By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Charlie’s piece on the paradigmatic revolution in Mississippi that has produced
dramatic improvements in students’ test scores is vital. So, too, is Rich’s
column detailing the steps Magnolia State educators took to
achieve what its proponents are calling the “Mississippi Miracle.” Both are
based on a report in The Argument bylined by Kelsey Piper, an intrepid journalist who has made a noble
habit of confronting her compatriots on the left with discomfiting information
about the world around them — often the sort that has long been known to conservatives. As Frederick Hess recently explained in National Review,
Mississippi is one of four Southern states that are seeing a surge in student
achievement.
Mississippi students’ impressive improvements are not
exactly unknown to the left. They have just been ignored by those who are
disinclined to take the state’s test results at face value. Not long ago,
however, that was not the case.
The educational trends in Mississippi are not exclusive
to Mississippi. “In 2019, blue states had higher average NAEP scores on all
four major tests (4th and 8th grade reading and math),” Tim Daly observed in the Education Daly. “By 2024,
red states had taken the lead in three of the four.” That story receives little
attention in mainstream pedagogical circles because “these are SEC states,” he
notes. And as Charlie observed, in blue states where teachers’ unions hold
sway, educational success stories in which the unions are written out of the
story have recently failed to elicit the attention of progressive social
commentators.
Initially, however, some on the left who were invested in
repairing the teachers’ unions’ unsalvageable reputations set out to discredit
the notion that anyone not beholden to that monolith could possibly know the
first thing about education. That was what L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik set out to do two years ago, as the
Mississippi Miracle was only just becoming a thorn in progressives’ sides.
At the outset of Hiltzik’s July 3, 2023, piece, he casts
a skeptical eye on the results emanating from Mississippi and implies that
Jackson has succeeded only in manipulating statistics to make it appear as
though students were outperforming their peers in blue America. He cites the
work of the late columnist Kevin Drum, who, along with a colleague, showed that
the “apparent gains may be a statistical illusion.”
That was what Drum found, at first. But he
subsequently revised his opinion that same month. “It looks like I might have
been wrong again,” Drum admirably admitted. “Something really did happen in
Mississippi. After the switch to phonics, their kids could read a lot better
than before.” That seems rather straightforward, but Hiltzik was too invested
in his own prejudices to similarly revise the record.
And those prejudices are laid bare.
To “consider the social and political landscape in
Mississippi” is to gaze into a “black hole,” he wrote, and not just when it
comes to educational policy. Hiltzik spends the remainder of the column
castigating Mississippi’s abortion laws. He scolds Mississippians for its
health-care policies, specifically its reluctance to expand access to Medicaid
under Obamacare. He takes an especially dim view of Mississippi’s minimum wage
schedule and its laws protecting the right of non-union workers to work in typically
unionized fields.
What does any of this have to do with education? Hiltzik
explains why “the focus on instructional technique” when attempting to boost
student performance is hopelessly flawed:
Education expert Paul L. Thomas
has identified the key factors as “food and work security, healthcare, [and]
class size.” Those get largely ignored in the literacy debate, he observed,
“even though these conditions combined would dwarf any measurable impact of
teacher quality or program/standards quality.” [Emphasis his.]
Mississippi’s answer to Hiltzik’s supposition is quite
simple: no, they don’t.
Indeed, the impossibly obtuse supposition that students
suffer wherever the entire suite of progressive desiderata is not at the
forefront of the social contract is illustrative of the problem facing the
American education establishment. Its members — particularly an activist class
that is drawn to political organizing at least as much as to actually educating
— seem to have genuinely convinced themselves that ensuring universal access to
health insurance, for example, contributes as much to student performance as
the scholastic fundamentals.
That is a nifty trick to play on yourself if you’re
looking for permission to abdicate your professional duties and pursue flights
of fancy that are more exciting than the rote mundanities of daily life in a
classroom. It is an abdication, nonetheless.
Hiltzik did his best to reinforce the activists’ delusion
in his readers. But the data speak for themselves, and Hiltzik has not
revisited his conclusions. Perhaps he never will. To do so would be to concede
that the most pilloried state in the Union — the butt of every progressive joke
about the hill folk who populate flyover country — is beating the left at what
it believes is one of its core competencies.
Kelsey Piper deserves credit for acknowledging the
evidence of her own eyes. You can’t say the same for everyone in her
ideological cohort. And it’s not hard to see why.
If the left was wrong when it convinced itself that
aggregate educational success is impossible in the absence of a progressive
social contract, what does that say about the teachers’ unions? What does that
say about their enablers in high office? Indeed, what does it say about the
value of that progressive social contract?
Who wants the answers to such questions? It’s better not
to ask them at all.
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