long program to find work) don’t exist or are representative of nothing.
You mean all kids in general, but at what age though?
We basically stop teaching reading in 8th grade. While the big hooha about "kids aren't reading BOOKS!" is moralizing nonsense, I agree we could be doing more to develop reading ability in high school than we are allowed to.
Ok thanks I really get it 😎
Concur. From my pov as a teacher at the time and until 6/24, NCLB’s orientation toward snappy metrics, a precondition of the business major concept of accountability that permeates much politicized critique of public ed., dealt the kibosh to independent reading programs (thinking Accelerated Reader, which worked well at my inner city MS in the late 90s). Because they didn’t tend to produce ample enough immediate score bump they were deemed insufficiently valuable, even though - in my limited experience, anyway - they clearly addressed the need to encourage reading in a way that both required students to absorb longer texts and develop reading as a persistent habit. The effort to establish a higher level of literacy among inner-city kids through a skill-building approach was never going to deliver permanent gains because nobody has ever been motivated to read by a desire to raise their test results. But the kind of people who make strategic instructional decisions, having long ago left the classroom for greener pa$tures, live in denial of that inconvenient fact.
I agree about that, Freddie actually wrote a pretty good book about education reform The Cult of Smart. I think he’s pretty qualified to write about this tough subject.
Yeah, I read the book. I liked it he doesn’t address the question I asked in that book.
...I don't think this is a fair analysis of the Piper piece.
She lists what she believes to be three components of the "Mississippi Miracle," only one of which - the last - is "accountability." The other two are sub-aspects of a very specific, narrow-bore, hypothetically-actionable claim: phonics instruction works, other currently-popular strategies for teaching kids to read don't work, so make sure that every teacher who's supposed to be engendering literacy knows how to teach phonics and is actually doing it.
I do not, myself, have the expertise to evaluate that claim fully. I have some intuitive sense that it sounds right, because it's so easy to tell a cogent story about how context-based reading strategies are cargo-cult nonsense, but "some intuitive sense" goes only so far. And while I may not be *quite* as reflexively skeptical as you are, I'm happy to say - OK, maybe the data's being fudged or faked, such things have been known to happen, we should look into the matter critically.
But "phonics works better than rival pedagogical methods" is not at all the same kind of assertion as "we can get any educational results we want, all it takes is willpower."
(I would be genuinely shocked to learn that Kelsey Piper doesn't believe in underlying basically-ineradicable differences in academic talent.)
Then be genuinely shocked. She's an idiot.
As for your "very specific, narrow-bore, hypothetically actionable claim":
America has cycled through the sight reading to phonics to sight reading to phonics at least 3 times in 70 years. SEVENTY YEARS. The Dr Seuss book, The Cat in the Hat, was written ON SPEC in, I think, 1957 to teach kids the 200 most used words by sight. This was two years AFTER "Why Johnny Can't Read" was published. Why couldn't Johnny Read, you ask? PHONICS. California went through a whole phonics vs whole language debate in the 80s. Then again the country did in the 90s. And yet time and again, idiots pretend we discovered something new.
Fact: Somewhere between 40-60% of kids will learn how to read regardless of method.
Fact: American schools *today* teach enough phonics that most of the rest of the kids get enough phonics to learn how to read.
Fact: The kids who *can't* learn to read easily *MUST HAVE PHONICS*. These are the kids inevitably hurt by the swings back to "jesus, this phonics shit is boring and the kids can read anyway". Most of them are very low intellect, some of them aren't and have dyslexia. (although we are hurt by people claiming that all low readers have dyslexia). Mississippi has more than its share of low intellect kids. They benefit from systematic instruction. But any effort to take that nationwide will run into the reality that most of the kids are black and there will be Talk. (Lisa Delpit wrote a major essay about this back in the 80s, saying that black kids need phonics but black parents and white teachers don't like admitting this and want to give them "white" education. She was right, but ruined her case with "but black kids can do just as well, just give them both".
We teach phonics today in American schools. Most American kids can read. The phonics debate is incredibly old and Mississippi has done nothing new. they have improved and systematized phonics instruction just like states have done in the past. This is useful for their weak kids and may result in marginal improvements to their reading scores--as *appears* to have happened with the ACT scores of 2024. But it's not going to make them better, and most states have already caught up or surpassed MS by 8th grade.
You can't fix stupid.
