Category Archives: education reform

education, education reform, Educational Research, NAEP

NAEP: A Modest Proposal

May 10, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash]

Likely the most influential standardized test in the US is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), under the purview of the beleaguered US Department of Education.

Also without question, NAEP is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented standardized tests since the mainstream media, political leaders, pundits, and the public routinely shout “Crisis!” with each release of NAEP data.

NAEP’s achievement levels are misleading at best, but at worst, those achievement levels were designed to create the appearance of perpetuate educational failure, and yes, crisis.

“Proficient” is almost always conflated with “grade level” resulting in false claims, for example, that 2/3 of fourth graders are reading below grade level. NAEP’s “basic” is approximately what most states identify as “proficient”—suggesting on grade level (see an extensive analysis here).

What most people misunderstand as well about NAEP is its purpose: NAEP was born in the fertile soil of high-stakes accountability education reform spurred by the Reagan administration’s propaganda A Nation at Risk. Reagan sought to reintroduce forced prayer in schools and wanted to close the Department of Education, labeled an “abomination.”

However, what Reagan spawned was over four decades of ever-changing standards and tests to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable. In short, NAEP was created as a test of random samples of students to hold states accountable for their educational standards and outcomes (historically, public education has been the responsibility of the states, and NCLB in 2001 was a departure toward more federal oversight).

Frankly, NAEP was designed as an accountability mechanism, not a way to provide feedback on individual student achievement. (Note that state-level accountability testing was designed to provide individual student assessment that should provide evidence for instruction.)

In 2025, on the heels of recent shouts of “Crisis!” (again) because almost everyone has misunderstood and misrepresented NAEP scores across math, reading, and even civics, Reagan’s dream may be coming true since the Trump administration has promised to end the USDOE, and that move imperils the future of NAEP.

As Peter Greene has confronted, some have taken this uncertainty about NAEP to propose turning NAEP into (you should pause here to prepare yourself for the inanity) the failed Common Core experiment that sought to replace the state-based public education accountability process with national standards and testing.

Into the nonsense that is NAEP historically and the current doubling-down on Common Core Redux, I want to make a modest proposal about the future of NAEP.

Actually I want to make two modest proposals, acknowledging that the first is never going to happen (although it is the one more strongly supported by empirical data; you know, the “science” that so many education reformers claim to worship).

I strongly reject standardized testing as well as traditional classroom testing and grades. That has been at the core of my 40-plus-year career, and again, this is informed not just by my experiences as an educator but by a very robust body of research.

Therefore, my first modest (and completely unrealistic in the US) proposal is the conclusions reached by Maron and Tienken:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.

The United States has one of the highest levels of childhood poverty among Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It is well known that the social safety net in the United States is not as strong as some nations in Europe and other parts of the world [20]. Neoliberal policies have greatly reduced government support for families in the United States. Important social policy frameworks that reduce poverty, such as monetary, labor, fiscal, and health policies, have been weakened over the last 40 years, causing increases in childhood poverty in the United States compared to other democratic countries [41].

Although some education policy makers in the United States claim that standardized test results are an important component of a comprehensive system of educational quality control, the results from decades of research on the topic suggest otherwise [42]. The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

Alas, the US will never follow this last point because we refuse to acknowledge systemic forces and remain a people fatally committed to rugged individualism and bootstrap mythologies.

And thus, here is my compromise, a modest proposal that can and should be explored for the future of NAEP:

Rename achievement levels in standardized testing that share a national standard metric for the levels (all states and NAEP would share the same achievement levels and metric).
Achievement levels must be age-level and not grade-level (currently, using “grade level” allows states to game scores through grade retention, for example). A clear system of “below age level,” “age level,” and “above age level” would simplify reporting and allow for more accurate political, media, and public responses to data.

This proposal would be a first step, I hope. The problem at first is that this doesn’t address the excessive testing culture the US has embraced without positive outcomes for over forty years.

This first step, I think, can create a new basis for evaluating and viewing our public schools, and then, we may be primed to begin dismantling the standardized testing machine—or at least become more acclimated to reducing it dramatically.

