BIG caveat that these scores are adjusted for gender, age, and race or ethnicity, free and reduced-price lunch receipt status, special education status, and English language learner status. In terms of raw scores, Mississippi is still in the bottom 10.
Wow this is an excellent point and really undermines the article conclusions. We should always be looking at unadjusted scores as well as a whole series of adjusted scores with a variety of methods.
Just grabbing one highly adjusted score and drawing conclusions solely off of that is not enough. It's really only giving you one piece of a very complex puzzle in the case of something like education scores.
Observational stats in social sciences turns out to be a lot like epidemiology and strongly held conclusions are hard won.
Can you clarify what exactly you mean by the idea that adjusting for gender, age, race, and ethnicity makes this less impressive?
Generally speaking in order to evaluate the success of a school system you really do want to adjust for the demographics that that school has to deal with, so you don't attribute the effects of, say, private tutors to the public school system. It would be really unfair to judge teachers in the Bronx for their inability to compete on raw scores with teachers in upper Manhattan.
"Well, Mississippi has lower scores, but when you account for the fact that the people having those scores are black people the Mississippi comes out ahead!"
Not if it's applied evenly across the country, no.
When you're measuring schools you're trying to measure the impact of the actual school, not all the other factors, and to do that you have to separate out socioeconomics. Higher income parents are more involved in their children's education and can make up for a bad school in ways that lower income parents can't. It's pointless to compare schools to each other unless you adjust for demographics.
You could make the argument that not adjusting for demographics obscures the fact that some states are for some reason failing to teach certain demographics as well as Mississippi.
The more "adjustments" you do based on demographics, the more likely that one of your adjustments is incorrect and obscures problems or encourages incorrect solutions.
This is an argument to extremes, and it falls apart when you go to the other extreme: if you refuse to make any adjustments then you're now unable to separate the marginal effect of the school from the much larger effect of socioeconomic status. This would likewise obscure significant problems and encourage incorrect solutions.
The correct approach is to adjust for demographics but do so carefully, rigorously, and consistently.
What is a fair way to compare then? If rich Asians kids from the "best" school perform the same as the rich Asians from the "worst" school and poor Native American kids from the "best" school perform same and poor Native American kids form the "worst" school, and the only differences between the best at the worst school is the proportion of each demographic, what does that say about the quality of the shcool?
I've largely been convinced that "good schools" are just a side effect of motivated parents migrating to an area with "good schools". It has nothing at all to do with the schools or teachers themselves, but the parents with means who make decisions based on education will likely be doing other things to encourage education as well. Achieving a critical mass of children with involved parents will make a school "good".
education is mostly at home but teachers do matter. Part of what is going on is that bad teachers get kicked out of schools with high parental participation so the errors are correlated I guess. If all parents became involved would bad teachers disappear or would the parents just have to live with them instead of being able to remove them?
It's not impressive if you don't understand statistics I guess.
You want to measure the impact of educational policies on students. So you control for other factors that influence educational outcomes, and you try to eliminate those effects.
Girls do better than boys on most testing. Asians do better than other races. Free & reduced lunch kids do worse. Special education and ESL students obviously do worse. So of course you're going to adjust for these populations.
The only reason you look at the raw scores of a rural district outside Biloxi that is 70% black and compare that to the raw scores of a suburban San Francisco district that is 50% asian and 35% white is that you either don't understand math or you're more interested in making a political argument than an educational policy one.
Statistics can also be gamed, and this article reeks of it.
As other commenters are saying, Mississippi children's actual achievement rates are still bottom of the barrel. So while they might be statistically doing better, they're not actually doing better at the moment.
That's not to say that things can't turn around, or that this newfound investment into education might not bear fruit very soon.
But the OP made the choice not to address any of these issues; therefore, the article doesn't seem to have been made in good faith relative to the HN community's expectations.
As far as I can tell this article uses the exact same statistical analysis that every other educational achievement article in the world does. What are they doing that is statistically unsound? How does this article "reek" of it other than the fact that you don't seem to like the implication that a deeply conservative state is making positive strides in educational policy?
Mississippi's kids are doing 1.5 grade levels better in reading than they were 20 years ago. That's an objectively good thing. Maine's kids are doing 1.5 grade levels worse than they were 20 years ago. That's an objectively bad thing.
But unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" - which isn't supported by the evidence, because there may be other factors that coincide with those who are eligible for them.
You'd have to do something like take the high-performing SF district and give half the students, randomly selected, free lunches.
Reduced-price lunches are a proxy for socioeconomic status. That it's a proxy means it isn't perfect but we're talking about the entire country you can absolutely draw conclusions from it based on the mountains of data we have available.
So the schools are doing their job properly, instead of relying on upper-middle-class native English speaking parents to do all the work. It is impressive.
I think it's partly because political conservatives are more often right when it comes to education, because they don't listen to the experts and just demand boring conservative things like phonics, learning the times tables, learning facts, and other stuff that "doesn't really teach you how to think".
Just have a look at what the Harvard Education Review thinks is important - https://meridian.allenpress.com/her - no that's not a parody site by someone who uses the word "woke" without scare quotes.
Progressives listen to experts, and the experts in education are often a bit ... scientifically lightweight. Teachers are not all brilliant at scientific research (nor do they need to be, and expecting every teacher to be a scientific researcher would drastically limit the talent pool, or require a very significant salary bump to get more candidates), so universities need to cater to the lowest common denominator, which makes teaching degrees mostly a course in using education jargon to write persuasive essays.
If you have scientifically lightweight uni courses, you tend to get a lot of scientifically lightweight researchers, who are far better at writing a persuasive essay than actually looking at evidence. And with a critical mass of lightweights, they don't really want education to move into a more scientific or evidence based footing, because then their own influence and maybe even careers will be harmed. Yes, there's good education researchers, but most of them work in Psychology departments, not Education departments. Or special education, which is a bastion of sound evidence based practice, for some reason, probably because like teachers in red states they actually need to do their jobs properly, and can't just rely on demographics to do all the hard work.
Not really that impressive IMO.