The oddest part of DeBoer's criticism of Kelsey's original piece is it's been DeBoer who has been consistent on the idea that absolute gains are possible with the right pedagogy, but that there's no way to reliably close achievement gaps (or that it's even a good policy metric to pursue). And he's right! I am not sure what got him so bothered about the Mississippi article. I saw his first commentary go something like "control f 'texas miracle', no results, ignore".
I think he literally might have scanned the article for the Texas Miracle, didn't find any mention of it, assumed the article was about achievement gaps, started ripping off a hot take, and then was in so deep he couldn't retreat. Just weird because he's completely correct that closing gaps are hard/maybe not worth doing but absolute performance can be enhanced with good methods.
He has lots of real arguments about relative achievement, but he also is deeply skeptical about absolute improvements. For the latter, however, he has extremely limited evidence.
He talks so little about the benefits (and even the existence) of absolute improvements that sometimes I think he'd have a hard time admitting that it's good that the citizenry is better educated, as a whole, than 250 years ago.
He genuinely thinks that the amount of education people get today is about the max possible, which is ironic since he loves to criticize people in other contexts for thinking that now is somehow special.
If that's what he genuinely believes, that belief is actually in strong tension with his arguments about relative improvements of the lowest achieving students being impossible. When arguing against relative improvements, he constantly says it won't work because methods that help the lower achieving students improve will inevitably be used to also help already higher achieving students (either in curricular changes demanded by parents, or richer parents finding alternate routes like tutoring to teach their children), thus leaving the achievement gap in place. This literally has to mean that new methods could, in theory, make absolute improvements to education.
At a very general level, and I think this comes across pretty clearly, he's bothered by liberal optimism. It's as much an aesthetic rejection as anything else; it reeks of strivers, "front row kids", etc.
He can prattle on about liberal optimism all day long and I will often agree with him. He cannot pen evidence-free critiques of the hard work of public school educators in a successful state without expecting push-back if he is wrong.
Oh, 100%; it's a terribly vibesy and unreliable way to do policy analysis. I meant it as a diagnostic observation regarding why he's so eager to reject when it aligns with some of his own views on education policy, specifically "the idea that absolute gains are possible with the right pedagogy, but that there's no way to reliably close achievement gaps"
Education policy is not something I know much about. Prior to Kelsey’s piece last week I didn’t know about what had happened in Mississippi but it certainly looks amazing and I hope other states copy it with similar results. What I don’t get is why teachers’ unions oppose it. I get why they fight all kinds of things that could force accountability for their members as much as I dislike that. I just don’t see how doing what Mississippi did threatens them. Can someone explain why they oppose it?
To steelman the unions, it seems like their main concern is that these bills are essentially state governments micromanaging what happens in the classroom. Many of these bills don't just require teachers to be trained in the Science of Reading (including phonics) but also require them to use it in the classroom and ban using other methods like three-queuing at all. This reduces teacher and school autonomy and opens them up to lawsuits from parents.
I do sympathize with the feelings behind this. I know a few former teachers, and the way they tell it, there is a pervasive sense in the profession that their autonomy is being constrained by state governments and parents more and more. They feel they aren't being treated as professionals who deserve respect and decision-making authority in their classrooms.
That said, in this particular case I think they are wrong, and limiting teacher autonomy on reading education is clearly the right move. We have to put kids' interests first when the science is clear.
To add here is a great article on the importance of checklists how many lives they save and some idiots in the medical community fighting back against them while costing lives
My quick Googling seems to indicate that CTA thought last year's bill didn't take ESL students into account and was too restrictive in terms of curriculum. I'd love to see a longer piece on it, though. Maybe The Argument can recruit a guest post from a California teacher?
I'm really not sure if CTA believes this line of thinking or whether they are leveraging a common misconception about the science of reading and English Learners to oppose any form of mandate (as is historically their way). Stanford's Claude Goldenberg has done a nice job of addressing the confusion on this point:
That said, I think it would be fantastic for The Argument to publish a piece focused on the reasons that teachers resist these reforms. Spoiler: it has very little to do with Reading Wars and whole language. Also, it isn't a simple answer, or I would just drop it here.
Thank you so much for sparking this discussion. I knew next to nothing about this topic and now I feel like I have learned a lot, which is why I love The Argument:)
I have a quick question about a point you make in your piece:
"In 2013, only 3% of Mississippi’s fourth-grade public school students earned the highest score on the NAEP reading test. That has now more than doubled to 7%. Dropping or somehow hiding low-scoring students would never achieve that result."
