NYT might have written about this but I had no idea. It would be cool if this narrative of "do what works no matter where it's done" could be used as a unifying concept for the country.
To be fair, most people do not pay attention to education news unless it’s deliberately divisive. Which I think is to the benefit of educators, honestly in this day and age.
I teach 3rd grade in a southern state and we’ve had 3rd grade retention forever and I really don’t understand why it’s only us.
If you make it 3rd grade and can’t read there’s not that much magic we can do in one year and it’s a lot to ask in Two. We have a ton of comprehension standards to teach too. Like why not just do this every year or every other instead of a one time fear laden anti-jubilee. But if you were going to do it first seems to me much more pivotal as every grade after that significantly weights read to learn over learn to read more.
Even if it is stressful I kind of like the focusing it does for everyone and with most family’s it becomes an us against the test dynamic since my opinion doesn’t really matter.
The notion that students who can't read or write shouldn't be allowed to advance through school sounds merciless, but it's important I think — it's important unless you don't believe that kids need to learn how to communicate with text… which is what I *do* believe.
…
What if there were a *persistent* threat of retention, not only in the 3rd grade, but in every primary school grade? Would the effects of this threat focus the efforts of students during their entire educations?
There is a real debate as to whether retention in 4th grade actually leads to durable gains into 8th and 12th grade. If the gains don’t persist then you are spending 7% more to educate the retained kids for no real reason.
A lot of these studies seem focused on “does retention help the kids who are held back” and not “does a culture of holding kids back mean that teachers get marginal students over the line, so they master reading by 3rd grade”
And the racial disparity concerns seem aimed in the wrong direction. The problem isn’t that too many black kids are held back, it’s that too many black kids aren’t being taught to read (putting them in danger of retention)
Agreed on the racial disparity thing. But if the main benefit of retention is to incentivize better focus and improved performance for non retained students, there has to be a better and cheaper way to do that.
I would also say the Mississippi 8th grade reading scores which have improved a lot but are still below the national average, are consistent with a temporary bump from 3rd/4th grade retention which fades over time.
I think Mississippi has done a lot of good work but I really doubt they have gone from 49th to 7th in 10 years.
Re "there has to be a better and cheaper way to do that" I don't think there does have to be a better or cheaper way! The costs of one extra year of school for some kids are very low compared to the costs of nearly all ed reforms. "you can't go on to fourth grade if you can't read" is legible, easy to implement, hard to corrupt, and gets everyone focused on what really matters. I don't think we have a ton of things that do that.
The effects on the child who is retained seem to be limited (though it doesn't seem to be detrimental). The effects on the system which gets as many kids reading by the end of third grade as possible are a big deal!
I mean I’d love to read all about it but it genuinely lights a fire under family’s in a way nothing else I’ve seen in a school year does for kind of low but not catastrophically low reading level kids and gets them to study.
Maybe there’s something better but that has an assume a can opener problem.
Good piece Kelsey, but I think you missed an opportunity to discuss the role that luxury beliefs about critical pedagogy have played in curricular decisions in democratic districts. This is an especially conspicuous omission given the Argument's mission to defend philosophical liberalism.
Critical pedagogies began with Paolo Freire, who is one of the most commonly-assigned authors on education syllabi according to the open syllabus project. There is a direct line from Freire's rejection of the "banking model" of education where teachers "deposit" knowledge into students minds, to the rejection of things like phonics and rule-based approaches to math instruction.
So you're right that, until recently, "local school boards have been more interested in issues around equity than measurably improving learning outcomes" — but that's not just been an administrative focus. Large swathes of the teacher-education apparatus have been captured by the disciples of Freire and have rejected evidence-based methodologies as oppressive and inegalitarian. The shift away from phonics was politically motivated, not empirically motivated. Here's Freire in "The Importance of the Act of Reading" —
"First, I would like to reaffirm that I always saw teaching adults to read and write as a political act, an act of knowledge, and therefore as a creative act. I would find it impossible to be engaged in a work of mechanically memorizing vowel sounds, like in the exercises ba-be-bi-bo-bu, la-le-li-lo-lu. Nor could I reduce learning to read and write merely to learning words, syllables, or letters, a process of teaching in which the teacher fills the supposedly empty heads of the learners with his or her words. On the contrary, the student is the subject of the process of learning to read and write as an act of knowing and a creative act. The fact that he or she needs the teacher’s help, as in the pedagogical situation, does not mean that the teacher’s help annuls the student’s creativity and responsibility for constructing his or her own written language and reading this language."