The great irony of the power of high-stakes testing in the education accountability era is that it has proven only one thing: Weighing a pig does not make it fatter.

Testing, testing, and testing has not improved schools, teachers, or students, but it has created a perpetuate state of educational crisis.

Perpetual educational crisis serves only political agendas and the unquenchable education marketplace.

If we can entertain for a moment of idealism that the Trump disaster doesn’t destroy both the USDOE and public education, let’s consider how to more forward in ways that better serve the promise of public education and our fragile democracy.

If not an end to NAEP, at least a better NAEP that serves the interest of students and not political or market agendas?

The Zombie Politics of Misinformation about Students Reading at Grade Level

April 29, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash]

Yesterday, we had our last class session in my upper-level writing and research course that is grounded in students analyzing and evaluating how media covers a chosen education topic.

In that last class, we debriefed about what students concluded about media coverage of education. While some found the coverage valid and informative, much of the discussion focused on why media perpetuates misinformation more often than not—notably about student reading proficiency in the US.

Right on cue, then, I saw this posted on social media, Teaching reading is rocket science, with these two recurring claims that are, in fact, misleading at best and false at worst (see “Recommended” links below):

Eli’s story, and the stories of all my students, are not the exception. They represent the shared reality for two-thirds of our children, here in California and across the country since the 1990s. My students are not at risk because they cannot yet read — they are at risk because not knowing how to read limits their access to opportunities, both academically and beyond.

Research shows when we teach students to read by directly guiding them to break the code of how sounds in letters work, about 95% of them can become strong readers — including multilingual learners and those with dyslexia. So why have only one-third of our fourth graders been reading at grade level for the past three decades? This gap persists because students haven’t had access to evidence-based literacy instruction drawn from decades of vast interdisciplinary research in areas such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, communication sciences and education.

The “2/3 of students are not reading a grade level” claim is one of the most powerful recurring claims in the media. Note these high-profile examples:

Emily Hanford in APM Reports:

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they’re likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we’ve come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.

And even a college-based literacy professor in The Conversation:

Five years after the pandemic forced children into remote instruction, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders still cannot read at grade level. Reading scores lag 2 percentage points below 2022 levels and 4 percentage points below 2019 levels.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary and repeated clarifications from many educators and scholars (See “Big Lie” link in “Recommended” below), media characterizations of student reading proficiency continues to be misrepresented, primarily by misunderstanding NAEP achievement levels, because the public has always believed that “kids today can’t read”—despite there being little evidence of a reading “crisis” over the recurring claims of “crisis” reaching back into at least the 1940s.

Two points are important to clarify:

NAEP achievement levels are confusing because “basic” is approximately what most states consider “proficient” and by implication “grade level.” NAEP “proficient” is well above grade level, set at an “aspirational” [1] level that is misleading and creates a perpetual appearance of failure for students, teachers, and schools.
Most states—notably Mississippi and Louisiana—set their “proficient” level just above the mid-point of NAEP “basic” (MS) or just below (LA):

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales, 2007–22

In short, if we consider NAEP and state assessments of reading valid, about 1/3 of students have over the last couple of decades performed below “basic” (NAEP) and thus seem to be below grade level in grade 4.

While the NAEP misinformation and misunderstanding is grounded in the “aspirational” use of “proficient,” the “95% of students can be on grade level” claim is just wildly overstated, and ironically, not based on scientific evidence (despite this being a refrain by the “science of” movement).

I recommend reading Can 95% of Children Learn to Read? to see some of how this claim gained its zombie status.

Historically and currently, many in the US have been and are concerned about student reading acquisition; this, of course, is a valid concern, notably that marginalized and vulnerable populations of students are disproportionately struggling to meet whatever standard we set for “proficient” or “grade level” (see HERE that explores how MS has not closed the race or socioeconomic achievement gaps, for example).

There is an insidious zombie politics to claims about 2/3 of students not reading at grade level, but that if we just did the right thing, 95% of students would read at grade level.

