The latest accountability grades were a modest step back for Mississippi’s public schools. The results don’t discount, however, a growing national perception that the state has generally been on the right track in raising the academic skills of its children.
According to the Mississippi Department of Education’s annual report card, a smaller majority of school districts and individual schools are successfully educating their students. This year, 80% of schools and 87% of districts received a “C” or higher on the A-to-F grading scale. That’s down from the year before, when nearly 86% of schools and 94% of districts graded that high.
Two observations, though, should temper the disappointment.
First, last year saw a record high. Even though this year’s grades are down, they are still much better than when the state first started assigning grades, which are heavily based on the results from standardized tests that students take every spring. In 2016, for example, only 62% of schools and districts received a “C” grade or higher, according to the state Department of Education.
In addition, Mississippi grades on a curve that emphasizes improvement from the year before, rather than just the raw scores. That works to the advantage of schools when their students start off as low performers. As their scores improve, though, it becomes tougher to show growth.
Grading on a curve is designed to take into account the socioeconomic variations in students’ backgrounds. It can also lead, though, to inflated grades. Last year’s record-high report card probably reflected that.
It would be incorrect, though, to conclude that Mississippi’s education progress over the past decade has been a mirage, the result of adjusting expectations until they produce the results about which the education bureaucrats and politicians can brag.
That might be true if there were not an objective measurement, the National Assessment of Education Progress, which does not grade on a curve. Mississippi’s meteoric rise on that test, particularly in the lower grades and among minority and low-income students, has been so remarkable that other states, including much wealthier ones, are copying some of Mississippi’s strategies.
A Wall Street Journal editorial last week noted that California is the latest state to pay attention to Mississippi’s climb from 49th place to ninth place in fourth grade reading.
California has concluded — as did Virginia, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Indiana before it — that of all the decisions Mississippi made to address its high rate of illiteracy, one of the most pivotal was returning to phonics-based instruction in 2013. The California Legislature has unanimously passed a law requiring its state Board of Education to do the same.
There have been two competing schools of thought in the science of reading instruction since the 1980s, when “whole language” learning started to supplant phonics as the dominant methodology. Teacher training programs and the schools that hired their graduates adopted the belief that students would better learn to read if their instructors focused on comprehension and context. Instead of teaching children to read by sounding out words, they were expected to learn this essential skill by recognizing and memorizing entire words.
As with a lot of education fads, this one didn’t work. “Children have struggled with this ‘whole language’ method,” the Journal editorial said. “Reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have flat-lined over the last three decades and fallen among lower performers even as per-pupil spending has more than doubled.”
The Journal doesn’t claim that a return to phonics will alone solve the nation’s K-12 literacy crisis, but it is a significant move in the right direction. And Mississippi gets credit for providing the nudge.