Ken Goodman's cueing method, originally developed in the late 60's may have given teachers an apparent empirical crutch for their political beliefs (even though the science turned out to be bunk), but even this was shot through with controversial politics — as Emily Hanford revealed when she interviewed him in 2019. Ken Goodman appears unwilling to countenance a distinction between skilled and unskilled readers "because of the value judgment that implies." And that's from the "scientist" behind non-phonics pedagogy y'all!
Belief in the value of these pedagogies is a Luxury Belief because most folks who hold these views can afford to ensure their own kids get a good education regardless. They'll be reading with them outside school, they'll have rich pre-K vocabularies, they'll have tutors, etc. The kids who end up suffering are the ones in democratic districts whose parents _aren't_ members of the educated elite. Symbolic capitalists get to wrap themselves in the comfort that their districts are progressive and woke, when in fact those very pedagogies actually hurt the poor and marginalized.
You just fundamentally cannot understand the broader story here until you understand why we stopped teaching phonics. And when you start digging in to that story, you'll find many footnotes to Freire. Egalitarian liberals need to understand this tradition and critically evaluate how much of a role it ought to play in our educational institutions. It's just fundamentally illiberal and does more harm than good.
I have an incredibly low opinion of really most of the field of education research and certainly of all this stuff, and in my preferred world we'd dramatically alter the whole field. But I think I disagree that reform needs to start here. You can start with training teachers on what works, and that will help because most teachers really do want to use effective strategies. A reckoning for the liars and those who pushed theories that made them money or served their ideological gains at the expense of students would be satisfying, but it will not itself teach kids to read and I don't think it's even on the critical path to doing so.
Good — but my concern is that there will be many cases where "what works" is also regarded as "problematic" such that merely exposing teachers to what works won't always suffice for the reform we want.
We'll see just how often that happens, but some of the pushback against the reintroduction of phonics seems to bear that pattern out. I hope these cases are rare.
But when they do occur, I am less optimistic than you are that simply leaning into "what works" will suffice without addressing the beliefs that led us to reject pedagogical methods because they didn't sit well with our politics. That's why I think educational reform just won't be successful unless it pairs science with critique. I agree it doesn't need to start with critique — just that it must come alongside.
I think that if reform started here, it would be very beneficial. I kept wishing that Doge would take a look at this field and burn it all to the ground, but somehow it kept not happening. Over the same span, my company evaluated almost a hundred million dollars worth of DoEd grants that went towards "whole word" curriculum professional development for teachers.
my exaggerated impression is that teachers spend every waking hour going from professional development seminar to professional development seminar, each one costing the taxpayer hundreds of times the teacher's annual salary, and each one based on actively harmful pedagogy from the field of "education research"
i have the sinking feeling that even if we did get phonics curriculum instruction into the hands of teachers, it would just end up being one more training module in a giant stack of training modules teachers are pressured to get through.
without burning down the structure that's already there, i think we'll have a hard time injecting anything new into the ecosystem. it's extremely memetically competitive, and you're competing against grifters who get to optimize for political maneuvering ability while you're stuck optimizing for actually educating the kids, and the system is intentionally opaque to reformers
i don't know how large a factor this actually was... but one of the reasons mississippi had such a drastic turnaround is because the revolving door of grant management positions in their public university system happened to eventually stumble upon an extremely competent person who genuinely wanted to fix these problems, for the position of managing the state's 10 figure GEARUP grant. this meant there was a huge influx of new money which was not already spoken for by entitled grifters. some proportion of it could get used to purchase worthless professional development, or fund worthless research in the uni education departments, to placate the existing looters. then there was still a meaningful amount of money left over for genuine reform, which was not being competed over (nobody fights during a whalefall).
this isn't the kind of success that seems replicable. in fact, i don't even know if it's legible from the outside. GEARUP isn't even a literacy grant, for pete's sake (i think technically the disbursement of funds for literacy research might have been illegal)! and all the grifter "jobs" assuredly got "bid out" just as is legally mandated, even if the true negotiation happened on email chains long before the bidding process. i don't even know if it would be possible for a well-meaning reformer to understand what happened at all, not by reading the official documentation at least.
and that's just one tiny piece of the whole picture that I happened to get exposed to. i'm sure there were other illegible dice rolls happening in other parts of the ecosystem i'm not privy to. I have no idea how a reformer might bring about a result like this intentionally.
