Here’s a quick summary of a thread I recently posted on both BlueSky and X.
Storytime – for those who want to push some “southern” miracle in public schooling – using Mississippi as their exemplar, and implying “red state” strategies are the policy solution:
First – Mississippi doesn’t catch Massachusetts or New Jersey. NOT EVEN CLOSE
But states like Arizona and Florida fall to and even blow Mississippi in some cases on 8th grade NAEP performance (a better indicator of the cumulative effects of a system on student learning than 4th grade assessments).
Notable in these graphs are the continued large declines in Arizona and Florida while others are stabilizing or rebounding from 2022 to 2024 (AZ stabilizes in math, but not FL).