For MAGA politicians, from Donald Trump to Arizona gubernatorial candidate, Kari Lake, their approach to failed candidacy is simply to claim that they actually won. They never have any meaningful substantiating evidence, even failed in litigation to prove their election fraud claims, but they and their diehard followers believe they were the righteous victors. If you repeat a lie enough, it seems, it begins to ring true, especially to MAGA voters. Red state legislatures are tripping all over themselves to pass “election integrity” laws to correct the “election fraud” that never was… statutes that make voting difficult by eliminating voting procedures that enable opposition voters, from gerrymandering and polling station placement to vote-by-mail, to name a few.
Well, if claiming success even in failure works in creating believers for candidates, does it work the same way for failed state policies and governance? Well, at least one state – Mississippi – gave it the good ole college try. The news so bordered the credible that even blue states and liberal journalists stood up and took notice. Maybe Mississippi, long known as clinging to the bottom of national statistics in health, income and education, seemed to have discovered an educational program that really could improve educational performance. Their rapid rise in their public-school reading scores seemed to confirm that their new reading education program was a big success. They called it, “The Mississippi Miracle.”
But why does it even matter? The reality remains that perpetually poor people these days have children who remain poor. Expanding racially directed affirmative action, now illegal per the US Supreme Court, did not do much to expand economic opportunities for disadvantaged classes. Effectively, “upward mobility” in the United States has pretty much been relegated to history books, assuming these books have not been purged from public libraries and public schools. As austerity policies have effectively reduced our nationwide commitment to public primary and secondary education, more prevalent in red states, all the while as taxes for the wealthiest have been sliced both at the national (the corporate tax reform act of 2017) and state levels – often under that profoundly incorrect GOP mantra that just won’t die (“a rising tide floats all boats”).
In those elite universities, state and private, that open doors to more lucrative careers. even after affirmative action, “At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.” According to a Harvard study, reported in the New York Times, July 5th. The same is true for elite public universities (e.g., in California, Michigan and Virginia). The likelihood of children earning more than their parents has steadily declined since 1985. The only way to break this cycle, according to experts, is a ground-up improvement in public elementary, middle and high schools. Since Mississippi sits at the bottom of most educational and income statistics, its public-school students stand at the lowest level of educational and economic opportunity. So, news of The Mississippi Miracle turned heads. Could this impoverished state, with a large super-impoverished Black constituency, have found the solution?
Writing for the July 5th Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik delves into the truth behind this program: “The reference is to that benighted state’s surprising success in improving reading scores for its fourth-graders through a focused program of literacy instruction for teachers and pupils alike. It’s now 10 years old, an anniversary that may have inspired the most recent assessments… Statistics show that Mississippi’s children have gone from having almost the worst scores on the standardized national reading test for fourth-graders in 2013 to narrowly exceeding the national average in the most recent test, administered last year….
“Education writers and the New York Times jumped on the bandwagon. (‘Mississippi Is Offering Lessons for America on Education,’ was the latter’s headline.)… A close examination of the numbers suggests that it’s not true. Bob Somerby and Kevin Drum, two of the most adept myth busters in the blogosphere, have done yeomen’s work deconstructing the statistics. Their conclusion is that Mississippi’s program isn’t nearly as successful as its fans assert and may not have produced any improvement at all in fourth-grade reading scores. The apparent gains may be a statistical illusion…
“Mississippi implemented what appeared to be an aggressive attack on its literacy shortcomings in 2013. Its Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) required that pupils who failed to pass a reading test at the end of their third-grade year be held back… While repeating third grade, they were to receive intensified instruction. Funds were appropriated for ‘summer reading camps’ for poorly performing kids. New teachers were required to show proficiency in literacy education before receiving their certifications. The educational system was reoriented toward the ‘science of reading.’ That includes phonics, a method that teaches reading by breaking words up into sound bites of one letter or more, and showing students how to link them together into words…
“What’s the real story? Drum and Somerby focused on the so-called ‘third-grade gate’ implemented by the literacy program — the requirement that third-grade underachievers repeat third grade. In Mississippi, almost 10% of third-graders have been getting held back, a higher proportion than in any other state. (Some may have been held back more than once.)
“The statistical result of this policy should be obvious. If you throw the lowest-ranking 10% out of a statistical pool, the remaining pool inevitably looks better. Drum went so far as to add those dropped pupils back into the calculation. He found that the gains from 2013 to 2022 completely disappeared. ‘In other words,’ he remarked, ‘the 2013 reforms had all but no effect.’… As long as Mississippi’s social and economic conditions, especially for Black and Latino residents, remain mired just this side of medieval, its isolated effort to improve reading scores will be doomed to failure, and its statistical gains will look not much better than window-dressing. Journalists, take note.”
America’s only national commitment to improved public education was in response to the Soviet Union’s apparent lead in the “space race,” beginning in 1957, with several “firsts”: a satellite launch, quickly followed by placing a dog, then a man in orbit. That effort war off in favor of austerity in the years during and after the deficit-busting Viet Nam War. Today, the death of upward mobility seems to be a well-established norm.
I’m Peter Dekom, and we’d rather cut taxes for the rich, sending our federal deficit soaring, that improve the health and educational quality of all Americans needed in a very competitive global environment… instead of annihilating upward mobility with almost universally substandard public education, particularly in impoverished communities.
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