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Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

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101–110 of 230 posts

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#101
post #4

"Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. It’s not just tolerated - it’s venerated." Warning: possible flame bait, though I do not intend it this way. I am serious. I've had this thought for quite a while: the (social) left could pivot and win by being more woke. WTF? What I mean by this is: expand diversity and inclusion to…

I’ll explain it clearly: it is impossible to accommodate someone who wants you dead.

[flagged]

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#102
post #64
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you don’t understand what DEI really is. In America the groups you talk about are not at a disadvantage when it comes to recruitment in the respective areas of the country. As such they aren’t part of DEI in corporate recruiting. In education how would you make white Christians a greater part of the curriculum? Their history and contributions to society already dominate the curriculum. I’m a woke liberal. You…

> In America the groups you talk about are not at a disadvantage when it comes to recruitment in the respective areas of the country. When I was in college in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people from the rural South were at times told they should lose the Southern accent because it would hurt their ability to get hired in jobs like finance and engineering especially in the Northeast. This was at a college in the M…

Hence the “respective areas of the country” part of my comment.

DEI started due widespread systemic disadvantages certain groups have historically experienced. White Christians can’t reasonably claim to be part if this in the U.S.

The speech part of your comment is quite ironic given the vitriol hurled towards black English speakers by white southerners.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the article is really about politics, not education. Education was just a hook for the author to hang a political point on.

Just to clarify to those reading the comments first, the political point he's making is not to ignore Mississippi just because it's Mississippi. He has warnings for both Democrats and Republicans at the end and is pretty clearly not a fan of the way either party is approaching education at the national level right now. He is drawing attention to the fact that some red states with historically bad schools have started…

> "He has warnings for both Democrats and Republicans"

You left out the fact these warnings essentially boil down to: "Democrats need to stop being bad, and Republicans need to continue being good."

The political bias is clear as day in the article.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#104
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impressive if you don't understand statistics I guess. You want to measure the impact of educational policies on students. So you control for other factors that influence educational outcomes, and you try to eliminate those effects. Girls do better than boys on most testing. Asians do better than other races. Free & reduced lunch kids do worse. Special education and ESL students obviously do worse. So of cou…

Statistics can also be gamed, and this article reeks of it. As other commenters are saying, Mississippi children's actual achievement rates are still bottom of the barrel. So while they might be statistically doing better, they're not actually doing better at the moment. That's not to say that things can't turn around, or that this newfound investment into education might not bear fruit very soon. But the OP made the…

As far as I can tell this article uses the exact same statistical analysis that every other educational achievement article in the world does. What are they doing that is statistically unsound? How does this article "reek" of it other than the fact that you don't seem to like the implication that a deeply conservative state is making positive strides in educational policy?

Mississippi's kids are doing 1.5 grade levels better in reading than they were 20 years ago. That's an objectively good thing. Maine's kids are doing 1.5 grade levels worse than they were 20 years ago. That's an objectively bad thing.

It makes sense to look at why.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#105

BIG caveat that these scores are adjusted for gender, age, and race or ethnicity, free and reduced-price lunch receipt status, special education status, and English language learner status. In terms of raw scores, Mississippi is still in the bottom 10. Not really that impressive IMO.

Can you clarify what exactly you mean by the idea that adjusting for gender, age, race, and ethnicity makes this less impressive? Generally speaking in order to evaluate the success of a school system you really do want to adjust for the demographics that that school has to deal with, so you don't attribute the effects of, say, private tutors to the public school system. It would be really unfair to judge teachers in…

"Well, Mississippi has lower scores, but when you account for the fact that the people having those scores are black people the Mississippi comes out ahead!"

You don't see the issue?

