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Learn from the Magnolia State’s successes

“Mississippi continues to make historic strides in education,” Governor Tate Reeves celebrated last week, as state assessment results in reading showed third-graders completely recovering from pandemic learning loss and reaching pre-pandemic passing rates.

It is not the first time in recent years that Mississippi surprised critics. On the eve of the pandemic, Mississippi secured the largest gains in the nation in 4th grade reading and mathematics between 2017 and 2019.

Back in 2019, the Fordham Institute looked into the reasons for the Magnolia State’s remarkable climb from 50th in the nation to 29th over the course of a decade. Among the potential reasons for the improvement that Fordham found: raised expectations, early literacy supports and professional development. Those policies remain in effect, even in the pandemic era, and students who have yet to hit key literacy benchmarks by third grade have access to free summer school, tutoring and other services enabled by the federal pandemic funds.

Also at play is the state’s embrace of curriculum rooted in the phonics and the science of reading. It’s an approach that had struggled to get traction in other parts of the country but is now experiencing a resurgence, as Dana Goldstein documented in an article last month for the New York Times: “With brain science steadily adding to that evidence, there is a sense — at least for many in the education establishment — that the debate over early reading instruction may be ebbing. Phonics is ascendant.”

In Mississippi, that ascendance has been already firmly rooted in the state’s educational culture. When asked about the state’s success on the 2019 NAEP, then State Superintendent Carey Wright responded: “It’s all around the science of reading.”

The bet is paying off in more ways than simply national and state test score improvements: graduation rates for the state are the highest they have ever been and drop-out rates are at a historical low–dramatic change for a state that is no longer at the bottom of the nation.

Learn from New York City’s mistakes

“New York City schools are bracing for cutbacks as federal stimulus money tied to the pandemic begins to dry up,” The New York Post reports. “Budgets for city public schools are largely based on enrollment — and schools have shed roughly 70,000 K-12 students since the 2019-20 school year, with students opting for homeschooling in increasing numbers, enrolling in charter or private schools, or leaving the city altogether. The city Education Department has, up to now, shielded schools from the full budgetary impact of those enrollment losses using federal stimulus money. But that support is now running out, and school budgets are set to shrink by roughly $215 million next year — forcing some principals to make difficult financial decisions.”

As Chalkbeat’s Alex Zimmerman notes, this fiscal cliff was created not by current New York City Mayor Eric Adams, but by his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. Now it’s Adams’ mess to clean up–and it’s an expensive one. “Because the city spent a significant infusion of one-time federal relief money last year, the education department’s whole budget — also composed of state and federal dollars — will fall by $1 billion, even with the city’s increased contribution,” Zimmerman and colleague Reema Amin write in a piece examining the effects of the cuts, including a hiring freeze, permanent staffing reductions at the central office and schools and fewer school safety officers at a time when parents are increasingly concerned about their children’s physical well-being.

Adams is making the responsible choice here, but he should never have been put in this position. Districts using federal funds to avoid making hard choices are just making problems worse for kids by failing to adapt to the changing world. It’s one reason that fiscal transparency has to be a core element of any recovery plan. As we wrote back in September: “While some districts across the country have released detailed spending plans and budgets to the public, in most school districts we have no idea whether the tens of billions of dollars in emergency federal funds are being well spent. That needs to change.”

Moving forward, districts need to spend the remaining federal stimulus funds on programs like those championed by Mississippi, ones that will boost student achievement without incurring long-term costs that center interest groups instead of students, despite shrinking enrollment as families search for options that better meet their needs.

Key Resources

Urban Institute launched its “Degrees of Value” tool, which captures the return on students’ investment in higher education across different types of programs, as well as a new issue brief “Developing a Multimetric Accountability System for Postsecondary Institutions.”

Brookings Institution compares the way Trump and Biden have used executive actions to advance education policies, finding that Biden is using the tool much more extensively than Trump to advance change through unilateral action.

The Fordham Institute’s Nathaniel Grossman joins AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley and Ian Rowe for a podcast discussion of SEL.

AEI’s Robert Pondiscio conducted an exit interview with NCTQ’s Kate Walsh.

Writing for FutureEd, Morgan Polikoff explores what the Florida CRT controversy means for the future of textbooks while Walton Family Foundation’s Bruno V. Manno and Lynn Olson share a new bipartisan education agenda.

Writing in The Atlantic, Lisa Lewis looks at California’s push to let high school students sleep in.