This reminds me of my limited experience on a school site council for elementary. The teachers and administrators were saying they wanted to use the limited funding to improve children's self-esteem by focusing on socio-emotional support and culturally appropriate interventions. Me and an immigrant dad both asked, "but wouldn't knowing math and being able to read improve their self-esteem?" The rest of the people on our council did not love that.
The Sold A Story podcast was the first piece of media that turned me onto this and I'll always recommend it to anyone that's interested in how literacy education works (and doesn't)
It's heartbreaking hearing parents recounting their realizations, during COVID, that their children couldn't read. They'd trusted that the system responsible for teaching them to read when they were children could have only been improved via the modifications made to it since, but it has not been the case.
> Europe, a continent that has barely experienced economic growth in the last several decades.
Shots fired! (and correctly so)
The left engages in so much motivated reasoning to try to compare the US unfavorably to Europe. There are certainly several important areas where we fall short, but the same can, and should, be said in reverse. (Source: lived in Europe off and on for the past ~15 years)
Agreed that Europe doesn’t necessarily do things better than the US, but I don’t think comparative GDP growth is worth a “shots fired” slam dunk. What do most people care about an extra GDP growth percentage when the most common cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical issues.
So ok, we are Californians, we want to influence our local district to copy these measures. What obstacles need to be overcome? Is there a statewide statute that needs amendment to allow third grade retention, for example? Or could a reform school board slate, supported by a parent advocacy group and able to hire a like minded superintendent, just push this through in a district in a couple of years?
Yes, I know statewide support and state level accountability are necessary to preserve gains over the longer term. But one has to start somewhere, and a major CA urban school district like OUSD or SFUSD doing this and seeing it work would go a long way to build the political coalition necessary at the state level.
I do think the "move to MS for the better schools" thing, if you meant it at all seriously, is a bit off base. A parent determined enough to make such a move is likely determined enough to make sure their kid reads well regardless of where they go to school-- and there are many many other things one might prefer about CA schools, e.g. that they teach fact-based history of the Civil War and provide comprehensive non-moralizing sex education.
I will freely admit that "move to Mississippi for the public schools" was an intentionally provocative statement, but I do know a lot of CA parents whose kids were not taught to read who are invested, motivated, and trying to access supports for their kids and still struggling.
As for what concrete asks to make of your school board and what can be done on the district level, districts can absolutely adopt highly-rated curricula and teach students on them, and can set their own guidance on retention (though my impression is that the pressure against holding students back is so strong that without the 'it's out of my hands' of a statewide requirement, it simply doesn't happen. Weaver told me that one glaring thing wrong here in California is that Bookworms, the 2-5 reading curriculum with the strongest evidence for it, hasn't been approved.
“move to Mississippi for the public schools” is more than provocative, it’s misleading. And, like the original commenter suggested, it is off base.
You’re trying to set up a “red states do blue values better than blue states” reading very intentionally. That type of framing, while it gets clicks, is not honest.
We can applaud Mississippi for the gains it’s made. But you can still recognize the places it falls short. Mississippi is still last in maternal and infant mortality. Its eighth grade reading scores still fall short as well. We should analyze this data and not just look at it through the lens of “oh I thought Mississippi was backwards but they aren’t!” That’s a simplistic reading. It’s a “My Fair Lady” look at education.
California shouldn’t become Mississippi. Can its school systems learn something? Sure. But that data needs to be analyzed.
I think it is straightforwardly true that Mississippi is doing a much better job at delivering on a core liberal value - mass literacy - than California, and I think people ought to be outraged about that. So far the states that have imitated it are Louisiana and Tennessee. California should implement these reforms as well.
My point wasn’t that there isn’t much to learn from other states curriculum. But your statement of “. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools” is self-admittedly reductive and facile. I’ve lived in both states. I would not want my kids going to public school in Mississippi over California.
Good article. One point of caution though is I don't think the "adjusted for demographics, Mississippi has the best schools in America" story you'll see in some places adds up. Note --I don't think this article says this... Two issues here:
(1) By far the biggest--using free lunch numbers as a proxy for poverty is fine when comparing school districts in the same metro. But it fails pretty badly as a metric when you are dealing with areas varying cost of living, since school lunch is given based on the straight federal poverty line, while someone's actual living conditions are based on their income in comparison to the local cost of living. When you look at straight poverty, California is relatively average while Mississippi is at the bottom of the pack. If you look at Supplemental Poverty Measure (accounting for cost of living) California is close to tied for the worst.
