A companion to the education crisis Big Lie of education reform is the education miracle.

The list of media and political claims of “miracle” is long since the foundational misleading crisis alarm was set off by A Nation at Risk, the bedrock Big Lie of accountability education reform—Texas miracle, Harlem miracle, and others.

Another companion of the crisis/miracle Big Lies is the “poverty is an excuse” Big Lie; the so-called miracle schools tend to be used as proof that student achievement is not most strongly causally related to socioeconomic factors outside the control of schools. [1]

Many people who are eager to accept education miracles are less interested in the education miracle and more seeking evidence to confirm their beliefs that reject economic privilege and disadvantage; the core here is the rugged individualism, bootstrap, and meritocracy myths.

Building on research from 2006 [2], I wrote a chapter on miracle schools in 2016 [3] and found the following:

• Miracle school claims are rarely confirmed by non-partisan review; the so-called “high flying” schools (high poverty schools with high test scores) are incredibly rare events.
• Those rare miracle schools are outliers, and thus, are not evidence of any generalizations about what all schools, or all high-poverty schools, can do to be more successful.
• Evidence from outliers also are rarely scalable or transferable to schools with different challenges and populations of students.

Miracle school claims are often the tools for media, political, and marketing interests. They are designed to shame educators, not to provide evidence for credible reform.

Here are a few examples of how miracle claims in media are unmasked as false or misleading:

• See this counter-analysis of the miracle school identified in Emily Hanford’s “Hard Words”: Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper, Gerald Coles
• The counter-narrative about the Mississippi miracle: On education miracles in general (and those in Mississippi in particular)
• The misleading Southern Surge: The “Southern Surge” in Reading: Another Media Manufactured Mirage

Notes

[1] Maroun, Jamil, and Christopher H. Tienken. 2024. “The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States” Education Sciences 14, no. 2: 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129

[2] Harris, D. N. (2006, March). Ending the blame game on educational inequity: A study of “high flying” schools and NCLB. Tempe, AZ: Education Policy Research Unit. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ending-blame-game-educational-inequity-a-study-high-flying-schools-and-nclb

[3] Thomas, P.L. (2016). Miracle schools or political scam? In W.J. Mathis & T.M. Trujillo, Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA. Charlotte, NC: IAP.