If I understand correctly, 2013 is when Mississippi introduced the retention mandate so a two-point comparison between fourth graders in 2013 and now might in principle hide the effect of the fourth graders age change, I believe? Your argument to exclude this problem in the analysis of the test trends was based on the fact that the improvements were regular through time while the change in average age was likely just a step change in 2014. Have you looked at how the highest scores change through time? (A similar question applies to your point about the change in percentile reading scores).
Mississippi retained about the same number of students pre-mandate - the mandate made it more predictable and organized but they've always been higher than most states on retention. But yes, this is a good thing to look at and the answer is that the top performers (measured either by scoring 'advanced' or by the average score of the 90th percentile) has increased steadily over time since 2013 rather than there being a discontinuity in any particular year: https://tinyurl.com/3yx4su58
Thank you Kelsey, this is really interesting. To me this then is a strong hint that 3rd grade retention in itself had a very limited effect, at least in the Mississippi context? Given that this practice was equally present back when absolute performance was low, makes me think that it did not have a large impact. Another option is that, for other structural reasons, Mississippi's performance would have been much lower in the absence of retention, although this seems unlikely given that the state was already experiencing record low test results.
Could we take this as a clue that retention is not a relevant factor to the Mississippi rise? Is this something that we could extrapolate to other states that had high level of retention?
I took a look also at the graphs you shared, thank you! I thought it was interesting that you can see a bit of a jump up from 2013 to 2015 for all percentiles, which (once we exclude the age effect) does seem to point to a stepwise impact of the new rules, which is what I would expect to see. However, I was worried that some of the improvement might be due to the process of recovery post-financial crisis. After extending the time range of the data (https://tinyurl.com/mud8k4j9) one sees that the lower percentiles did regress partially post 2009, while the top percentiles more so stalled. Maybe then the 2015 "jump" is connected to a slow "return to normal" (funding seems to recover around that year: https://www.cbpp.org/research/a-punishing-decade-for-school-funding). If this is the case, then the slow progress for all percentiles in Mississippi that continues since the '90s seems harder to read in terms of more recent changes in their education policies?
The authors’ point is technically false since as a matter of 5th grade math, you can turn 3% hitting the top score into 7% if you exclude the bottom 57% of the population from testing.
But of course, regardless of the exact details of the policy, they weren’t excluding the majority of the student population . The gains among the top were real.
>"First, we must get straight on the plays in the Southern Surge playbook. Because, for the love of God, it’s not just phonics. There are four parts to the playbook..."
This is the part that always gets me. We're mostly told that only two of those reforms are responsible for the gains: phonics and retention. When you find out that's only half of the reforms actually taking place, it feels like once again we're being sold a story.
What teachers and administrators need from these discussions is a sense of the specifics. When you say "Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools — for phonics and other aspects of literacy" it helps us to know what that actually means. Teachers in many states get trainings, professional development, curriculum workshops, and coaching. What makes these ones so effective? What changes can a school principal or district superintendent actually make that might yield similar results? Or are we doomed to waiting for state legislatures to legislate us into miracle territory? So much digital ink about policy but very little about the curriculum, the training, or the pedagogy.
Lastly, I want to point out that Mississippi's NAEP math scores have also steadily improved, albeit not to the same extent as their reading scores. What's happening there? Nobody seems interested. Miracles only happen in reading, I guess.
Unequivocal support for the reality of the "southern surge" and a brilliant playbook. All kids can read. Politics need to be jettisoned in favor of applying these principles across our nation wherever and whenever they are needed. After all, the continuity of our existence depends on the well-being of children.
I love the coverage on this. For what it's worth, I really think all parents should teach their own kids to read. Learning to read is best done with 1 on 1 instruction with the child trying to sound stuff out, and the parent providing the help when needed. This can be done in 15-20 mins a day.
Yes, I know some parents won't do that. But there are also a lot of highly educated parents that don't. That think they should just leave it to the teachers. They are wrong. It's not that hard, you can do it. And it will really help your child.
Amazon has the Teach your Child to read in 100 easy lessons book. It really works. And yes it's phonics based.
