About those 'miracle' reading scores in Mississippi …

Mississippi schools have pulled off a “miracle,” or so we’re told by the media. But a series of commentators are raising serious questions about the state’s methods for achieving this so-called miracle.

The miracle is that Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress standardized test rose from second-worst in the nation in 2013 to 21st overall in 2022. This is attributed to a policy Mississippi put in place making kids repeat third grade if they failed a reading test at the end of that year. During their second year of third grade, they would then get intensive reading instruction. It’s that intensive reading instruction, along with increases in teacher training on literacy instruction and an emphasis on the “science of reading” approach (aka updated phonics) that’s being credited with making the difference, but Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times, Bob Somerby, and Kevin Drum are all looking at the data and asking if the kids who are being taken out of the fourth-grade testing pool, combined with the extra year itself, might be a key difference. In that, they follow some education researchers who raised this question before this year’s “miracle” claims.

Mississippi makes a lot of kids repeat grades throughout their early school years: In the 2018-2019 school year, it was 8.7% in kindergarten, 7.9% in first grade, 5% in second grade, and 9.6% in third grade. So what are the effects of that on reading scores in one specific grade? (The NAEP is administered in fourth, eighth, and 12th grade.) Drum notes that if the state holds back 9.6% of third graders for failing the year-end reading test, and “we then test in fourth grade we're automatically going to get higher scores than we should because the bottom kids are no longer in the testing pool. They're still back in third grade.” Drum then recalculated as if the scores of the held-back kids—the bottom 10% on reading scores—were still included, and said, “it turns out that Mississippi scores in 2022 are still about 13 points below the national average. In other words, the 2013 reforms had all but no effect.”

The increased fourth-grade NAEP scores didn’t decrease racial disparities, something you would hope would be the effect of a major new initiative like this. Additionally, these improvements in reading scores haven’t shown up on the eighth-grade NAEP results. Maybe they’re coming next year, but it seems premature to declare victory, especially when some studies show that reading gains achieved in early grades through phonics instruction then fade in later grades.