Since neither claim is empirically true, we must confront that basing education claims and reform on misunderstanding and misinformation have not yet worked and are unlikely to work moving forward.

Note

[1] Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf

Webinar: The Manufactured Crisis: Exposing the False Narrative of Public Education’s “Failure” (A4PEP)

April 21, 2025 plthomasedd

The Manufactured Crisis: Exposing the False Narrative of Public Education’s “Failure”

[Click HERE for recording]

Date & Time

Apr 16, 2025 08:30 PM EST

Description

Join us for a timely and vital conversation on April 16 at 6:30 p.m. ET with Dr. P.L. Thomas, Professor of Education at Furman University. For decades, media and policymakers have pushed a narrative that America’s public schools are “failing.” But who benefits from this story, and who is harmed by it? Dr. Thomas will expose how the education reform industry has fueled a false crisis, undermining trust in public schools while advancing corporate-driven reforms. Drawing on his experience as a teacher, scholar, and national award-winning writer, Dr. Thomas will offer critical insights into how we can challenge disinformation and reclaim a narrative rooted in equity, democracy, and community empowerment.

6:30 pm, April 16

[Click HERE for presentation]

education, education reform, Educational Research, literacy, reading, Science of Reading

Recommended: Effective practices for literacy teaching

April 16, 2025 plthomasedd

Effective practices for literacy teaching, Colin Harrison, Greg Brooks, P. David Pearson, Sari Sulkunen, Renata Valtin (2025)

In light of the PISA 2022 student results, which showed a decline in performance in basic reading skills across Europe, this report presents a detailed literature review of the most recent European and international research on effective approaches to literacy teaching. It highlights practices that have been properly evaluated and are supported by evidence of impact.

Targeted primarily at policymakers, but also relevant to teachers, parents, and all those contributing to children’s literacy development, the report analyses over 600 studies on effective teaching practices (both pedagogical and content-specific), support programmes, and policies that promote literacy for all children across the EU. It covers different levels of education and takes into account gender perspectives as well as the needs of vulnerable and special needs groups.

Based on the key findings, the authors discuss the teaching of comprehension beyond letters and words (e.g. drawing inferences, judging relevance and trustworthiness), the role of dispositional characteristics such as motivation, metacognition, and world knowledge, and the teaching of digital literacy skills, including critically evaluating online information. Building on these findings, they present 20 research-informed recommendations for policymaking.

education, education reform, Educational Research, sexism

Education: How the Market and Fads Poison a Robust Field

April 3, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Thomas Kolnowski on Unsplash]

My high school English teacher and eventual mentor, Lynn Harrill, told me in my junior year that I should be a teacher.

I laughed, and certainly as teens are apt to do, hurt his feelings.

Almost fifty years later, and I have been a career educator since 1984.

I realized I wanted to be a teacher and a writer during my junior college years—the former because I had a job as a tutor and the latter because my speech teacher, Steven Brannon, introduced my to e.e. cummings.

I declared my secondary English education major when I transferred the fall of my junior year. And then, almost immediately, I learned a harsh lesson about becoming an education major: It was a “lesser” degree.

I took as many English courses as I could as an undergrad, and in ever class, I had to out myself as an education major, not an English major (almost most of my close friends were English majors).

Over the next five decades, I have had to navigate that “lesser” status when I tried to enter an MFA program while teaching high school full-time (nope), tried to apply for a PhD in English while teaching high school full time (nope), and then completed an EdD (yet another “lesser” degree to go with with my BA in English Education and MEd).

And since 2002, I have had to correct people who assume I am in the English department; nope, I am in Education.

In the good ol’ U.S. of A., as well, the standard beliefs are that education is failing, teachers are people who can’t do (and were mostly weak students themselves), and the discipline of education is a joke.

Just as a recent example, see this on social media:

Why does Hattie's plagiarism & misconduct matter?

Because it exposes the lie at the heart of what is called the 'science of learning', 'evidence-based' or 'education reform' movement.

