‘Miracle’ maybe, but only a start
A Los Angeles Times columnist got under the skin of a number of folks, including Mississippi’s former superintendent of education, by recently questioning this state’s incredible gains on a national reading test over the past decade.
Michael Hiltzik was perhaps justified in his skepticism, but for the wrong reasons. Instead of taking pot shots at Mississippi for banning abortion and refusing to expand Medicaid — two issues totally unrelated to education performance — he could have said he doubted the reading scores because this state has a history of gaming the system, as when it increased the high-school graduation rates by lowering standards several years ago.
But what about reading? Are the gains in fourth grade real — going from the worst performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test to better than the national average?
The answer appears to be yes, although so far much of the improvement is transitory, largely disappearing within four years.
Hiltzik’s now discredited column was based on the research of two bloggers, who hypothesized that Mississippi’s gains in fourth grade were the result not of new teaching strategies but of holding back the lowest performers in third grade. The bloggers wrongly assumed that prior to the Literacy Based Promotion Act of 2013, which requires most third graders to pass a state reading test before advancing to fourth grade, Mississippi didn’t fail many third graders. The bloggers have since retracted their analysis after being shown that the age of fourth grade test takers had changed hardly at all since 2013.
“The Mississippi reading miracle looks to be real after all,” wrote one of the bloggers, Kevin Drum, in a headline acknowledging his error.
Russ Latino of the news site Magnolia Tribune also pointed out that Hiltzik is hardly one to tarnish Mississippi’s gains by focusing on the racial gap that persists between white and Black students. As Latino says, Mississippi can actually be proud of how much it has reduced the gap. Even though it’s still 25 points wide, that’s much better than the 37-point disparity in California, which has the second-largest gap among states that track the statistic.
Where Mississippi falls short so far is being able to sustain its progress.
Between 2019 and 2022, the state’s fourth grade reading score on the national test actually declined slightly. That happened, however, all around the country, most likely due to the classroom disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of bigger concern is the lack of improvement in the upper grades, a point in Hiltzik’s column that he does get right. Between 2013 and 2022, Mississippi students in the eighth grade, the only other cohort measured by NAEP, saw no improvement on their scores. Whatever the state has learned to do right in the early grades apparently has not translated to the middle school years.
“A teaching program whose gains evaporate over a four-year span doesn’t much warrant the label ‘miracle,’” Hiltzik wrote.
That criticism is fair. The end game for education reforms is not to get students reading at grade level in the fourth grade. That’s the starting point. The end game is to have them reading at a 12th grade level by the time they graduate, plus being competent with other academic skills, such as math and critical thinking, and having a solid foundation in literature, history, civics and technology.
Producing a well-educated, well-rounded populace is what schooling is supposed to be about. Reading is a building block for all of that to happen, and there’s no discounting its importance. But Mississippi should not be satisfied with one education miracle. It needs to produce a bunch of them.
DeSantis fails to gain ground
Here’s the most compelling question during these early months of the 2024 presidential campaign: Why isn’t Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis doing better in the polls?
DeSantis, after all, has an admirable record of achievement in Florida. With the help of a compliant Legislature, he got a number of conservative bills passed. He got national attention by convincing lawmakers to punish the Walt Disney Co. when it publicly opposed Republican legislation to prohibit discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in the early grades of elementary school.
But really, his signature accomplishment occurred after Hurricane Ian hit the state in 2022. DeSantis was a model crisis manager. His agencies deployed significant assistance to the hardest-hit areas quickly and proved that, properly directed, government can be helpful. Voters noticed, and a couple of months later they rewarded DeSantis with a second term as governor.
With all that going for him, why is DeSantis still a distant second behind former President Donald Trump in virtually every presidential poll available? Trump has been out of office for more than two years, a period during which DeSantis has regularly made news for what he supports and what he opposes.
Here are a few thoughts:
• There’s only one Trump. DeSantis has tried to make the case that he’s the newest version of Trump, who will pick up the torch once carried by the former president. Key to this point is that DeSantis is the one without all the political baggage that Trump amassed during his four years in office, and therefore would have a better chance of winning the general election.
So far, Republicans being polled aren’t buying it. Many of them are sticking with the original version. As the summer grinds on, Trump has a comfortable lead in the polls while DeSantis lays off staff and promises changes to his campaign.
• Some of DeSantis’ Florida strategies may be coming back to haunt him. Catherine Rampell, a columnist on The Washington Post website, noted that the governor was among the Republicans blasting Bud Light beer after it made a marketing agreement with a transgender social influencer. It was a colossally bad move by Bud Light that has hurt the stock price of its owner, Anheuser-Busch InBev.
So now, Rampell noted, DeSantis says the state should consider suing the company for losses because Florida’s pension fund is a stockholder. It doesn’t take much for people to see that he can’t have it both ways.
The same goes for the governor’s Disney strategy. Why take aim at Florida’s largest employer? Disney is entitled to its corporate opinion, but DeSantis was unable or unwilling to let it go. Frankly, he was a sore winner.
• But this one may be the key: DeSantis may be a good governor, but he remains an awkward candidate. Politicking does not come naturally to him, the way it did for presidents like FDR, JFK, Reagan, Bill Clinton — and, most importantly, Trump.
The former president is clearly a lightning rod, but there’s no doubt that he knows how to get attention and connect with voters. That may be the biggest challenge for DeSantis.
It says something about the voters that we tend to be charmed by smooth politicians rather than listen to what they’re saying. Many times we have gotten it right — just reread the list above. But there are other 2024 natural politicians besides Trump; Chris Christie, Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswanthy come immediately to mind. DeSantis just isn’t there yet.
Jack Ryan
Enterprise-Journal