I think this is reflected in the fact that Mississippi has the lowest rate of homelessness in America despite having the lowest GDP per capita. So Mississippi clearly has a lot of poverty, but is it really correct to say its poverty rate is almost 50% higher than California's when doing a demographic adjustment? Seems a bit off.
Of course this leads to another criticism of blue state policy around housing but that's a different post.
(2) All the discussion and criticism of coastal/blue states around how much they spend on schools has some merit. That said education is a classic baumol's disease industry where a richer area will have to raise teacher/administrator pay more. Government spending in general is overindexed on Baumol's disease sectors which is I think the source of a lot of cost growth. Clearly there are some things blue states do badly.
Having lived in both Mississippi and California, I would say it is accurate to say that its poverty is 50% higher. Homelessness is lower because housing is unbelievably cheap in Mississippi. But just because you have two walls and a roof over your head (which could be a house given the lack of regulation defining livability) doesn’t mean you aren’t living in poverty. Is it better than being homeless? Yes. But the poverty is still higher.
I try only to comment when I have something worthwhile to say, but here I wanted to comment only to say that I thought the article was truly excellent.
I was unlucky in that I was not taught to read phonetically, but by the gestalt method.
The idea of recognizing whole words at once seemed like a great shortcut to comprehension, but it's more like a speed bump in practice. It slows you down, and makes you double-check the identity of each word before moving on. It's also terrible for understanding standard spellings. The gestalt method is actually "the hard way" of learning to read, although I've found that it does improve comprehension quality — not because of what gestalt teaches intrinsically, but because of what the many countermeasures students need to practice in order to compensate for the flaws of gestalt, teach.
I like that Jerusalem’s piece from yesterday (“Don’t let ‘Abundance’ become the moderate Omnicause”) was followed up by an actual example of why moderate Democrats might want to reach across the aisle and learn from Republican states in a new way unrelated to housing or permitting
Finally the niche content I demand in my life. To be very fair to the rest of California Oakland has maybe the single most dysfunctional public school district in the country and actually makes the rest of the city look competently run in comparison. This is a high bar given that I worked for the city for 19 months and spent 9 of those months playing Hades at work instead of actually working towards the city's public safety goals.
Oakland unified finally escaped receivership only for VanCedric Williams and his friends (sorry to pick on you VanCedric but you sent me the most mailers) to just torpedo them right back. Sometimes I miss Oakland but man I am endlessly glad that I did not grow up there.
I hope he signed the bill but it doesn't do that much to ensure the better curricula are actually adopted, teachers are trained to use them, and schools are accountable for not promoting forward students who aren't equipped to succeed.
It is also worth noting that a lot of Southern states have countywide education funding, even if they have separate school districts within that county, largely as a result of needing to make reforms to get out from court supervision under desegregation plans. That contrasts with, say, Connecticut or New York outside NYC, where school districts can be very small and determine their own tax rates, so two towns next to each other can have wildly varying resources.
In my small city in california we have three elementary schools - the two in wealthy neighborhoods have much larger budgets than the one in the poorer neighborhood, because the parents can afford to give ~$1,000 a year to the PTA vs. ~$20 a year at the poor school. So a school a mile away from the one my kid went to have a PTA budget 10 times larger ($200,000 vs. $20,000)
All of this seems very logical to me the 3 steps that Mississippi and other states took to improve literacy and other core competency scores obviously worked. So why can’t these practices just be standardized across the United States?
It’s not like the nation is so siloed anymore that what works with kids in the South wouldn’t work in California, Washington, Illinois, etc. It’s too bad that the Department of Education has been gutted and is being ran into the ground by a former WWE executive.
Maybe it’s time for education reform and standardization at the National level.
NYT might have written about this but I had no idea. It would be cool if this narrative of "do what works no matter where it's done" could be used as a unifying concept for the country.
I constantly run into people who have no idea!! You really need constant relentless coverage to make something something everyone has heard about.
To be fair, most people do not pay attention to education news unless it’s deliberately divisive. Which I think is to the benefit of educators, honestly in this day and age.
I teach 3rd grade in a southern state and we’ve had 3rd grade retention forever and I really don’t understand why it’s only us.
