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Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

educationdaly.us

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Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#61

Post by throwanem »

yogurt-male wrote: post #58
throwanem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like a rich white liberal. I grew up in Mississippi white and poor, and I had friends (when we could get away with that) who were black and poor. If you haven't noticed the way those latter are kept apart - quite literally the oldest play in America - then you haven't been nearly as attentive as you imagine yourself to be. The ignorant contempt you display here confirms it. Well, as you correctly note, ignoran…

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 magnanimous and openminded by generalizing from there to the poor whites who picked on you and beat you up and the black kids you were ashamed you were afraid of.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#62

Post by pc86 »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #32

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.

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 course you're going to adjust for these populations.

The only reason you look at the raw scores of a rural district outside Biloxi that is 70% black and compare that to the raw scores of a suburban San Francisco district that is 50% asian and 35% white is that you either don't understand math or you're more interested in making a political argument than an educational policy one.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#63

Post by voxic11 »

ascondabout wrote: post #18
api wrote: 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.

Yet they are able to support Hamas and other similar groups so I don't think this really explains it fully.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#64

Post by api »

redczar wrote: post #44
api wrote: 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 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 Midwest.

If you go to New York, Boston, or Silicon Valley and try to break into a top-tier industry with a thick Southern accent and talk about how much you love to go deer hunting, this will absolutely put you at a disadvantage. I lived in Boston for five years and one thing I learned is that even being from a poor or "flyover" area of the country makes you a lower class of person. There's a very strong but quiet classism, especially in the Northeast, and the Northeast is the cultural heartland of American liberals. "Where did you go to school" is the biggest class marker, followed by where you're from.

Is it as big of a disadvantage as other things? Probably not, but "the oppression olympics" isn't a good take or a good strategy.

BTW -- every human culture has class markers and in-group out-group dynamics. It just seems like the US left is blind to the fact that they have these too, and no it's not all about rejecting Nazis and misogynists. Everyone from the rural South or Midwest is not a Nazi or a misogynist. Most are not.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#65

Post by bee_rider »

kogus wrote: post #3

This was very interesting to read, and news to me. It's gratifying to see Mississippi prove that it's possible to break out of a pattern of failure. I would love to see a discussion around the specific policies and practices that MS has put in place to actually achieve these results. The article doesn't really discuss that.

The scores are adjusted for some demographic factors, so one explanation could be that they use exactly the same strategies as everybody else but the “demographic factors” adjustment works out for them.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#66

Post by megaman821 »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #32

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.

What is a fair way to compare then? If rich Asians kids from the "best" school perform the same as the rich Asians from the "worst" school and poor Native American kids from the "best" school perform same and poor Native American kids form the "worst" school, and the only differences between the best at the worst school is the proportion of each demographic, what does that say about the quality of the shcool?

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#67

Post by pc86 »

aredox wrote: post #46
pc86 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 statistics could be improved by eliminating bad data points?

I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what. That there's nothing you actually need to learn in 3rd grade in order to be advanced to 4th grade.

Is that what you're saying?

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#68

Post by ajross »

megaman821 wrote: post #50
ajross wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have kids in Oregon public schools. The schools themselves (in the sense of classroom education) are fine, for the most part. But education is very underfunded (especially relative to the tax base). So kids like mine do just fine, but anyone who needs outreach or extra support tends not to get it. That hurts badly on aggregate test scores, but not so much on college acceptance performance. So it's hard to correct,…

Oregon public schools are underfunded compared to Mississippi? Some of the worst performing schools in my area have the most funding per pupil. A bucket of money doesn't solve bad systems, bad administartors, bad teachers and bad parents.

> Oregon public schools are underfunded compared to Mississippi?

No, but they outperform Mississippi too. The article is about the first derivative, not the signal.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#69

Post by ZeroGravitas »

This all feels a bit astroturfed.

Is their increase in 4th grade student reading scores still there if you count the kids that they made resit grade 3 if they failed to meet literacy standards as 4th graders?

I quickly skimmed a few reports and articles and the lack of clarity on that point makes me suspicious.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#70

Post by bombcar »

pc86 wrote: post #62
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #32

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.

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…

But unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" - which isn't supported by the evidence, because there may be other factors that coincide with those who are eligible for them.

You'd have to do something like take the high-performing SF district and give half the students, randomly selected, free lunches.

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