3 ms·

This was on HN a few weeks ago and provides a similar take: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choice https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illi

• rglover 1y ago
  "You'll graduate more competent students with this one simple trick." /s
  • tyleo 1y ago
    There’s a few other things they do. The link I shared actually provides 3 examples. I just thought it aligned particularly well with the OP on that specific point.
    • mindslight 1y ago
      Ugh, 3 simple tricks sounds too hard. I'm not going to read something that long. (/s)
• gjsman-1000 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > remember when the popular academic consensus was "you can't imprison your way into a safe society." Who said this? I thought the argument was always you can’t do this and maintain the high living standards of a modern economy built on the rule of law. It’s essentially a challenge to a society: fuck up enough on security and you lose the fruits and freedoms of a modern state fielding a growing economy. > more or less saying "you can't just discipline children." Who said this? I thought the argument was it inhibits learning in the long run and is not fair to poor kids or something. (We know that’s B.S. now.) But totally unrelated to El Salvador.
    • gjsman-1000 1y ago
      Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law, then the academic definition was wrong. Both are related in the sense that they said you can't just discipline people, more or less, with the same spirit of focusing on people's good side, to their detriment. Different application, same principles, same failure.
      • zozbot234 1y ago
        How meaningful is that approval statistics in a country where the government can put people in prison more or less arbitrarily without any kind of habeas corpus protections?
        • gjsman-1000 1y ago
          Before the government suspended it; the murder rate was nearly the highest in the world, and every attempt previously failed. Freedoms sometimes break down at scale given the right conditions. That's not comfortable to contemplate. If even 20% of people were involved in the gang and using GrapheneOS, you bet that freedom would be revoked. There is no guarantee in natural law that freedom is self-sustaining or chaos-resistant. Freedom is the privilege of a stable nation that can hopefully stay stable, but freedom does not guarantee stability. Thus why we have outliers like Singapore - very stable, minimal freedom; and outliers like El Salvador previously - very free, very unstable. Stable always beats free, because unstable makes freedom a purely academic exercise in nonsense (sure, the government might not arrest you for saying something, but the local thug will happily do worse; bragging "I have habeas corpus" is idiotic when the local drug lord is your problem and he doesn't honor it).
          • estearum 1y ago
            The murder rate was falling for years prior to Bukele’s election Obviously extremely “generous” policies for jailing people involved with or adjacent to crime will reduce crime further, but he’s not singularly responsible for improvements and it’s not clear at all where the cost-benefit will net out North Korea also has very low crime rates, I hear!
  • empath75 1y ago
    Of course you can imprison your way to a safe society. At the limit, you can just put everyone in prison. Nobody would ever say you can't imprison your way to a safe society. What people actually say is that the consequences of attempting to do that are not worth the trade off. Most people would not want to live in a dictatorial police state even if it is "safe".
  • watwut 1y ago
    America is already imprisoning more then other countries. Russia puts more people in prison, but that is it.
    • actionfromafar 1y ago
      Georgia (the country) has Russia beat in the prisoners per capita game.
      • pixl97 1y ago
        Isn't Georgia just Russia-lite these days?
  • heavyset_go 1y ago
    Safe for whom?
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • array_key_first 1y ago
    Red states went from dead last in education to still dead last in education but trending upwards. I wouldn't hold your breath.
• anon291 1y ago
  Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left. They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi does. Their sole purpose is to siphon off as much public funding for their members, not to teach children. In fact failing kids justifies more money spent (guys, this is literally in the article as a point where liberal assumptions are being challenged; please read the article before downvoting me at least). While all this sold a story 'whole word' nonsense was going on in public schools (my mom was a public school teacher), our Catholic school (non union) used a phonics based curriculum. It was the teachers unions circulating misinformation to public school teachers about the efficacy of the 'whole word' method. EDIT: Because I'm getting downvoted, let's go straight to the source. Here is the California Teacher's association itself highlighting its efforts to ban mandatory phonics-based instruction: https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/reading-california-phonics/ https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
  • greenie_beans 1y ago
    > Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left. They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi does. Mississippi Association of Educators (a teacher's union that is part of the National Education Association, aka the largest union in the US) supported the efforts to improve the literacy rates.
    • anon291 1y ago
      MAE is a wholly different beast than teacher's unions in most states. Mississippi does not require teachers to join the union, thus the union needs to compete to attract teachers. Thus, it is incentivized to actually do stuff. Usually, when people say teacher's unions (or at least when I refer to them), I refer to the set up in the most populated states like CA, NY, IL, etc, where it is a requirement for teachers to join the union, regardless of what they think of the union. I'm fine with employees banding together. What CA and other states do (require teachers to pay dues to the union) is criminal. Basically, the strength of the union correlates with educational outcomes: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-are-us-teacher-unions-state-state-comparison https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar... As of 2006 (a bit dated), only 36% of MS teachers were in the union.
• micromacrofoot 1y ago
  This is a short term fix that may cause long term problems though, kids that are held back are more likely to drop out before graduating
  • mikkupikku 1y ago
    [dead]
  • Jensson 1y ago
    Whats the point of graduating if you can't read?
