I’m pretty confident the knee jerk skepticism about the “Mississippi Miracle” is the result of the immense psychic injury a lot of blue staters suffered from having to entertain the idea that a bunch of dumb hicks are doing something better than they are.
I frequently get this vibe, yes. There's this overt disgust at having to take Mississippi seriously and people are insulted at even comparing their school outcomes to Mississippi's, let alone to that comparison being favorable to Mississippi.
I think you might have this one backward. People rooting for this Mississippi Miracle to be valid are going to find themselves embarrassed. Have you considered that you are not looking at this from a neutral position?
I have looked at this exhaustively from tons of different angles, reading everything I can find arguing both for and against there being a real effect here, and looking myself at tons of NAEP data for evidence of selection of the population taking the test. If there's a rebuttal that explains the data, I will share it immediately, because I care about getting the right answer here. This rebuttal is really, really bad, and the people who published it should be embarrassed.
I genuinely dont understand the idea that retention amounts to selection bias in any way that a normal person would understand that concept.
Also it bears noting that if Mississippi’s policy is anything like Florida the retention level is basically they need to only be one year behind. My threadbare level 2s last year were basically proficient second grade students.
The few 1s I’ve had who can’t pass in summer school are literally in 3rd grade with early first grade or late k proficiency. They don’t know all the letters and sounds for them or have single digit percentile working memory or something else. What do standards even mean if we say they should pass like that.
At this point like 10% of my media consumption is Kelsey Piper pointing out that Mississippi did actually meaningfully improve education outcomes and Andy Masley pointing out that data centers don't actually use very much water. I'm awed at their persistence in the face of such poor epistemics on the part of their opponents and annoyed that this much effort is required to even put up a decent flight against pervasive motivated reasoning.
Hi Kelsey, I really enjoy your articles on child education. Please keep writing them. I'm not sure why people are trying to debunk the Mississippi Miracle theory. It seems pretty obvious that teaching kids the mechanics of phonically reading would be the best method to teach them. Further holding children back, especially in early grades, isn't a punishment; it's an opportunity for them to catch up.
I might have missed this in your reporting, but is there data on how much better children do on reading tests after being held back?
Do you or any other readers have suggestions on how parents can start teaching a 3 almost 4-year-old to start using phonics to read? Are there iPad apps I could use with him, or physical books/games?
Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Lessons is pretty good! We've tried a bunch of software programs (Starfall, Reading.com, Mentava) and some of them are fine but none of them are vastly better than any other. The core thing you want to do is just teach them the most common sounds made by each letter (watch a couple videos on how to do this, it's more helpful to kids to say 'b-' 'p-' than 'buh' and 'puh'. Once they've mastered that you want to model the skill of blending sounds together, and every app has a different approach to teaching this so you can just bounce around and see which one resonates with your kid.
I mostly agree that you have the stronger argument here but I think there are still real concerns.
1. I think the strongest argument against the ideas in your article is the strong pretrend. If Mississippi scores were going up before the reforms you describe, and then the reforms didn't change the trajectory, then it's hard (not impossible but hard) to attribute the results to the reforms.
2. Today, retention can absolutely lead to moving out of the data set in many contexts, given the significant expansion of non-public schools.
3. You are skeptical that kids passing the test might be retained for other reasons under the previous policy, but there are lots of possibilities -- retaining students for behavior issues, or for struggles with other aspects of the curriculum. Focusing retention on kids that fail the reading test could absolutely cause selection effects.
1). MS got significant mileage out of their NCLB reforms. 2013 was not the first step they took towards improving instruction, and I think was substantially an effort to standardize on stuff that was going well in 180 trial schools and that they were now confident enough in to take statewide. One reformer said in 2024 that 2013 "“t[ook] the Barksdale model that we had been vetting in those 180 schools, [and] took it to scale.”
2) Of course you should check private enrollment. Private school enrollment in MS fell over the time period in question.
3) For this to have the observed effect on the upper deciles they'd have had to be retaining students basically uniformly across reading ability levels. I absolutely don't buy this.
1. I think "Mississippi has a 20+ year history of successful incremental education reform" is a plausible read of the data but that's somewhat different from your original thesis in your article.