This movement is not about 'science', but about 'management science', and it's destructive ⬇️ https://t.co/ODuGOTdAX5
— Stephen Vainker (@StephenVainker) April 1, 2025

Visible Learning, promoted by Tom Bennett, Nick Gibb, Carl Hendrick, & Daisy Christodoulou in the most glowing terms, is a far deeper & more pernicious myth than any of these.

Hattie appeared at Greg Ashman's ResearchED event as recently as last month.https://t.co/lYd8XLId5S https://t.co/zbJfJmh6qI
— Stephen Vainker (@StephenVainker) April 1, 2025

I have recently submitted a book chapter, in fact, on two “pernicious” fads in education—grit and growth mindset.

However, I believe the standard attacks on education, teachers, and then the discipline of education are gross oversimplifications that miss almost entirely the real problems (what Vainker is addressing above and what I am confronting in my chapter on grit and growth mindset).

There are layers to the problem.

First, education as a discipline is robust and valid. My own recognition of that, however, did not fully develop until my EdD program where I was engaged with the scholarship, philosophy, and theory of the field of education—and not distracted by issues of certification and bureaucracy.

Now, that means when people are attacking “education” and the “pernicious fads” they are in fact not criticizing the discipline.

Here are the layers of problems that dilute a valid field:

Certification and accreditation bureaucracy. Regretfully, education is a profession that feels compelled to mimic more respected fields like medicine and law, where credentials are required. However, that layer has more often than not been reductive for the discipline because of the inherent flaws with credentialing and bureaucracy.
The education market place. The current “science of reading” (SOR) movement is repeating what happened during the Common Core era—the education market place using branding (SOR, CC) to spur purchasing cycles in education. To be blunt, the single most powerful and corrupting aspect of education as a field is the market. Any credible or valid education research is necessarily reduced when it is packaged and sold; this is exactly what happened with multiple intelligences, learning styles, grit, growth mindset, etc., creating the perception that the research isn’t credible instead of acknowledging that the marketing is the problem (although in some cases, the market is perpetuating flawed research as well). In short, education reform is an industry, not a process for improving teaching and learning in the US.
Education celebrities. A parallel problem with education market forces is the education celebrity who corrupts the field of education by selling programs, fads, or themselves as “experts” (and sometimes, all of these at once). This is a problematic concern since many of us who work in education, of course, are paid as professionals. Simply being paid as a professional is not something to criticize in a capitalistic society, of course, but money can and does corrupt. One of the best (worst?) examples of how an education celebrity can distort significantly credible and valid research is Ruby Payne, who cashed in (literally) on NCLB mandates and funding. Payne peddled stereotypes about poverty and teaching children in poverty—even though a robust body of research on poverty refuted nearly everything she packaged, promoted, and sold. Part of the problem here is that education celebrities and the market can easily prey on education and educators because the US has been politically negligent in providing schools, teachers, and students the sort of conditions in which all children can learn.
Sexism. Here is a fact at the core of many problems in education: More than 7 out of 10 K-12 teachers and most teacher educators/scholars are women. I leave this as the last point for emphasis because I believe sexism is the foundation of why education remains disrespected as a field and why there is so little political and public support for teachers as professionals (note the current rush to support scripted curriculum as one example). The current focus on “science,” as well, is another sexist movement (repeating the same sort of claims during NCLB) since the quantitative/qualitative divide in what research matters is highly gendered (men do “hard” science, but women do “soft” science).

Bashing student achievement, school and teacher quality, and teaching as a profession as well as education as a field are all a sort of lazy and unexamined national past time in the US.

These sorts of attacks and criticisms are shrugged off as common knowledge and even jokes; again, I believe, primarily because we still see teaching as just something women do with children.

While there is some validity to criticizing educational research that is packaged and sold, this is not something unique to education as a field.

Consider as just one example the perversion of the 10,000 rule in psychology, and the power of Malcolm Gladwell as “celebrity” to do just that.

Psychology and economics, in fact, have experienced crises of replication that should tarnish those fields at least as much as how we marginalize education.