After using phonics to learn to decode (read) then we need to switch to a knowledge building curriculum. Natalie Wexler has really convinced me of this from her excellent book "The Knowledge Gap"
And I would go further and state that we should really have ONE state wide curriculum. That curriculum should be content rich, and then there should be the statewide tests that based on that curriculum. That way is how things are supposed to work.
Teach a subject, then test on what was learned. For better results combine that with frequent low stakes tests that measure student progress and get those that fall behind help with tutors in small groups.
"I really think all parents should teach their own kids to read." Rather than leave it to chance, we just read and had our kids read every night from the moment we could with them.
It paid off.
Yes, at a macro level, we need to improve the schools (by digesting this playbook and utilizing it) but at a micro, personal level, you are absolutely correct. Parents should not leave it to chance.
Most students who are retained in 3rd grade fail to read words like tape or maybe even simpler words. Long vowels, basic digraphs, blends, rarely cvc words. The low passers usually can decode 1-2 syllable words just fine but have a huge comprehension gap in part brought on by them having been slow to develop decoding but also other factors where they’re not getting the background knowledge they need.
I think among this population of the students who actually are retained it’s damning that they weren’t already screened for a disability and were allowed to get to 3rd grade. I wouldn’t be shocked if their kindergarten teachers could predict with striking accuracy who needs intervention and evaluation if Everything wasn’t set up to slow roll these resources out.
The oddest part of DeBoer's criticism of Kelsey's original piece is it's been DeBoer who has been consistent on the idea that absolute gains are possible with the right pedagogy, but that there's no way to reliably close achievement gaps (or that it's even a good policy metric to pursue). And he's right! I am not sure what got him so bothered about the Mississippi article. I saw his first commentary go something like "control f 'texas miracle', no results, ignore".
I think he literally might have scanned the article for the Texas Miracle, didn't find any mention of it, assumed the article was about achievement gaps, started ripping off a hot take, and then was in so deep he couldn't retreat. Just weird because he's completely correct that closing gaps are hard/maybe not worth doing but absolute performance can be enhanced with good methods.
He has lots of real arguments about relative achievement, but he also is deeply skeptical about absolute improvements. For the latter, however, he has extremely limited evidence.
He talks so little about the benefits (and even the existence) of absolute improvements that sometimes I think he'd have a hard time admitting that it's good that the citizenry is better educated, as a whole, than 250 years ago.
He genuinely thinks that the amount of education people get today is about the max possible, which is ironic since he loves to criticize people in other contexts for thinking that now is somehow special.
If that's what he genuinely believes, that belief is actually in strong tension with his arguments about relative improvements of the lowest achieving students being impossible. When arguing against relative improvements, he constantly says it won't work because methods that help the lower achieving students improve will inevitably be used to also help already higher achieving students (either in curricular changes demanded by parents, or richer parents finding alternate routes like tutoring to teach their children), thus leaving the achievement gap in place. This literally has to mean that new methods could, in theory, make absolute improvements to education.
Under it all I think he mostly believes that a lot of people are genetically too dumb to learn algebra.
At a very general level, and I think this comes across pretty clearly, he's bothered by liberal optimism. It's as much an aesthetic rejection as anything else; it reeks of strivers, "front row kids", etc.
He can prattle on about liberal optimism all day long and I will often agree with him. He cannot pen evidence-free critiques of the hard work of public school educators in a successful state without expecting push-back if he is wrong.
Oh, 100%; it's a terribly vibesy and unreliable way to do policy analysis. I meant it as a diagnostic observation regarding why he's so eager to reject when it aligns with some of his own views on education policy, specifically "the idea that absolute gains are possible with the right pedagogy, but that there's no way to reliably close achievement gaps"
Yes, I know our piece contained multiple points of agreement with DeBoer.
Education policy is not something I know much about. Prior to Kelsey’s piece last week I didn’t know about what had happened in Mississippi but it certainly looks amazing and I hope other states copy it with similar results. What I don’t get is why teachers’ unions oppose it. I get why they fight all kinds of things that could force accountability for their members as much as I dislike that. I just don’t see how doing what Mississippi did threatens them. Can someone explain why they oppose it?
I had the same question, and found this article: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-some-teachers-unions-oppose-science-of-reading-legislation/2023/03
To steelman the unions, it seems like their main concern is that these bills are essentially state governments micromanaging what happens in the classroom. Many of these bills don't just require teachers to be trained in the Science of Reading (including phonics) but also require them to use it in the classroom and ban using other methods like three-queuing at all. This reduces teacher and school autonomy and opens them up to lawsuits from parents.