Exactly. But the one thing you can do (and is entirely worth doing) is to educate the stupid to the highest level of stupidity that is possible. I believe Mr deBoer is doing valuable work toward that end.
I read the piece in question with a healthy dose of skepticism in large part due to FdB's pieces on this subject, and accordingly have started to assume anything in education, like other areas, that sounds to good to be true probably is.
To me the underlying issue is less about education itself and more about the narrowing of pathways to a minimally successful life and standard of living. Were there more avenues a lot of this becomes well... academic.
To the extent I differ at all it may be that I think Freddie is too easy on on the teachers unions, and the embrace of various forms of academic wokery. My suspicion is that these things do some harm on the margins but, by the same logic FdB applies to school reform, aren't having much influence on aggregate population level outcomes. What unions and some of these other educational fads do achieve is a widespread damaging of trust and credibility in public school systems generally, which in turn erodes political buy in from Jane and Joe Normie. That's how public education eventually dies.
The issue isn’t the unions as much as it is the colleges of education that propagate these weirdo ideologies instead of actually teaching teachers how to, you know, Teach. I worked in union & non-union environments and all of them embraced the weirdo social-emotional shit, and all of them embraced all the Anti-Racism trainings that probably made me a worse teacher lmao.
I see them as two separate issues. To the degree unions protect poor performing members (or members with other serious issues) and/or bargain for concessions that result in annoying the larger public they serve they also lay the groundwork for political problems, and maybe their own destruction. It's an issue for all public sector unions in that their interests by their nature tend to bump up against the interests of those they serve. That can be true regardless of whether and what sort of politics or values are inflected in the pedagogy.
Now I do think it's possible to manage this tension in more and less successful ways. In a perfect world it doesn't have to be totally zero sum. However the impression I get is that very few teachers unions are operating with much, if any, awareness of this dynamic.
I don’t think it’s the unions that are the problem, and I don’t think it’s fair to throw the baby out with the bath water. Plenty of shitty teachers keep their jobs without union protections, and plenty of good teachers lose their jobs despite union protection—if an administrator wants to see you gone, they’ll get you gone.
Yeah the unions fucked up during Covid and their uncritical embrace of a lot of crazy shit, but guess what? People are critical of public schools and teachers even in non-union states. Also I think there’s likely to be some sort of reckoning within the unions, given how much the national dialogue has shifted more broadly.
Yea I don't want to overstate my opinion. The idea that we could disband teachers unions and that in itself would revolutionize education in a positive way strikes me as clearly wrong. But they showed their asses during covid and for that reason I can't ever see myself looking at them in anything but the most skeptical way.
To what extent is teaching a skill that can be learned but cannot be taught?
That is a honest question, and from your other posts, you may be the human to ask that question of.
Targeted reading instruction can be explicitly taught (methods, scope and sequence…) but behavior management and rapport—which are arguably the most important elements of contemporary education—are learned through experience.
Teachers unions and ed schools have absolutely nothing to do with how reading is taught in schools.
Que?
Yep.
They are a secondary problem at worst! The right always likes to scapegoat them 🤨
"Meanwhile, large-scale performance gaps between groups with profoundly different social and economic conditions cannot be closed on the school side; we have thrown an immense amount of money, effort, time, and manpower at those gaps at the school level for a half-century, with close to nothing to show for it."
As someone who teaches at a school with kids from wildly different backgrounds (our students include the governor's daughter and her mansion-dwelling friends as well as kids who live in by-the-week motels), I feel this all the time. What exactly am I supposed to do about the kid who misses my class 2-3 days a week to care for siblings or do under-the-table landscaping work? We have a family graduation advocate who does a lot of outreach to students who are flagged as at-risk, and I will help individual students to the best of my ability while I am at school, but we can't magically fix their life circumstances. And a lot of the educational gaps are at least partially a consequence of those circumstances--these are the students who switch schools multiple times a year, who disappear for two weeks, get dropped, and have to reenroll when they return. They are dealing with very real problems that cannot be fixed by more engaging teaching methods. (In fact, the spottier the attendance, the fewer fun engaging activities I can do--they all have to be stuff that's easy for students to make up--but I digress.)
The work our graduation advocate and social worker do is good and meaningful and improves many students' lives to some extent, and they do help some kids who might have dropped out make it to graduation. It's not that there's no value to it. But ultimately the gaps persist, and I don't see how schools can reasonably be expected to fix it.
