Yesterday's tromp through Mississippi's reading scores for third-graders got me a little curious about taking a slightly deeper dive. I'm not sure why. Just bored, maybe.
As you'll recall, in 2013 Mississippi established a set of reading reforms primarily focused on teaching phonics. These reforms included a mandate to hold back kids who don't pass a reading test at the end of third grade—which was controversial at the time but has been maintained ever since. In the Mississippi system, third-graders are initially tested at the end of the school year in May. Those who fail are given a second chance. If they fail again they're urged to attend an intensive summer school session, after which they get a third chance. Here's what the failure rate looks like at each round:
In the the initial round of testing 26% of third-graders failed. For comparison with a different test, I've added a column for Mississippi's failure rate on both the main and long-term NAEP:
- Main: 37% ("below basic")
- LTT: 24% ("below 150")
That's a big difference and I don't know what to make of it, so I leave its interpretation to each of you. If the results from the main NAEP are accurate, it looks like Mississippi is simply conducting a fairly easy test in order to get its failure rate down. If the LTT results are right, the Mississippi test is right on the money.
Now here's how Mississippi does within various categories of third-grade reading:
Boys fail at nearly double the rate of girls. Black students fail at nearly triple the rate of white students. Military kids do great. So do high-income kids. None of these results look especially out of the ordinary to me.
Finally, here are the NAEP reading failure rates over time—for fourth graders since that's who NAEP tests. Since 2013, the national failure rate has gone up a few points while in Mississippi it's gone down 10 points. The NAEP is a "low stakes" test, meaning that its scores don't affect anything: low-scoring kids don't get held back, teacher evaluations aren't affected, there's no teaching to the test, etc. For this reason it's considered pretty reliable since there's little incentive to cheat.
Overall, none of this gives me any reason to change my mind from yesterday. It looks to me like Mississippi's reading reforms are not a panacea but have worked pretty well.
On the first chart, is the second bar 15% of all 3rd graders, or 15% of those who failed the first time?
The bars are all percentages of all third graders. In particular, the third bar shows that 9% of all third graders are held back.
Meh. I still think that if you’re moving to Mississippi for the quality of the public schools, you must currently live in a real shithole school district. I have never heard anybody say “you know what? I wish my kids were raised in Mississippi.”
Here's a bit of anecdata; make of it what you will. For about a decade I taught math at a selective liberal arts college in the South. One of my duties was advising students about what courses to take. Often incoming students were skittish about signing up for the course that they were fully qualified and ready to take, based on their academic records, test scores, etc., and part of my task was to convince them that they really were properly prepared. I would point out all the facts, but on two occasions I got this argument back: "Yeah, but I went to a public high school in Mississippi."
Parents cracking the whip and insisting that their kids take school seriously raises the passing rate on these tests? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.
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