If you make it 3rd grade and can’t read there’s not that much magic we can do in one year and it’s a lot to ask in Two. We have a ton of comprehension standards to teach too. Like why not just do this every year or every other instead of a one time fear laden anti-jubilee. But if you were going to do it first seems to me much more pivotal as every grade after that significantly weights read to learn over learn to read more.
Even if it is stressful I kind of like the focusing it does for everyone and with most family’s it becomes an us against the test dynamic since my opinion doesn’t really matter.
The notion that students who can't read or write shouldn't be allowed to advance through school sounds merciless, but it's important I think — it's important unless you don't believe that kids need to learn how to communicate with text… which is what I *do* believe.
…
What if there were a *persistent* threat of retention, not only in the 3rd grade, but in every primary school grade? Would the effects of this threat focus the efforts of students during their entire educations?
There is a real debate as to whether retention in 4th grade actually leads to durable gains into 8th and 12th grade. If the gains don’t persist then you are spending 7% more to educate the retained kids for no real reason.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-does-research-say-about-grade-retention-a-few-key-studies-to-know/2022/11
A lot of these studies seem focused on “does retention help the kids who are held back” and not “does a culture of holding kids back mean that teachers get marginal students over the line, so they master reading by 3rd grade”
And the racial disparity concerns seem aimed in the wrong direction. The problem isn’t that too many black kids are held back, it’s that too many black kids aren’t being taught to read (putting them in danger of retention)
Agreed on the racial disparity thing. But if the main benefit of retention is to incentivize better focus and improved performance for non retained students, there has to be a better and cheaper way to do that.
I would also say the Mississippi 8th grade reading scores which have improved a lot but are still below the national average, are consistent with a temporary bump from 3rd/4th grade retention which fades over time.
I think Mississippi has done a lot of good work but I really doubt they have gone from 49th to 7th in 10 years.
Re "there has to be a better and cheaper way to do that" I don't think there does have to be a better or cheaper way! The costs of one extra year of school for some kids are very low compared to the costs of nearly all ed reforms. "you can't go on to fourth grade if you can't read" is legible, easy to implement, hard to corrupt, and gets everyone focused on what really matters. I don't think we have a ton of things that do that.
Maybe. But also given the effect almost entirely fades it kinda seems that doing 3rd grade twice might not really work?
The effects on the child who is retained seem to be limited (though it doesn't seem to be detrimental). The effects on the system which gets as many kids reading by the end of third grade as possible are a big deal!
I mean I’d love to read all about it but it genuinely lights a fire under family’s in a way nothing else I’ve seen in a school year does for kind of low but not catastrophically low reading level kids and gets them to study.
Maybe there’s something better but that has an assume a can opener problem.
Good piece Kelsey, but I think you missed an opportunity to discuss the role that luxury beliefs about critical pedagogy have played in curricular decisions in democratic districts. This is an especially conspicuous omission given the Argument's mission to defend philosophical liberalism.
Critical pedagogies began with Paolo Freire, who is one of the most commonly-assigned authors on education syllabi according to the open syllabus project. There is a direct line from Freire's rejection of the "banking model" of education where teachers "deposit" knowledge into students minds, to the rejection of things like phonics and rule-based approaches to math instruction.
So you're right that, until recently, "local school boards have been more interested in issues around equity than measurably improving learning outcomes" — but that's not just been an administrative focus. Large swathes of the teacher-education apparatus have been captured by the disciples of Freire and have rejected evidence-based methodologies as oppressive and inegalitarian. The shift away from phonics was politically motivated, not empirically motivated. Here's Freire in "The Importance of the Act of Reading" —
"First, I would like to reaffirm that I always saw teaching adults to read and write as a political act, an act of knowledge, and therefore as a creative act. I would find it impossible to be engaged in a work of mechanically memorizing vowel sounds, like in the exercises ba-be-bi-bo-bu, la-le-li-lo-lu. Nor could I reduce learning to read and write merely to learning words, syllables, or letters, a process of teaching in which the teacher fills the supposedly empty heads of the learners with his or her words. On the contrary, the student is the subject of the process of learning to read and write as an act of knowing and a creative act. The fact that he or she needs the teacher’s help, as in the pedagogical situation, does not mean that the teacher’s help annuls the student’s creativity and responsibility for constructing his or her own written language and reading this language."
