No. of Recommendations: 3
They've gone from something like 49th to...16th overall. That's insanely good.
It is very good. But I think there's a few reasons why it's not the huge national story with people lining up to emulate it.
The first is pretty simple, but important. A big part of their rise in the national rankings is that everyone else has gotten notably worse. They look great on comparisons to the other states, and it's amazing that they managed to resist the retrogression experienced almost everywhere else. But their absolute improvement isn't nearly as large as their relative improvement.
The second is also pretty simple - most other Red States, which ostensibly have similar attitudes towards education (like Florida, itself formerly held up as having the answers) have seen their performance fall.
And the third is a little more complicated, but perhaps the most important. This is in some ways a policy that's been tried before, and that is now very unloved by both sides. Many of the concepts that underlie the "Mississippi Miracle" are straight out of No Child Left Behind. Measurement, accountability, consequences and rewards work. NCLB resulted in a significant improvement in student performances.
Teachers and their unions hated NCLB, and basically killed it. But the principles behind NCLB improved student performance. The left responded to this by kind of giving up on significant education reform, but the right responded by deciding that this meant the system had to be torched. As Yglesias put it:
I think people know, broadly speaking, that teachers and unions generally did not like No Child Left Behind because it threatened negative consequences for a poor-performing minority of schools. This reflects poorly on them and conservatives are right to believe that public sector unions often lead to bad public sector outcomes.
But in most cases, rather than “it reflects poorly on unions that they oppose effective education reforms, so we should blow them off and run school systems,” the trend on the right has been to behave as if the goal of education policy is to dismantle teacher unions. As a result, the biggest reform trends have not been the kind of curriculum efforts we see in the Southern surge states.
Instead, there’s been a ton of enthusiasm for vouchers and education savings accounts, which are basically efforts to replace public-school funding with tax breaks for spending money on your kids’ education. The evidence on the effectiveness of these programs has generally been negative in terms of the impact on student achievement. This is true including (and perhaps especially) in states like Tennessee and Louisiana, where the mainstream public-school systems have been getting good results.
There's not really a constituency anywhere for this kind of program. Big factions in the left coalition hate it, and big factions on the right have a much different policy solution they want implemented. Keeping public schools - with the teachers unions - but imposing some really serious harness on them isn't a popular policy in either coalition.