Yet, psychology and economics are seen as men’s professions, and thus, professions, and receive a huge pass when they simply do not deserve that.

We should stop bashing education as a field, but we should also be far more vigilant about protecting educational research and practice from the corrosive impact of bureaucracy, the market, celebrities, and sexism.

education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Science of Reading

Recommended: Why We Cannot Go Back to Basics (Rethinking Schools)

April 3, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash]

Note

The article below appears in Rethinking Schools and brings together several problems with and connections between the “science of reading” and book banning/censorship movements that I have been address since 2018.

Why We Cannot Go Back to Basics: Reclaiming The Right to Teach Literacy, Daniel Ferguson, Laurie Rabinowitz, and Amy Tondreau

Although the “culture war” and “reading war” have been described as separate causes promoted by disparate organizations, their stories are more connected than they appear. Both book banning and SoR dogmatism limit what teachers can teach and what students can read, narrowing the ability of public schools to address children’s diverse needs. We see this most explicitly in conservative parent groups, including Moms for Liberty, who have made it clear they endorse both. This should be a wake-up call to critically examine the potential impact of phonics-based policies on public school students and teachers.

Beware Scripted Curriculum: More Trojan Horse Education Reform

April 1, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by José León on Unsplash, cropped]

It took a few years, but there was always a long game.

And there was a few decades of preparation along the way.

George W. Bush built the foundation for Trojan Horse education reform in the 1990s, including a false “miracle” narrative and efforts to establish scripted curriculum (a colleague and I examined that here).

Education reform, however, was never about improving learning or teaching, but about ideological agendas, conservative agendas.

The crisis/miracle cycles started with that Texas “miracle,” but included the Chicago “miracle” (to bolster Arne Duncan), the DC “miracle” (to promote Michelle Rhee’s grift), and the Harlem “miracle” (that solidly merged education reform as bi-partisan under Obama with the help of grifter Duncan).

What may prove to be the most successful (and harmful) “miracle,” however, is the media manufactured Mississippi “miracle,” grounded in 2019 NAEP scores.

Six years later, the real end game of these manufactured and false “miracles” are merging with an initial effort by W. Bush—de-professionalizing teachers with scripted curriculum. Note the connection in a recent misleading but recurring endorsement by Patrinos (from the Department of Education Reform, funded by Walton money in Arkansas) of that Mississippi “miracle”:

Teaching at the right level and a scripted lessons plan are among the most effective strategies to address the global learning crisis. After the World Bank reviewed over 150 education programs in 2020, nearly half showed no learning benefit.

And then, this disturbing piece by Korbey: Why US schools have fallen in love with scripted lessons.

After taking a swipe at NCTE, Korbey makes the same but false connection as Patrinos above:

Nearly all the states that have seen reading scores improve recently – including Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama – have changed state law to encourage districts to choose from approved lists of HQIM.

Conveniently omitted in public advocacy and endorsements of scripted curriculum, is that this is a correlation; however, research has shown that curriculum, instruction, and teacher training are not the keys to increased test scores. Grade retention is:

[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.

And another omission is that research has shown scripted reading programs de-professionalize teachers, fail to serve the individual needs of students, and have “whitewashed” the curriculum, alienating the most under-served students in our schools [see Recommended below].

And thus, the end game:

Musk: If you have a classroom of 25 or 30 kids, it is literally impossible to spend time with every kid individually or you can spend to little time.. But what you can do is set them up with ai.. pic.twitter.com/tAcySW2zTE
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 31, 2025

Education reform is dedicated to perpetual education crisis for market and political goal.

Scripted curriculum, then, is not designed to improve reading proficiency, but to create one more step toward AI replacing teachers the same way self-checkout replaced cashiers in our grocery stores.

Buyer Beware: Marketing Education Often an Incomplete Story

March 25, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Merakist on Unsplash]

Mainstream media loves a compelling story. And, regretfully, media tends to care very little how accurate or complete that story is.