Ken Goodman's cueing method, originally developed in the late 60's may have given teachers an apparent empirical crutch for their political beliefs (even though the science turned out to be bunk), but even this was shot through with controversial politics — as Emily Hanford revealed when she interviewed him in 2019. Ken Goodman appears unwilling to countenance a distinction between skilled and unskilled readers "because of the value judgment that implies." And that's from the "scientist" behind non-phonics pedagogy y'all!
Belief in the value of these pedagogies is a Luxury Belief because most folks who hold these views can afford to ensure their own kids get a good education regardless. They'll be reading with them outside school, they'll have rich pre-K vocabularies, they'll have tutors, etc. The kids who end up suffering are the ones in democratic districts whose parents _aren't_ members of the educated elite. Symbolic capitalists get to wrap themselves in the comfort that their districts are progressive and woke, when in fact those very pedagogies actually hurt the poor and marginalized.
You just fundamentally cannot understand the broader story here until you understand why we stopped teaching phonics. And when you start digging in to that story, you'll find many footnotes to Freire. Egalitarian liberals need to understand this tradition and critically evaluate how much of a role it ought to play in our educational institutions. It's just fundamentally illiberal and does more harm than good.
I have an incredibly low opinion of really most of the field of education research and certainly of all this stuff, and in my preferred world we'd dramatically alter the whole field. But I think I disagree that reform needs to start here. You can start with training teachers on what works, and that will help because most teachers really do want to use effective strategies. A reckoning for the liars and those who pushed theories that made them money or served their ideological gains at the expense of students would be satisfying, but it will not itself teach kids to read and I don't think it's even on the critical path to doing so.
Good — but my concern is that there will be many cases where "what works" is also regarded as "problematic" such that merely exposing teachers to what works won't always suffice for the reform we want.
We'll see just how often that happens, but some of the pushback against the reintroduction of phonics seems to bear that pattern out. I hope these cases are rare.
But when they do occur, I am less optimistic than you are that simply leaning into "what works" will suffice without addressing the beliefs that led us to reject pedagogical methods because they didn't sit well with our politics. That's why I think educational reform just won't be successful unless it pairs science with critique. I agree it doesn't need to start with critique — just that it must come alongside.
I think that if reform started here, it would be very beneficial. I kept wishing that Doge would take a look at this field and burn it all to the ground, but somehow it kept not happening. Over the same span, my company evaluated almost a hundred million dollars worth of DoEd grants that went towards "whole word" curriculum professional development for teachers.
my exaggerated impression is that teachers spend every waking hour going from professional development seminar to professional development seminar, each one costing the taxpayer hundreds of times the teacher's annual salary, and each one based on actively harmful pedagogy from the field of "education research"
i have the sinking feeling that even if we did get phonics curriculum instruction into the hands of teachers, it would just end up being one more training module in a giant stack of training modules teachers are pressured to get through.
without burning down the structure that's already there, i think we'll have a hard time injecting anything new into the ecosystem. it's extremely memetically competitive, and you're competing against grifters who get to optimize for political maneuvering ability while you're stuck optimizing for actually educating the kids, and the system is intentionally opaque to reformers
i don't know how large a factor this actually was... but one of the reasons mississippi had such a drastic turnaround is because the revolving door of grant management positions in their public university system happened to eventually stumble upon an extremely competent person who genuinely wanted to fix these problems, for the position of managing the state's 10 figure GEARUP grant. this meant there was a huge influx of new money which was not already spoken for by entitled grifters. some proportion of it could get used to purchase worthless professional development, or fund worthless research in the uni education departments, to placate the existing looters. then there was still a meaningful amount of money left over for genuine reform, which was not being competed over (nobody fights during a whalefall).
this isn't the kind of success that seems replicable. in fact, i don't even know if it's legible from the outside. GEARUP isn't even a literacy grant, for pete's sake (i think technically the disbursement of funds for literacy research might have been illegal)! and all the grifter "jobs" assuredly got "bid out" just as is legally mandated, even if the true negotiation happened on email chains long before the bidding process. i don't even know if it would be possible for a well-meaning reformer to understand what happened at all, not by reading the official documentation at least.
and that's just one tiny piece of the whole picture that I happened to get exposed to. i'm sure there were other illegible dice rolls happening in other parts of the ecosystem i'm not privy to. I have no idea how a reformer might bring about a result like this intentionally.