    • micromacrofoot 1y ago
      jobs, it's pretty much the driving force of the entire US economy
      • gowld 1y ago
        "Jobs" don't requure graduation.
        • micromacrofoot 1y ago
          they certainly do more than they did 50 years ago
  • bluGill 1y ago
    Is there any reason to think they would graduate with useful knowledge otherwise? The kids in my day who did poor may have graduated - but they still lacked knowlege and to the diploma was paper... also those kids who don't pass will hold those who do pass - as the next year teachers waste time teaching what the majority already knows
  • variadix 1y ago
    When graduating is essentially just aging out, it isn’t really graduating
• coliveira 1y ago
  Well, that's a simple way of "solving" the problem: exclude everyone who has the problem you're supposed to fix.
  • ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    It's not exclusion. If you fail to meet standards, you should be retained for another year for additional time to meet them. That only becomes a "problem" when we treat it like one, usually because of warped institutional incentives or misplaced shame. We’ve built a system where the performance of teachers and schools is measured by graduation rates, as if every student who doesn’t graduate on time is a failure of instruction. That’s nonsense. Some kids need more time. Some face life circumstances that derail their progress like undiagnosed learning disabilities, unstable home environments, trauma, poverty. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons a child might struggle in a given year, and pretending that all of them can be solved by pushing them forward anyway is not accomplishing anything but putting them in academic and later career situations that they are not prepared properly for. What No Child Left Behind did was make an AWFUL perverse incentive where schools are indirectly ordered to pass every kid at every opportunity lest their already meager budgets get slashed even further. Children are not widgets moving along on an assembly line and we have spent decades now proving this fact.
    • Terr_ 1y ago
      > retained for another year It strikes me that US K-12 systems don't have a clear architecture to support, er, non-uniform progress. A student either moves to the next grade in all classes, or "repeats" a year. Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? Maybe in high-school the concept of "honors" classes becomes available. Perhaps that represents a conflict between the social goals (keeping cohorts together) versus per-subject educational ones.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? This works for middle and high-school students, where courses are somewhat independent. It doesn't for a third grader who can't read. They need the time to master what they haven't. Rushing that process compromises every year of education in front of them.
• TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  "A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them." Resources doesn't mean iPads and software subscriptions, it means teachers. Good teachers. There's been a catastrophic collapse in numbers in the profession, and many of the leavers are at the more talented end. They're the ones who have the skills and quals to get better jobs elsewhere. There's no point "raising expectations" unless you provide the resources to change what's possible. Individually, students have the least agency in the entire system. They're at the mercy of parents, school boards, and administrators who may be actively hostile to the very idea of a broad liberal education, of corporate opportunists who are trying to sell unproven study aids of all kinds, and of the disapproval of their peer culture. The one thing that can cut through this - sometimes - is inspiration and motivation from educators.
  • zozbot234 1y ago
    The proper job of teachers is to provide far more than simple "inspiration and motivation", especially to students who are at significant risk of failure. Teachers must be given the skills they need to provide clear and understandable information and direction to these students in the course of their job duties. They should actively educate, not just act as coaches who simply expect their "inspired" students to learn the school curriculum on their own, as with the now-popular "sink or swim" approach.
  • bccdee 1y ago
    That it's being framed as "raising expectations" at all is very silly to me. "Raising expectations" costs nothing and requires no external support, yet we see no success stories about schools which raised expectations and had big success. The "Mississippi Miracle" boils down to directing resources toward struggling kids. They hired reading coaches specifically for struggling students, provided teachers with literacy-based professional development resources, and created Individualized Reading Plans for struggling kids and their parents. Yes, they also held back kids who didn't pass a literacy exam (and moved them to teachers who specialized in helping struggling children), but failing more students was not the primary policy improvement here, and on its own it would do nothing. "Low-expectations theory" (and the accompanying suggestion that progressives are somehow to blame) is an absurd diagnosis for a problem that was not solved by raising expectations, but rather by targeting available resources toward problem areas—a solution which is painfully obvious in hindsight. That doesn't have an ideological valence, though, and this article seems intent on sticking it to progressives somehow.
• someothherguyy 1y ago
  Why have grade levels at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through. Then, in order to advance, you can focus the labor effort toward correcting skill deficits in a dynamic way. This is not possible with how educational institutions are traditionally organized, but it doesn't seem intractable to restructure to support this methodology. It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress.
  • rpcope1 1y ago
    I have a suspicion that you'd wind up with a lot of places that would care even less and with people making it to 18 without ever having advanced at all without some sort of stick ("being held back"), probably impacting the most vulnerable even more.
    • someothherguyy 1y ago
      That might be a possibility, but from what I've read, retention (the stick) does more harm than good. One of those harms is that students get held back by struggling with one skill, like math, when they are progressing on other skills at a normal pace. A system like this would address that issue, and could prevent education resources from being applied redundantly.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Why have grades at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests." > It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a necessary component of progress. It seems that if the evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.