Schools are getting worse in most red states

I am a believer in the “Mississippi Miracle,” where one of America’s worst-resourced school systems has achieved some of its best results in early reading through solid training and rigorous implementation of best practices. More broadly, I am bought in on the idea of what David Brooks hailed as “the biggest education story of the last few years … the so-called Southern surge, the significant rise in test scores in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.”

But I do think it’s important to pay attention to the limits of this story.

It’s not a significant rise in test scores in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. It’s just those four states.

That’s a great achievement by those states, but I’ve seen a fair amount of discourse using their example to hail red state governance more broadly.

Viewing this through a narrow partisan lens, it’s worth noting that Louisiana’s turnaround mostly happened under John Bel Edwards, a Democratic governor. But more to the point, there are way more than four red states. If we were actually seeing broad-based educational improvement as a result of conservative governance, that would be much more embarrassing for Democrats but much better for the country than the reality.

One reason that Mississippi has shot up the rankings is that not only have its scores been going up, but scores in most places are getting worse. As a result, a state can now be a top performer with results that would have been pretty average a decade ago.

That’s not to take anything away from Mississippi, where schools and state officials are doing a truly excellent job of combating these serious national headwinds.

But if you want to understand what Mississippi’s results do — and don’t — mean for American society, you need to get the ratio of figure to ground correctly. Mississippi stands out partly because the national background has gotten worse. Most red states aren’t seeing similar improvements, and students in blue states aren’t doing well either. The failures look different, but they’re still bad.

Probably the best thing you can say about the conservative approach to education right now, all things considered, is that when Republicans give you a school system that doesn’t work, they also won’t