The sad truth is if you adopt one of those kids into Matt's family at birth the kids end up much more like their biological parents than they end up like Matt. There is the great hope that all this can be fixed but these problems are the result to deep genentic differences.
Well, my point was about the influence of circumstances. On the other side, I work with a lot of wealthy students who are reasonably successful in school, but who I would expect to fare very differently if they weren't raised in mansions and hadn't benefited from private tutors since kindergarten.
It's impossible to prove anyway, but I was not at all suggesting that my students who miss 50% of my class due to circumstances outside their control are victim to "deep genetic differences" that prevent their success.
"It's impossible to prove anyway"
It's totally possible to prove. Adopt them at birth into Matt's family and see how they do. The results are what they are. The missing school is a symptom of the problem and not the cause.
It's possible to take one of my struggling high school students, turn them back into a baby, raise them in a different family, and compare? Or is there some data showing that infants adopted into supportive, financially stable families frequently have different life outcomes than that of the same families' biological children--and that this difference is attributable to "deep genetic differences"?
Honestly, I think we just disagree.
Twin studies
I mean, sure. To be clear, I'm not saying genetics play no role at all. I just take issue with the broadness of their claim.
Not only is it totally possible, but it has been proven time and time again. There's an entire field of research called "adoption studies".
I listened to the Yglesias Lovett podcast to see if the left was finally converging on the FdB view of the limits of education and I got the impression that Lovett simply refuses to consider that “academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population.” Yglesias seemed to accept the proposition but his reluctance to state it outright told me it’s still a third rail issue. It will be the right’s endless obsession with selection that drives education policy.
I had that exact same curiosity when I saw that podcast. I appreciate you giving me the spoiler so that I don't have to listen to that much Yglesias.
Another thing that did not work, shoveling money at an already failing system: Federal District Judge Russell Clark ordered a significant increase in Kansas City local property taxes for the 1991-92 fiscal year to finance capital improvements and experimental education and cultural offerings in the schools ("larger-than-Olympic-size swimming pool, college-caliber field house, and weight rooms, 25-acre wildlife sanctuary and actual zoo, television studios, computer and science labs, classes in garment design, ceramics, and Suzuki violin--and students from outside the urban district were offered free taxi rides to and from school daily). Failing then, failing now 33 years later. Problem, same urban pool of school district students.
Freddy, Sorry that I can’t join in Middletown next month.Always enjoy meeting with authors and discussing their work and the influences on them. Reside in CT and graduated from college in Middletown in 1963 ( yrs, I have now reached middle age) but am now in SC and won’t return to Ct until after your event.
BTW- while recognizing individual differences in academic ability ( as differentiated from differences in intelligence) of course there are common sense tried and tested ways to improve academic achievement. One of the best ways is to hire teachers who love and excited by their subject matter and have mastered it rather than for some reason just want “to teach” .
What in the world does this mean, "while recognizing individual differences in academic ability (as differentiated from differences in intelligence)" . . . except as the attempt to find a pretty way of saying the unpalatable to modern taste? And my heavens, it's "tried and tested" that the way to improve schools is to "hire teachers who love and excited by their subject matter." Codswallop. What has been tested and proved is that while it's much more fun for a student to have a good teacher than a bad one . . . it does not change the student's (or plural students') long-term outcome.
That helps but it’s not scalable 🙂
I haven’t read the Piper article but am absolutely in agreement that if it focuses narrowly on phonics vs whole language, the benefits are probably real. That said, this is all outside of the context of the coming world —where the qualifications for “success” (with literacy undoubtedly being crucial, regardless)will likely need to be radically redefined. Just curious what ppl think about that.
It primarily focuses on phonics vs whole language, and on holding back 3rd graders who can't read for another year.
And I think that probably should work but it needs more testing and auditing to really make sure that the people who run the system are not manipulating the results! That happens 🤨
"Differences in educational talent are real." Will this euphemistic formulation turn out to be more palatable to the educational reform crowd than "differences in IQ"?
When schools abandon tracking: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/1c4xudt/midvale_school_for_the_gifted/
A flawed experimental design clearly 😂
"Here I must again point out the stark reality. Academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable. Not all students are equally talented, and this can never change. Differences in educational talent are real."
So, based on education outcomes, Asians in general are more academically talented, and blacks in general are less academically talented. Do I have that right?