When there’s a scandalous “false miracle” in the education world, it’s usually one of two things: direct cheating on a test or careful selection of the population that takes the test. So if you see a sizable improvement in education results, it’s worth looking out for both of those.
When I first began looking into the “Mississippi Miracle,” wherein a low-performing southern state shot up in fourth-grade reading scores from 49th place to ninth place, I was worried about being taken in by yet another fraudulent success story in the world of education. So, I tried to figure out: Was I looking at education, or was I looking at selection?
In particular, a major plank of Mississippi’s reading reforms is a test of basic reading fluency administered at the end of third grade. Kids who don’t pass it are held back a year. For at least five years, people have argued that maybe this, rather than any actual teaching skill present in Mississippi, is what’s driving the state’s improvements.1
A provocative new article from Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky, and Daniel H. Robinson in Significanceargued that, in fact, nearly all of Mississippi’s results are driven by the third-grade retention policy, not by the phonics instruction, curriculum changes, or the teacher training that accompanied them. It has gone viral, with lots of glee in certain quarters, where it was sometimes taken as proof that there’s nothing other states need to learn from Mississippi after all.
This is an important debate, but I’ve been dismayed to see their article treated as a significant contribution to it. It’s badly mangled with straightforward factual errors that should undermine anyone’s confidence the authors did their homework — for example, the authors claimed that “the 2024 NAEP fourth-grade mathematics scores rank the state at a tie at 50th!” In fact, Mississippi ranked 16th on the fourth-grade math NAEP assessment.2 Unsurprisingly, the authors’ errors are not limited to these sorts of factual claims but also extend to their core argument, which is wholly unpersuasive.