For the New York Times, Nicholas Krisrtof does a long and well-reported article on why the public school children in three Southern states - Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama - are top performers in nationwide tests of child learning. Wonder of wonders, the column is not behind the NYT paywall.
The extent to which these schools are literally chasing down truants and twisting parents' arms to get kids into classrooms is amazing. If you know this part of the nation, children in public schools are predominantly non-white, mostly black. Imagine if you will not permitting students to pass out of third grade unless they can read with some proficiency - these three states are insisting, and the kids are reading and passing.
Kristof makes too little of an important contributing factor. He writes:
It was easier to undertake these reforms in states like Mississippi that lacked strong teacher unions.
No kidding, he writes only that one sentence about perhaps the major factor blocking schools in other states from emulating the success of these three "southern stars."
These three have overcome what President Bush called "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and replaced it with this, from a superintendent in Marion County.
We no longer accept that our kids can’t compete with anybody in the world.
Kristof points out that nothing about the kids' home environment has been changed.
For many years, skeptics have offered dispiriting arguments about the prospects for educational gains: The way to improve literacy is to fix the family, fix addiction, fix the parents, for as long as the child’s environment is broken, there’s not much else that can be done.
The gains in these states suggest that that critique is wrong. Mississippi and Alabama haven’t fixed child poverty, trauma and deeply troubled communities — but they have figured out how to get kids to read by the end of third grade.
And their math scores improved a lot too.