Media coverage of education is almost entirely a series of misleading stories grounded in either crisis or miracle rhetoric.

One of the darlings of the media is the charter school, the one aspect of the school choice movement that has garnered bipartisan support.

However, as a type of school choice, charter schools must market themselves and recruit. So when media and school marketing combine, I urge “Buyer Beware”:

Here, The State (Columbia, SC) has platformed the principal of a charter school, who makes a couple important (but misleading) claims: the charter school is exceptional and that is because the school practices separating boys and girls for instruction.

“Exemplary High Performing School” is causally connected by Wooten to the boy/girl instructional segregation; however, rarely can a school conduct the sort of scientific research in-house to determine causation, and more importantly, student achievement (test scores) remain overwhelmingly a reflection of the students’ socioeconomic status (60+%), not the school, instruction, or teacher quality.

Here is the missing parts to this story:

Note that Langston Charter Middle has the third lowest poverty index (PI) in the state (12.9), and for comparison, in the same district, the Washington Center has one of the highest PI (96) in the state. [Note that Greenville has a incredibly wide range of low and high poverty schools because the district is large and covers an area of the state with significant pockets of poverty and affluence; and thus, neighborhood schools tend to reflect that socioeconomic reality.]

Further, if we look at Langston Charter Middle’s state report card, the “exceptional” seems to be missing:

Yes, the academic achievement is “excellent,” but again, this data point reflects mostly the very low PI for the students being served.

Note that when Langston Charter Middle is compared to schools with similar student demographics (Daniel Island School, 8.2PI, and Gold Hill Middle, 11.5 PI), the “exceptional” appears to be typical among similar schools:

Media and marketing do more harm than good for public education. When the media is fixated on incomplete and misleading stories and schools feel compelled to market themselves for customers, we all lose.

The OpEd run by The State is not about an exceptional school or the success of separating girls and boys for instruction (although that does speak into a current political ideology that wants this to be true).

The story, as usual, is incomplete, and the marketing is at best misleading.

Once again, many in the US do not want to hear or see the full story: Our schools and student achievement mostly reflect the socioeconomic status of the students’ parents, homes, and communities.

When it comes to media coverage of our schools, I must emphasize: Don’t buy the story being sold.

Media Manufactures Mississippi “Miracle” (Again) [Updated]

March 5, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Cropped from Photo by Miracle Seltzer on Unsplash]

I almost feel sorry for Louisiana. (See Update 2 below)

When the 2024 reading scores for NAEP were released, LA seemed poised to be the education “miracle” of the moment for the media and political leaders.

Since mainstream media seems to know only a few stories when covering education—outliers, crises, and miracles—the outlier gains by LA compared to the rest of the nation, reportedly still trapped in the post-Covid “learning loss,” was ripe for yet another round of manufacturing educational “miracles.”

However, the media is not ready to let go of the Mississippi “miracle” lie: There Really Was a ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in Reading. States Should Learn From It.

To maintain the MS “miracle” message, journalists must work incredibly hard to report selectively, and badly.

For example, Aldeman celebrates, again, MS as a outlier for for the achievement of the bottom 10% of students (carelessly disregarding that outlier data is statistically meaningless when making broad general claims):

But one state is bucking this trend: Mississippi. Indeed, there’s been a fair amount of coverage of Mississippi’s reading progress in recent years, but its gains are so impressive that they merit another look.

Next, Aldeman highlights reading gains by Black students in MS, omitting a damning fact about the achievement of Black (and poor) students in MS (which mirrors the entire nation):

That’s right, MS has the same racial and socio-economic achievement gaps since 1998, discrediting anything like a “miracle.”

But the likely most egregious misrepresentation of MS as a reading “miracle” is Aldeman “debunking” claims that MS gains are primarily grounded in grade retention, not the “science of reading.”

Notably, Aldeman seems to think linking to the Fordham Institute constitutes credible evidence; it isn’t.

So let’s look at the full picture about grade retention and MS’s reading scores on NAEP.