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#106

I'm still trying to pinpoint exactly why Oregon has some of the worst scores in the country (I believe it ranked dead-last this year when adjusted for socio-economic factors). When I see what's going on around me, I can only think it's somewhat related to broken family's and undisciplined kids. The stuff that my kids come home and tell me is happening in school is pretty mind blowing. I've also noticed a complete rev…

Oregon is 2 different states: there's the west coast and big cities (Portland, Eugene), and then there's the East Half, which is rural and underfunded. So you have highly funded schools and then underfunded.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there are good people there. But the people at the highest rungs of society there (doctors, lawyers, etc.) did perpetuate 1950s-level racism. Our family was told in no uncertain terms that they would not stand for us selling our house to a black family for example. I heard white kids saying slurs constantly, and not in a "rapping along to a song" kind of way. Denying my personal experience and calling it ignora…

Oh, please. I denied nothing. If you object to my characterization of that experience, do so overtly. But I knew at least a dozen like you. You were friends with the young rich asshole kids of the old rich asshole antebellum planter families, because they were your family's social peers even if you yourself didn't respect them - your family owned real estate worth redlining! - and now you think you're being magnanimo…

Okay, let me be more clear. The contempt I display is not "ignorant contempt". It's rooted in years of experience. How could my comments possibly be interpreted as me thinking I'm being magnanimous? I very clearly expressed my sympathy with the liberal attitude toward the people in these states.

You're making quite a lot of assumptions about my experience, none of which is really correct. I wasn't openly hostile to these "antebellum plantation families", but I avoided them as much as possible. Most of my friends were from other liberal-leaning families.

Many of the people I spent time with were poor whites. I wasn't ever beat up by a poor white kid, and I wasn't afraid of any black kids. If I consider the political leanings of the white kids I knew, I didn't notice much difference in prejudice based on social class. So again, denying my experience just because you're mad (I assume?) that your segment of society is being painted with a certain brush. And imagining all sorts of things about my life to dismiss my attitude to boot.

Is what I wrote earlier unfair to you? Yes, probably (so are your replies to me). But I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about what I experienced, and that crosses boundaries of social class, despite your implication that it doesn't.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#108
post #38
post #4

"Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. It’s not just tolerated - it’s venerated." Warning: possible flame bait, though I do not intend it this way. I am serious. I've had this thought for quite a while: the (social) left could pivot and win by being more woke. WTF? What I mean by this is: expand diversity and inclusion to…

Identity politics of all sorts get their salience by having enemies to coalesce around. Who would be the enemy of your broadened woke coalition? White coastal elites?

cosmopolitans of the rootless variety

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#109

BIG caveat that these scores are adjusted for gender, age, and race or ethnicity, free and reduced-price lunch receipt status, special education status, and English language learner status. In terms of raw scores, Mississippi is still in the bottom 10. Not really that impressive IMO.

So the schools are doing their job properly, instead of relying on upper-middle-class native English speaking parents to do all the work. It is impressive.

I think it's partly because political conservatives are more often right when it comes to education, because they don't listen to the experts and just demand boring conservative things like phonics, learning the times tables, learning facts, and other stuff that "doesn't really teach you how to think".

Just have a look at what the Harvard Education Review thinks is important - https://meridian.allenpress.com/her - no that's not a parody site by someone who uses the word "woke" without scare quotes.

Progressives listen to experts, and the experts in education are often a bit ... scientifically lightweight. Teachers are not all brilliant at scientific research (nor do they need to be, and expecting every teacher to be a scientific researcher would drastically limit the talent pool, or require a very significant salary bump to get more candidates), so universities need to cater to the lowest common denominator, which makes teaching degrees mostly a course in using education jargon to write persuasive essays.

If you have scientifically lightweight uni courses, you tend to get a lot of scientifically lightweight researchers, who are far better at writing a persuasive essay than actually looking at evidence. And with a critical mass of lightweights, they don't really want education to move into a more scientific or evidence based footing, because then their own influence and maybe even careers will be harmed. Yes, there's good education researchers, but most of them work in Psychology departments, not Education departments. Or special education, which is a bastion of sound evidence based practice, for some reason, probably because like teachers in red states they actually need to do their jobs properly, and can't just rely on demographics to do all the hard work.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#110
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They hold students back if they don't pass a basic reading literacy test in third grade.

Who would have thought that not pushing kids forward into an academic environment they're not prepared for would be beneficial?

> Who would have thought that not pushing kids forward into an academic environment they're not prepared for would be beneficial?

I think the point is that the school system is outputting kids that are not prepared for the academic environment they create themselves for these kids. So instead of fixing the problem, they are eliminating the bad results to inflate the success statistics.

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