This reminds me of my limited experience on a school site council for elementary. The teachers and administrators were saying they wanted to use the limited funding to improve children's self-esteem by focusing on socio-emotional support and culturally appropriate interventions. Me and an immigrant dad both asked, "but wouldn't knowing math and being able to read improve their self-esteem?" The rest of the people on our council did not love that.
The Sold A Story podcast was the first piece of media that turned me onto this and I'll always recommend it to anyone that's interested in how literacy education works (and doesn't)
It's heartbreaking hearing parents recounting their realizations, during COVID, that their children couldn't read. They'd trusted that the system responsible for teaching them to read when they were children could have only been improved via the modifications made to it since, but it has not been the case.
> Europe, a continent that has barely experienced economic growth in the last several decades.
Shots fired! (and correctly so)
The left engages in so much motivated reasoning to try to compare the US unfavorably to Europe. There are certainly several important areas where we fall short, but the same can, and should, be said in reverse. (Source: lived in Europe off and on for the past ~15 years)
Agreed that Europe doesn’t necessarily do things better than the US, but I don’t think comparative GDP growth is worth a “shots fired” slam dunk. What do most people care about an extra GDP growth percentage when the most common cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical issues.
So ok, we are Californians, we want to influence our local district to copy these measures. What obstacles need to be overcome? Is there a statewide statute that needs amendment to allow third grade retention, for example? Or could a reform school board slate, supported by a parent advocacy group and able to hire a like minded superintendent, just push this through in a district in a couple of years?
Yes, I know statewide support and state level accountability are necessary to preserve gains over the longer term. But one has to start somewhere, and a major CA urban school district like OUSD or SFUSD doing this and seeing it work would go a long way to build the political coalition necessary at the state level.
I do think the "move to MS for the better schools" thing, if you meant it at all seriously, is a bit off base. A parent determined enough to make such a move is likely determined enough to make sure their kid reads well regardless of where they go to school-- and there are many many other things one might prefer about CA schools, e.g. that they teach fact-based history of the Civil War and provide comprehensive non-moralizing sex education.
I will freely admit that "move to Mississippi for the public schools" was an intentionally provocative statement, but I do know a lot of CA parents whose kids were not taught to read who are invested, motivated, and trying to access supports for their kids and still struggling.
As for what concrete asks to make of your school board and what can be done on the district level, districts can absolutely adopt highly-rated curricula and teach students on them, and can set their own guidance on retention (though my impression is that the pressure against holding students back is so strong that without the 'it's out of my hands' of a statewide requirement, it simply doesn't happen. Weaver told me that one glaring thing wrong here in California is that Bookworms, the 2-5 reading curriculum with the strongest evidence for it, hasn't been approved.
“move to Mississippi for the public schools” is more than provocative, it’s misleading. And, like the original commenter suggested, it is off base.
You’re trying to set up a “red states do blue values better than blue states” reading very intentionally. That type of framing, while it gets clicks, is not honest.
We can applaud Mississippi for the gains it’s made. But you can still recognize the places it falls short. Mississippi is still last in maternal and infant mortality. Its eighth grade reading scores still fall short as well. We should analyze this data and not just look at it through the lens of “oh I thought Mississippi was backwards but they aren’t!” That’s a simplistic reading. It’s a “My Fair Lady” look at education.
California shouldn’t become Mississippi. Can its school systems learn something? Sure. But that data needs to be analyzed.
I think it is straightforwardly true that Mississippi is doing a much better job at delivering on a core liberal value - mass literacy - than California, and I think people ought to be outraged about that. So far the states that have imitated it are Louisiana and Tennessee. California should implement these reforms as well.
My point wasn’t that there isn’t much to learn from other states curriculum. But your statement of “. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools” is self-admittedly reductive and facile. I’ve lived in both states. I would not want my kids going to public school in Mississippi over California.
CA will be moving in the right direction, assuming Newsom signs this bill (which he's expected to).
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/california-is-poised-to-pass-a-science-of-reading-law-after-a-long-tense-debate/2025/06
Good article. One point of caution though is I don't think the "adjusted for demographics, Mississippi has the best schools in America" story you'll see in some places adds up. Note --I don't think this article says this... Two issues here:
(1) By far the biggest--using free lunch numbers as a proxy for poverty is fine when comparing school districts in the same metro. But it fails pretty badly as a metric when you are dealing with areas varying cost of living, since school lunch is given based on the straight federal poverty line, while someone's actual living conditions are based on their income in comparison to the local cost of living. When you look at straight poverty, California is relatively average while Mississippi is at the bottom of the pack. If you look at Supplemental Poverty Measure (accounting for cost of living) California is close to tied for the worst.