First, the research on increased reading achievement has found that only states with retention have seen score increases. Westall and Cummings concluded in a report on reading policy: “[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component [emphasis added].” [Note that Aldeman selective refers to this study late in the article, but omits this conclusion.]

The positive impact of retention on test scores has not been debunked, but confirmed. What hasn’t been confirmed is that test score gains are actual achievement gains in reading acquisition.

Next, MS (like FL and SC, for example) has risen into the top 25% of states in grade 4 reading on NAEP, but then plummets into the bottom 25% of states by grade 8 (despite their reading reform having been implemented for over a decade), suggesting those grade 4 scores are a mirage and not a miracle:

And finally, MS has consistently retained about nine thousand students each year (mostly Black and poor students) for a decade; if the state was actually implementing something that works, the number of students being retained would decrease and (according the SOR claims that 95% of students can be proficient) disappear.

A final point is that media always omits the most important story, what research has shown for decades about student achievement:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables…. The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

High-poverty states and states with high percentages of so-called racial minorities are not, in fact, beating the odds—again, note that states have not closed the racial achievement gap or the socio-economic achievement gap.

Yes, too often our schools are failing our most vulnerable students. But the greater failures are the lack of political will to address the inequity in the lives of children and the lazy and misleading journalism of the mainstream media covering education.

Update 1

The Mississippi “miracle” propaganda is part of a conservative Trojan Horse education reform movement.

Note this commentary from the Walton-funded Department of Education Reform (University of Arkansas): Mississippi’s education miracle: A model for global literacy reform. The key reveal is near the end of the commentary:

Teaching at the right level and a scripted lessons plan are among the most effective strategies to address the global learning crisis. After the World Bank reviewed over 150 education programs in 2020, nearly half showed no learning benefit.

The goal is de-professionalizing teachers and teaching, not improving student reading proficiency.

Updated 2

The political, market, and media hype over both MS and LA are harmful because that misrepresentation and exaggeration drive the fruitless crisis/reform cycles in education and distracts reform from the larger and more impactful causes of student achievement.

To understand better education reform, I recommend the recently released Opportunity to Learn Dashboard.

According to the press release from NEPC:

Funded and maintained by the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) and The Schott Foundation for Public Education, the Opportunity to Learn Dashboard tracks 18 indicators across 16 states. The project seeks to provide information about factors impacting the degree to which children of different ethnicities and races are exposed to environments conducive to learning.

However, indicators directly related to schools explain only a minority of the variation in achievement-related outcomes. Therefore, the dashboard includes out-of-school factors such as access to health insurance and affordable housing, as well as within-school factors such as exposure to challenging curricula and special education spending.

For both MS and LA, we must acknowledge the significant and robust systemic (out-of-school) disadvantages minoritized and impoverished students continue to face in both states:

Explore MS here.
Explore LA here.

Note here my points raised about lingering opportunity/achievement gaps exposed by NAEP scores in both states:

To emphasize again, NAEP scores do not reveal education “miracles” in either MS or LA. In fact, NAEP scores continue to show that education reform as usual is a failure.

Recommended: Voices from the Field: The Impact of the Implementation of Science of Reading Instruction and Policy on Emergent Bilingual/English Learner Literacy Programs and Teachers

February 26, 2025 plthomasedd

Voices from the Field: The Impact of the Implementation of Science of Reading Instruction and Policy on Emergent Bilingual/English Learner Literacy Programs and Teachers

This new groundbreaking report from the National Committee for Effective Literacy (NCEL), Voices from the Field: The Impact of the Implementation of Science of Reading Instruction and Policy on Emergent Bilingual/English Learner Literacy Programs and Teachers, dives deep into the real-world implementation of Science of Reading (SoR) policies. Through interviews with nearly 80 educators who work directly with emergent bilinguals and English learners (EB/EL) in schools implementing state and district SoR policies, we uncover critical insights into the challenges and opportunities for supporting EB/ELs. This study points to the need for more comprehensive understanding of the SoR and for implementation supports that directly address the needs of EB/EL students and the contexts in which they are taught.

Free Download