I do sympathize with the feelings behind this. I know a few former teachers, and the way they tell it, there is a pervasive sense in the profession that their autonomy is being constrained by state governments and parents more and more. They feel they aren't being treated as professionals who deserve respect and decision-making authority in their classrooms.
That said, in this particular case I think they are wrong, and limiting teacher autonomy on reading education is clearly the right move. We have to put kids' interests first when the science is clear.
Most professionals don't have that much autonomy
Everyone has bosses
Everyone has guidelines in best practices
Think about airline pilots.They literally have checklists, telling them each step and what to do.So they don't crash the damn plane.
These teachers are acting like children crying.Don't tell me what to do
To add here is a great article on the importance of checklists how many lives they save and some idiots in the medical community fighting back against them while costing lives
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
My quick Googling seems to indicate that CTA thought last year's bill didn't take ESL students into account and was too restrictive in terms of curriculum. I'd love to see a longer piece on it, though. Maybe The Argument can recruit a guest post from a California teacher?
I'm really not sure if CTA believes this line of thinking or whether they are leveraging a common misconception about the science of reading and English Learners to oppose any form of mandate (as is historically their way). Stanford's Claude Goldenberg has done a nice job of addressing the confusion on this point:
https://edsource.org/2024/english-learners-too-would-benefit-from-fixing-how-we-teach-reading-in-california-this-bill-is-a-good-start/708799
That said, I think it would be fantastic for The Argument to publish a piece focused on the reasons that teachers resist these reforms. Spoiler: it has very little to do with Reading Wars and whole language. Also, it isn't a simple answer, or I would just drop it here.
Thank you for taking what I'm not sure is sincere criticism and treating it like it is. This is the only way to solve problems. Reasoned arguments.
Thank you so much for sparking this discussion. I knew next to nothing about this topic and now I feel like I have learned a lot, which is why I love The Argument:)
I have a quick question about a point you make in your piece:
"In 2013, only 3% of Mississippi’s fourth-grade public school students earned the highest score on the NAEP reading test. That has now more than doubled to 7%. Dropping or somehow hiding low-scoring students would never achieve that result."
If I understand correctly, 2013 is when Mississippi introduced the retention mandate so a two-point comparison between fourth graders in 2013 and now might in principle hide the effect of the fourth graders age change, I believe? Your argument to exclude this problem in the analysis of the test trends was based on the fact that the improvements were regular through time while the change in average age was likely just a step change in 2014. Have you looked at how the highest scores change through time? (A similar question applies to your point about the change in percentile reading scores).
Thanks for your great work!
Mississippi retained about the same number of students pre-mandate - the mandate made it more predictable and organized but they've always been higher than most states on retention. But yes, this is a good thing to look at and the answer is that the top performers (measured either by scoring 'advanced' or by the average score of the 90th percentile) has increased steadily over time since 2013 rather than there being a discontinuity in any particular year: https://tinyurl.com/3yx4su58
Thank you Kelsey, this is really interesting. To me this then is a strong hint that 3rd grade retention in itself had a very limited effect, at least in the Mississippi context? Given that this practice was equally present back when absolute performance was low, makes me think that it did not have a large impact. Another option is that, for other structural reasons, Mississippi's performance would have been much lower in the absence of retention, although this seems unlikely given that the state was already experiencing record low test results.
Could we take this as a clue that retention is not a relevant factor to the Mississippi rise? Is this something that we could extrapolate to other states that had high level of retention?
I took a look also at the graphs you shared, thank you! I thought it was interesting that you can see a bit of a jump up from 2013 to 2015 for all percentiles, which (once we exclude the age effect) does seem to point to a stepwise impact of the new rules, which is what I would expect to see. However, I was worried that some of the improvement might be due to the process of recovery post-financial crisis. After extending the time range of the data (https://tinyurl.com/mud8k4j9) one sees that the lower percentiles did regress partially post 2009, while the top percentiles more so stalled. Maybe then the 2015 "jump" is connected to a slow "return to normal" (funding seems to recover around that year: https://www.cbpp.org/research/a-punishing-decade-for-school-funding). If this is the case, then the slow progress for all percentiles in Mississippi that continues since the '90s seems harder to read in terms of more recent changes in their education policies?
The authors’ point is technically false since as a matter of 5th grade math, you can turn 3% hitting the top score into 7% if you exclude the bottom 57% of the population from testing.
