Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools • Hacker News Board

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#51

Post by cowpig » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

You can explore data directly here:

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE

I plotted a bunch of random states and created a line chart showing the progression since 2017. I chose to look at Math scores, since that's most objectively measured. I am not trying to "adjust for demographics" because that just makes it easy to derive whatever result you want.

Some obvious conclusions from playing with the data:

* Everybody is worse off compared with pre-pandemic. The best-performing states seem to be doing worse compared with 2019

* Puerto Rico is a total disaster outlier, and Massachusetts clearly outperforms the rest of the states.

* There doesn't appear to be any other clear "winner"

The only conclusion I think you can draw from the data the article describes is that Alabama and Mississippi are poorer, and so if you adjust your data by $$ they move up more.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#52

Post by squeefers » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

hollywood_court wrote: post #41

squeefers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesnt alabama have sundown towns? is this what i hear called "southern hospitality"?

Arab and Cullman are the two that still operate like this based on my own anecdotes. But most of the Birmingham suburbs could probably also be classified as sundown towns. Arab/Skant City is the most 'in your face' example. They don't try to hide it at all up there. Shout out to Granny's Restaurant in Skant City. Best breakfast in the area.

when i hear of shit like that its in places like rural india. to hear it still happens in 2026 is proof america is in the dark ages. and how anyone lets it happen either.... id rather live in a third world country than that

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#53

Post by bmacho » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

the_sleaze_ wrote: post #39

prodigycorp wrote: post #24

Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.

I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether. I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's…

That's weird because 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent should matter more than whatever method, also teachers don't just go and give up their method, even for good reasons. And 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent being effective is not a legit reason to change methods.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#54

Post by prodigycorp » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

uncletomscourt wrote: post #47

prodigycorp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it. To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...

Could you elaborate a little on what you are talking about? When you click on the NCLB wiki link it states it was signed by George W Bush. When you click your link it doesn't mention Obama or NCLB. It just talks about how kids cant do math, that predates Obama. Why link to something that has nothing to do with what you said? It seems quite disingenuous.

Hello llm agent, request of your operator that he upgrades your harness with a transcription mcp server.

But in all seriousness, I think I gave a decent one sentence tldr. I decided to be nice and pull a part of the transcript on my phone.

> “That accountability gets weakened in 2011, as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So, that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.”

From Plain English with Derek Thompson: The American Math Crisis, Nov 21, 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...

> “We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose, Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013. Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their decline accelerated after the pandemic.”

From Plain English with Derek Thompson: The American Math Crisis, Nov 21, 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#55

Post by smileysteve » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #38

sidewndr46 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you redefine the goal to be "complete the educational system in a normal manner" and then pass everyone each year you have implemented outcomes based education. The outcome is that everyone is that each individual completes an education. What good it is remains to be seen.

So the idea behind NCLB is to lower the standards until everyone passes?

It's metric chasing;

If the metric is everyone passes, then you either taught really well or lowered the standard.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#56

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #20

swaits wrote: post #6

Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders. So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this. It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might…

>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resour…

> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?

Talk to someone educated in the 1950s and 1960s and you'll understand. There was always one or two kids in the class who were 2-3 years older than everyone else, because they frequently had to repeat grades. It caused a problem for them because they weren't with their peers, age-wise. (As opposed to the kid who was born too close to the cut-off and held back a year because they were just too young to start school.)

When I was in school, (1980s and 1990s,) sometimes kids who fell behind had to go to summer programs to catch-up. But, I was sent to private schools; children with special needs were sent to public schools that head the resources to handle them, and everyone was either from a financially stable family or otherwise knew the strings to pull to keep the kids in private school.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#57

Post by ch4s3 » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #29

Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g... They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing succ…

The sub headline is "Adjusted for student poverty", and is about reversing pandemic learning loss. The poorest students in the highest poverty districts in Alabama made significant gains since the end of the pandemic. You can see more detail here[1].

[1] https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/20...

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#58

Post by walthamstow » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

nixon_why69 wrote: post #16

fncypants wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.

To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them. To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.

> we've had many generations as a developed nation now

Have you? Jim Crow apartheid was in place in my parents lifetime. I don't care how many cars and ship you make, that ain't developed.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#59

Post by wildzzz » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

TimorousBestie wrote: post #28

I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.

Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#60

Post by andsoitis » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #20

swaits wrote: post #6

Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders. So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this. It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might…

>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resour…

> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?

big picture... people avoid telling others what their gaps are, where they're underperforming.

this empathy ruins people and, while it avoids difficult conversations, doesn't do the kid any favors. it is actually very unkind to the individual while the messenger protects their own comfort.

this pattern repeats it self in adulthood too.