2/3. My point is that you made some weak claims in this specific post on these two points about retention -- it doesn't always turn kids into subsequent year test takers, and it could have changed composition even if the numbers stayed similar.
More generally, the other decile results suggest that Mississippi is doing something right, but I think it's more puzzling than you are giving it credit for. Both the general trends in education reform, and the specific reforms you discussed, should be primarily impactful for below-median students. After all, one of the stylized facts about the phonics debate is that the strongest kids learn reading easily under most methods, but better instruction is really needed for kids who struggle. Similarly retention should obviously not impact 90th percentile students. So I think it's clear there is something interesting going on here but I think there's less clarity yet on what.
Was wondering could schools have improved the retention policy annually (better identification?) but I don't know how many years you can do that effectively.
I have a strong prior for claimed gains in education being artifactual but in this case, it does seem like Mississippi genuinely improved.
It can't be selection bias because the retention policy would merely shift the lower-performing students over by a few years max and the gains have been occurring for many years, and before the retention policy ever went into effect. It can't simply be that you're giving the poor students extra time or that you've optimized retention for the test because the gains have been occurring even in the students who don't get retained. You're not seeing any noticable jumps in the data, as would be the case if there were some huge change in methodology one year.
I don't know what explains all of the stats except that Mississippi made their students better readers. Maybe there's some weird combination of statistical artifacts going on making it seem this way when it isn't so but the simplest explanation at present is that the gains are real.
What allowed Mississippi (and other states) to -do- these reforms in the first place? Weak teacher's unions? Lack of activist parents? And, relatedly, is "rigorous standards for teachers and students" a kind of "secret sauce" that could extend these learning gains to other states and grade levels without a massive increase in public investment?
> To their credit, when I reached out to the authors about this mistake, they acknowledged it immediately and reached out to get it fixed before the article’s publication.
Before that article's publication or this article's publication? It looks like the mistake is still there - is the link to some kind of preprint? (I did notice the "lorum ipsum" text floating around.)
I’m pretty confident the knee jerk skepticism about the “Mississippi Miracle” is the result of the immense psychic injury a lot of blue staters suffered from having to entertain the idea that a bunch of dumb hicks are doing something better than they are.
I frequently get this vibe, yes. There's this overt disgust at having to take Mississippi seriously and people are insulted at even comparing their school outcomes to Mississippi's, let alone to that comparison being favorable to Mississippi.
I think you might have this one backward. People rooting for this Mississippi Miracle to be valid are going to find themselves embarrassed. Have you considered that you are not looking at this from a neutral position?
I have looked at this exhaustively from tons of different angles, reading everything I can find arguing both for and against there being a real effect here, and looking myself at tons of NAEP data for evidence of selection of the population taking the test. If there's a rebuttal that explains the data, I will share it immediately, because I care about getting the right answer here. This rebuttal is really, really bad, and the people who published it should be embarrassed.
Yeah, you might be too worried about getting schooled by a redneck if…
I genuinely dont understand the idea that retention amounts to selection bias in any way that a normal person would understand that concept.
Also it bears noting that if Mississippi’s policy is anything like Florida the retention level is basically they need to only be one year behind. My threadbare level 2s last year were basically proficient second grade students.
The few 1s I’ve had who can’t pass in summer school are literally in 3rd grade with early first grade or late k proficiency. They don’t know all the letters and sounds for them or have single digit percentile working memory or something else. What do standards even mean if we say they should pass like that.
At this point like 10% of my media consumption is Kelsey Piper pointing out that Mississippi did actually meaningfully improve education outcomes and Andy Masley pointing out that data centers don't actually use very much water. I'm awed at their persistence in the face of such poor epistemics on the part of their opponents and annoyed that this much effort is required to even put up a decent flight against pervasive motivated reasoning.
Hi Kelsey, I really enjoy your articles on child education. Please keep writing them. I'm not sure why people are trying to debunk the Mississippi Miracle theory. It seems pretty obvious that teaching kids the mechanics of phonically reading would be the best method to teach them. Further holding children back, especially in early grades, isn't a punishment; it's an opportunity for them to catch up.
I might have missed this in your reporting, but is there data on how much better children do on reading tests after being held back?
Do you or any other readers have suggestions on how parents can start teaching a 3 almost 4-year-old to start using phonics to read? Are there iPad apps I could use with him, or physical books/games?
Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Lessons is pretty good! We've tried a bunch of software programs (Starfall, Reading.com, Mentava) and some of them are fine but none of them are vastly better than any other. The core thing you want to do is just teach them the most common sounds made by each letter (watch a couple videos on how to do this, it's more helpful to kids to say 'b-' 'p-' than 'buh' and 'puh'. Once they've mastered that you want to model the skill of blending sounds together, and every app has a different approach to teaching this so you can just bounce around and see which one resonates with your kid.
This argument had me at “And what we see is that Mississippi has seen gains in every decile.”
I mostly agree that you have the stronger argument here but I think there are still real concerns.
1. I think the strongest argument against the ideas in your article is the strong pretrend. If Mississippi scores were going up before the reforms you describe, and then the reforms didn't change the trajectory, then it's hard (not impossible but hard) to attribute the results to the reforms.
2. Today, retention can absolutely lead to moving out of the data set in many contexts, given the significant expansion of non-public schools.
3. You are skeptical that kids passing the test might be retained for other reasons under the previous policy, but there are lots of possibilities -- retaining students for behavior issues, or for struggles with other aspects of the curriculum. Focusing retention on kids that fail the reading test could absolutely cause selection effects.
1). MS got significant mileage out of their NCLB reforms. 2013 was not the first step they took towards improving instruction, and I think was substantially an effort to standardize on stuff that was going well in 180 trial schools and that they were now confident enough in to take statewide. One reformer said in 2024 that 2013 "“t[ook] the Barksdale model that we had been vetting in those 180 schools, [and] took it to scale.”
2) Of course you should check private enrollment. Private school enrollment in MS fell over the time period in question.
3) For this to have the observed effect on the upper deciles they'd have had to be retaining students basically uniformly across reading ability levels. I absolutely don't buy this.
1. I think "Mississippi has a 20+ year history of successful incremental education reform" is a plausible read of the data but that's somewhat different from your original thesis in your article.
2/3. My point is that you made some weak claims in this specific post on these two points about retention -- it doesn't always turn kids into subsequent year test takers, and it could have changed composition even if the numbers stayed similar.
More generally, the other decile results suggest that Mississippi is doing something right, but I think it's more puzzling than you are giving it credit for. Both the general trends in education reform, and the specific reforms you discussed, should be primarily impactful for below-median students. After all, one of the stylized facts about the phonics debate is that the strongest kids learn reading easily under most methods, but better instruction is really needed for kids who struggle. Similarly retention should obviously not impact 90th percentile students. So I think it's clear there is something interesting going on here but I think there's less clarity yet on what.
Was wondering could schools have improved the retention policy annually (better identification?) but I don't know how many years you can do that effectively.
It would be nice if we could look at performance numbers by age instead of by grade, to bypass the retention question entirely.
I have a strong prior for claimed gains in education being artifactual but in this case, it does seem like Mississippi genuinely improved.
It can't be selection bias because the retention policy would merely shift the lower-performing students over by a few years max and the gains have been occurring for many years, and before the retention policy ever went into effect. It can't simply be that you're giving the poor students extra time or that you've optimized retention for the test because the gains have been occurring even in the students who don't get retained. You're not seeing any noticable jumps in the data, as would be the case if there were some huge change in methodology one year.
I don't know what explains all of the stats except that Mississippi made their students better readers. Maybe there's some weird combination of statistical artifacts going on making it seem this way when it isn't so but the simplest explanation at present is that the gains are real.
The pang I had when I saw a Kevin Drum chart. He would be blogging furiously about this. I miss him.
I was truncated in preschool
What allowed Mississippi (and other states) to -do- these reforms in the first place? Weak teacher's unions? Lack of activist parents? And, relatedly, is "rigorous standards for teachers and students" a kind of "secret sauce" that could extend these learning gains to other states and grade levels without a massive increase in public investment?
> To their credit, when I reached out to the authors about this mistake, they acknowledged it immediately and reached out to get it fixed before the article’s publication.
Before that article's publication or this article's publication? It looks like the mistake is still there - is the link to some kind of preprint? (I did notice the "lorum ipsum" text floating around.)
The link is to a preprint, yes. The magazine article I believe will come out in January.