But of course, regardless of the exact details of the policy, they weren’t excluding the majority of the student population . The gains among the top were real.
Thank you for a thorough, agenda-free analysis.
I have an agenda. It’s children’s reading outcomes. And I make no apologies for asking you to get behind it.
But thank you for the kind words. I very much know what you meant.
>"First, we must get straight on the plays in the Southern Surge playbook. Because, for the love of God, it’s not just phonics. There are four parts to the playbook..."
This is the part that always gets me. We're mostly told that only two of those reforms are responsible for the gains: phonics and retention. When you find out that's only half of the reforms actually taking place, it feels like once again we're being sold a story.
What teachers and administrators need from these discussions is a sense of the specifics. When you say "Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools — for phonics and other aspects of literacy" it helps us to know what that actually means. Teachers in many states get trainings, professional development, curriculum workshops, and coaching. What makes these ones so effective? What changes can a school principal or district superintendent actually make that might yield similar results? Or are we doomed to waiting for state legislatures to legislate us into miracle territory? So much digital ink about policy but very little about the curriculum, the training, or the pedagogy.
Lastly, I want to point out that Mississippi's NAEP math scores have also steadily improved, albeit not to the same extent as their reading scores. What's happening there? Nobody seems interested. Miracles only happen in reading, I guess.
Unequivocal support for the reality of the "southern surge" and a brilliant playbook. All kids can read. Politics need to be jettisoned in favor of applying these principles across our nation wherever and whenever they are needed. After all, the continuity of our existence depends on the well-being of children.
I love the coverage on this. For what it's worth, I really think all parents should teach their own kids to read. Learning to read is best done with 1 on 1 instruction with the child trying to sound stuff out, and the parent providing the help when needed. This can be done in 15-20 mins a day.
Yes, I know some parents won't do that. But there are also a lot of highly educated parents that don't. That think they should just leave it to the teachers. They are wrong. It's not that hard, you can do it. And it will really help your child.
Amazon has the Teach your Child to read in 100 easy lessons book. It really works. And yes it's phonics based.
https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1XQQV0UV9VR0T&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.oyUlujdajCda0OkfFN66950v0Wr9urUsPpPaAka6WRTMwrZBfF5om1xUfT2NCsW3S8IfWc36PyQAxzHJ0TZ-IusJ9wClfBLCY00BV7EpI8uspl0JZjJELjLYKvP6ccrg2_BOozY8LGoy8fX1_E-KuKgteHb5INEXf2PkY_rljglY1ikDZpHhHDwGGtI2KEomx9aLOvmcNjQsbOdpBaTFwdiWttFFLlpn_QH4VgBP1p0.MD5EH9DFTe9HOr-Si00_Qput46edKg7vy_mc143u97w&dib_tag=se&keywords=teach+your+child+to+read+in+100+easy+lessons&qid=1759937549&sprefix=teach+your+c%2Caps%2C177&sr=8-1
After using phonics to learn to decode (read) then we need to switch to a knowledge building curriculum. Natalie Wexler has really convinced me of this from her excellent book "The Knowledge Gap"
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/whats-really-behind-the-southern
And I would go further and state that we should really have ONE state wide curriculum. That curriculum should be content rich, and then there should be the statewide tests that based on that curriculum. That way is how things are supposed to work.
Teach a subject, then test on what was learned. For better results combine that with frequent low stakes tests that measure student progress and get those that fall behind help with tutors in small groups.
Great post.
"I really think all parents should teach their own kids to read." Rather than leave it to chance, we just read and had our kids read every night from the moment we could with them.
It paid off.
Yes, at a macro level, we need to improve the schools (by digesting this playbook and utilizing it) but at a micro, personal level, you are absolutely correct. Parents should not leave it to chance.
Most students who are retained in 3rd grade fail to read words like tape or maybe even simpler words. Long vowels, basic digraphs, blends, rarely cvc words. The low passers usually can decode 1-2 syllable words just fine but have a huge comprehension gap in part brought on by them having been slow to develop decoding but also other factors where they’re not getting the background knowledge they need.
I think among this population of the students who actually are retained it’s damning that they weren’t already screened for a disability and were allowed to get to 3rd grade. I wouldn’t be shocked if their kindergarten teachers could predict with striking accuracy who needs intervention and evaluation if Everything wasn’t set up to slow roll these resources out.