Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools • Hacker News Board

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#81

Post by lolinder » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #70

pc86 wrote: 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…

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.

> unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse"

Nonsense, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs are correlated with kids who do worse", which they absolutely are!

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#82

Post by silverlake » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

If you look at the full table of NAEP scores, you see the differences are not that much. 8th grade reading is 245(WV)-266(MA). That's 20 point spread, where NAEP goes to 500 pts. A 4% difference between the best and worst state is insignificant. They all suck because they are at 50% of the scale.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#83

Post by khelavastr » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #76

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.

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…

Great classes which target top-performing students will be different than great classes that target below-average students..

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#84

Post by miltonlost » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

None of this article says WHY Mississippi changed, just that it did and Blu States should emulate. But emulate what? School vouchers? Feeding children before school? The blog doesn't say, just implies that it's Republicans doing.... The analysis is lacking and surface level and right-wing water carrying.

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#85

Post by otterley » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#86

Post by happyopossum » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

keenmaster wrote: post #48

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.

Mississippi's average ACT scores are tied for last (edit: tied for second to last). I’m sure some of their educational outcomes are improving, but the demographic-adjusted stats from elementary school students are misleading. Holding kids back for poor performance can really pump their numbers inadvertently. Even if that’s not a very prevalent practice, performance in high school is more important and far more predic…

ACT scores trail education outcomes by ~10 years, as students in school in the middle of a shift don’t get the full benefit from it - they’re often not included in policy changes for the sake of continuity (you may not be able to suddenly change the way you teach math in 5th grade).

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#87

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #56

This article is advocating that using poverty-adjusted scores is a better way to assess student education levels. I just can't agree with that. "Your children aren't just dumber, they're also poorer" feels like a very spicy way to elevate the status of a state to me. > Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. > When the Urban…

[deleted]

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#88

Post by bombcar » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #29

duxup wrote: post #2

I wish this story dove into the "why" or what these test results even are / validate them rather than finger wag at everyone within shouting distance.

Yeah I think the phenomenon is interesting and important to be aware of, but the berating political take isn't really that helpful or productive in my opinion — even though it ostensibly attempts to be unbiased in its criticisms. It would have been more productive to dive into what is working and what might be irrelevant, and how it might or might not generalize to other places. There is a kind of implicit spin to it…

My repeated experience has been that the teachers on the ground (actually teaching the classes) know exactly what they'd like to do to improve things, but they instead have to implement whatever new policy has flowed down from who knows where this year or decade.

(An actionable example of a policy that parents can implement today is "redshirting" where you hold a child with a late birthday back a year in pre-kindergarten)

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#89

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:26 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

#90

Post by lolinder » Wed, May 07, 2025, 2:27 PM UTC

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #56

This article is advocating that using poverty-adjusted scores is a better way to assess student education levels. I just can't agree with that. "Your children aren't just dumber, they're also poorer" feels like a very spicy way to elevate the status of a state to me. > Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. > When the Urban…

> "Your children aren't just dumber, they're also poorer" feels like a very spicy way to elevate the status of a state to me.

Would this comment have been made if we were talking about The Bronx instead of Mississippi?

The author is saying that given the poverty status of the state it's remarkable how quickly they've been able to turn their education system around. A really good school in The Bronx will have lower scores than a mediocre school in Upper Manhattan, but that doesn't mean that we should all go out and emulate the mediocre school in Upper Manhattan. The really good school in The Bronx is obviously the better model.

The author's initial point is correct, though: because it's Mississippi we're talking about that intuition doesn't apply. It's okay to diss on Mississippi for being Mississippi.