I think this is reflected in the fact that Mississippi has the lowest rate of homelessness in America despite having the lowest GDP per capita. So Mississippi clearly has a lot of poverty, but is it really correct to say its poverty rate is almost 50% higher than California's when doing a demographic adjustment? Seems a bit off.
Of course this leads to another criticism of blue state policy around housing but that's a different post.
(2) All the discussion and criticism of coastal/blue states around how much they spend on schools has some merit. That said education is a classic baumol's disease industry where a richer area will have to raise teacher/administrator pay more. Government spending in general is overindexed on Baumol's disease sectors which is I think the source of a lot of cost growth. Clearly there are some things blue states do badly.
Having lived in both Mississippi and California, I would say it is accurate to say that its poverty is 50% higher. Homelessness is lower because housing is unbelievably cheap in Mississippi. But just because you have two walls and a roof over your head (which could be a house given the lack of regulation defining livability) doesn’t mean you aren’t living in poverty. Is it better than being homeless? Yes. But the poverty is still higher.
I try only to comment when I have something worthwhile to say, but here I wanted to comment only to say that I thought the article was truly excellent.
I was lucky enough to be in the room for my 3 years older sister’s phonics tapes and was reading by preschool 🙂
I was unlucky in that I was not taught to read phonetically, but by the gestalt method.
The idea of recognizing whole words at once seemed like a great shortcut to comprehension, but it's more like a speed bump in practice. It slows you down, and makes you double-check the identity of each word before moving on. It's also terrible for understanding standard spellings. The gestalt method is actually "the hard way" of learning to read, although I've found that it does improve comprehension quality — not because of what gestalt teaches intrinsically, but because of what the many countermeasures students need to practice in order to compensate for the flaws of gestalt, teach.
I like that Jerusalem’s piece from yesterday (“Don’t let ‘Abundance’ become the moderate Omnicause”) was followed up by an actual example of why moderate Democrats might want to reach across the aisle and learn from Republican states in a new way unrelated to housing or permitting
Finally the niche content I demand in my life. To be very fair to the rest of California Oakland has maybe the single most dysfunctional public school district in the country and actually makes the rest of the city look competently run in comparison. This is a high bar given that I worked for the city for 19 months and spent 9 of those months playing Hades at work instead of actually working towards the city's public safety goals.
Oakland unified finally escaped receivership only for VanCedric Williams and his friends (sorry to pick on you VanCedric but you sent me the most mailers) to just torpedo them right back. Sometimes I miss Oakland but man I am endlessly glad that I did not grow up there.
Very well reported
- An education wonk
I think you misread the California data and reported what the national statistics are, not the CA stats.
Only 28% read proficiently, another 28% read at a basic level, and 44% are below basic. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2024/pdf/2024220CA4.pdf
Last I checked, Governor Newsom has AB 1454 on his desk, which would incentivize adoption of MS-style programs.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/california-is-poised-to-pass-a-science-of-reading-law-after-a-long-tense-debate/2025/06
I hope he signed the bill but it doesn't do that much to ensure the better curricula are actually adopted, teachers are trained to use them, and schools are accountable for not promoting forward students who aren't equipped to succeed.
It is also worth noting that a lot of Southern states have countywide education funding, even if they have separate school districts within that county, largely as a result of needing to make reforms to get out from court supervision under desegregation plans. That contrasts with, say, Connecticut or New York outside NYC, where school districts can be very small and determine their own tax rates, so two towns next to each other can have wildly varying resources.
In my small city in california we have three elementary schools - the two in wealthy neighborhoods have much larger budgets than the one in the poorer neighborhood, because the parents can afford to give ~$1,000 a year to the PTA vs. ~$20 a year at the poor school. So a school a mile away from the one my kid went to have a PTA budget 10 times larger ($200,000 vs. $20,000)
All of this seems very logical to me the 3 steps that Mississippi and other states took to improve literacy and other core competency scores obviously worked. So why can’t these practices just be standardized across the United States?
It’s not like the nation is so siloed anymore that what works with kids in the South wouldn’t work in California, Washington, Illinois, etc. It’s too bad that the Department of Education has been gutted and is being ran into the ground by a former WWE executive.
Maybe it’s time for education reform and standardization at the National level.
Thanks for a very interesting article.