>Three city programmes stand out.
>The first tackled absenteeism [...]
>Next, the district turned to preventing holiday learning loss [...]
>[...] “Birmingham Promise”, a programme that pays full tuition at many Alabama colleges for graduates of the city’s public schools. [...]
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.
bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.
well yeah.... because for good schools you need good money. no money = bad schools. good schools dont appear in poor areas. thats the connection.
Does this explain the gap between white/black poverty too?
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.
How should you measure an education system? Should you measure purely based on the student's performance? What if the students are just better at reading, independent of the school? It's not hard to imagine that even with identical teachers, that inner cities schools would have worse test scores than wealthy suburban schools, especially if the latter are rich enough to afford tutors, the family environment is more conductive to learning, etc. Recognizing this fact, it's fairly obvious that "you're either at a third grade level or not" is a terrible way of assessing how good of a job an educational system is doing.
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 take some time for these literate 4th graders to get up to 8th grade age.
I don’t think Alabama is a model for anything related to public education.
Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!
In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.
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 resources on remedial education
If the metric is everyone passes, then you either taught really well or lowered the standard.
https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/953/2015/04...
Page 95. “The limitations that resulted from the curricular requirements also affected the use of classroom resources. In some cases, there appeared to be particular books, teaching models, and other resources that were mandated in the curriculum. An observation following a teacher interview illuminates the inability of teachers to include non- prescribed resources: "She wanted to be able to use more chapter/trade books and it was not possible because of all of the excerpts and mandates of basal instruction" (IA, WSRSD, ES, Carey, FN, #8, p. 2). The teachers seemed to want greater curricular control. While they indicated that they did have control over their instructional methods, they appeared to be inhibited by the lack of authority and decision-making power with regard to the curriculum.”
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...
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.
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...
Recently, there has also been a movement to drop standards based grading and advanced classes, under guise of equity. That I find more troubling.
2) "They know the letter of the law, but not the spirit." No common shared understanding of the purpose/point/value motivations.
3) "Time marches on." There is a constant influx of new kids to educate and you can't realistically block the flow without rupturing something.
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.
I also went to private school. There, it was clear that every student was expected to advance every year, but that each had to also truly meet the standard to advance. No teacher would let you fall behind, and any and all actions needed were taken. I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)
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.
Academic prowess shouldn't be such a social booster/crusher, especially pre-PhD, but it is, so we have to deal with it, and that mean not making kids repeat classes too much (two decade ago, it was max a year below 11, max two after that in my country, nowadays it's just avoided as much as possible).
I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's _hard_ and requires genuine teaching - personal focus on a little kid's understanding. I can't imagine that scaling in a classroom but I'm no educator.
I guess I didn’t consider phonics to be hard.. it seems self evident. But yeah, I also read to my kid a ton and have been throwing some phonics practice in there. I don’t know how else to give a toddler footholds to comprehend what’s on the page.
Teachers use phonics all the time. “Teachers don’t use phonics anymore” is just a thing people say. It’s odd.
The NYT Daily podcast did an ok episode on this[1].
Not that phonics is useless, but it isn't as helpful as it should be. We need spelling reform first - which probably needs to start with a more general spoken language reform, and that doesn't seem like it will get anywhere for political reasons.
Not something I was advocating, thanks.
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 success for new initiatives.
Also, y'know, not a phrase I would use with American schools.
Let's have less shooting eh?
[1] https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.
- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.
- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)
- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.
- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.
Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.
The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.
So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.
[1] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e...
[2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...
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.
eks391•1h ago
FuriouslyAdrift•1h ago