Weirdly, the Leftwing Media Isn't Interested in Reporting That Red States Now Lead Blue States in Education and Student Achievement

Buh buh buh we're the Smart People who Love the Science (TM).

No, you're the blinkered, uneducated, little-read, provincial morons who believe in weird demonic cult dogmas.

Not long ago, blue states typically outperformed red ones when it came to education. That is changing. Blue states like Oregon and Washington experienced significant drops in reading and math scores for both fourth- and eighth-graders between 2015 and 2024, worse than the national declines during the same period. Mississippi, meantime, gained five points in fourth-grade reading and math and held steady in eighth-grade performance. Louisiana also maintained its scores, defying the negative national trends.

Whether you call it the "Mississippi Miracle" or the "Southern Surge," Republican-led states are rapidly improving student outcomes relative to blue states, thanks to a series of substantive reforms over the past decade.

Republican-led state governments have implemented evidence-based reading curricula, banned ineffective teaching methods, and improved school safety. In contrast, Democrat-led states have undermined school discipline, reduced academic standards, and embraced policies that deemphasize achievement in favor of ideological goals.

Wait -- you're saying that didn't work?

The most important factor driving this divide has been the progressive push for "equity." In practice, equity has meant eliminating honors classes, lowering grading standards, and loosening classroom discipline. Avoiding this ideological approach, red states have taken the lead on evidence-based reforms.

The divide is particularly striking in reading instruction. For decades, American schools steered clear of phonics--the instructional method that teaches students to connect letters with sounds--which progressive educators derided as a right-wing scheme (and some still do now). They favored the "whole language" approach, whereby students supposedly learned through a "holistic" process of immersion in literature and "sight reading." Even though this approach was exposed as a failure as early as the 1950s, when Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read warned of its ineffectiveness and championed phonics, the educational establishment stuck with the whole-language approach throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

In recent decades, however, red states have returned to phonics. In 2013, Mississippi, under unified Republican leadership in both the legislature and governor's mansion, was an early adopter of requiring that teachers be trained in evidence-based reading pedagogies. At the time, Mississippi rated second to last in reading scores nationally. But since then, the Magnolia State has steadily climbed the rankings. In fact, adjusted for demographics, it now stands among the top states in reading.

Liberals are always engaging in primitive cargo-cult thinking. Here's what these assholes thought: They saw that kids who were very good at reading did not use phonics to read words, but rather just recognized them in a glance.

So they reasoned: If the smart kids are just reading words "whole" at a glance, that must be what we must teach our slower-readers to do!

It apparently never occurred to them that fast readers had all gone through the phonics sounding-out process, but at an earlier age than their peers.

And then, after reading for a couple of years before even getting to first grade -- yes, they then were reading words by sight (at least the ones that were already stored in their memory's word-bank). They stopped using phonics not because phonics wasn't useful, but because they eventually outgrew it.

These geniuses similarly noticed that kids who were good at math sometimes didn't use the standard algorithms for doing multiplication and division, but instead used little tricks to manipulate the numbers to make calculation faster and easier.

Once again: These kids all used the standard techniques of memorization and long-form multiplication and division first, then, as they became proficient, they began realizing on their own that there were quick tricks for doing calculations. Like, if you want to divide by 10, just move the decimal point one place to the left.

But these geniuses again decided that because the smarter kids were figuring out these shortcuts, then we should skip teaching kids the standard algorithms for calculation and just teach them the tricks.

And that's why parents are unable to help their kids with math any longer-- Parents all know the standard algorithms, and are ready to teach it, but when their kids come home they're told do weird stuff the parents haven't seen before.

Which is another big thing stupid liberals don't realize: Teachers set the pace of learning in classrooms, but it's actually parents who do the bulk of the actual teaching at home. So if you make up random nonsense to "teach" kids math, you are cutting the main teachers of math, the parents, out of the equation.

I hate the Educrats. They are constantly churning out New and Stupid Techniques both to justify their phoney-baloney jobs and also to provide excuses for why low-performing teachers are unable to teach kids.

See, it's not the incompetent teachers' fault -- it's the fault of The System! We can fire The System and keep all the incompetent teachers on the payroll!

This is such a standard bureaucratic dodge it ought be be criminalized. They never want to fire incompetent bureaucrats, just fire the old "system" (or "procedures" or "trainings").

The old system (and procedures, and teachings) usually work.

But no system works in the hands of an incompetent.

Read the whole thing. Red states are also making it easier to remove disruptive students from the classroom, whereas blue states are making it impossible to do so, thus guaranteeing that those few disruptive students won't be the only ones leaving the school entirely uneducated. All the students they kept from learning will also graduate with a moron-level intellect.

(No slight to good Morons intended.)

posted by Ace at 05:20 PM

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