4 ms·

Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

35 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

eks391 9mo ago
Paywall
- FuriouslyAdrift 9mo ago
  https://archive.is/pbXg8 https://archive.is/pbXg8
hollywood_court 9mo ago
It's good to see Birmingham finally doing something right. It so easy to become distracted by the corruption and the drama surrounding the water board at the moment.
- alphawhisky 9mo ago
  Something something broken clock
  - gruez 9mo ago
    Not really. The specific policies seem like plausibly good things, so you can't really dismiss it as "broken clock twice a day". >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. [...]
b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
This is less "Alabama" and instead "one blue city in a red state making policy changes while the governer takes credit for it".
- gruez 9mo ago
  Look at the chart. Adjusted for "poverty rate and other demographics", the top states are red states, so it's harder to chalk it up as some sort of n=1 outlier.
  - fncypants 9mo ago
    What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.
    - nixon_why69 9mo ago
      To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them. 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.
      - squeefers 9mo ago
        > your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.
        the_sleaze_ 9mo ago
        No, gp is correct. Good public education is a profoundly good indicator of economic prosperity, though it is a long term investment.
        squeefers 9mo ago
        > Good public education is a profoundly good indicator of economic prosperity well yeah.... because for good schools you need good money. no money = bad schools. good schools dont appear in poor areas. thats the connection.
swaits 9mo ago
Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders. 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.
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
  It's also noteworthy that they have some of the most impoverished populations in their schools in the entire country.
  - swaits 9mo ago
    Yes, indeed. I should’ve mentioned that in my comment.
- NietzscheanNull 9mo ago
  > still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. 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.
  - swaits 9mo ago
    Yes. I realized I should’ve clarified that and edited it into my comment in parallel with your comment.
- HanShotFirst 9mo ago
  I expected to see that in the article, but it's not mentioned at all.
- CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
NurembergDfens 9mo ago
[flagged]
- squeefers 9mo ago
  doesnt alabama have sundown towns? is this what i hear called "southern hospitality"?
  - hollywood_court 9mo ago
    Arab and Cullman are the two that still operate like this based on my own anecdotes. But most of the Birmingham suburbs could probably also be classified as sundown towns. Arab/Skant City is the most 'in your face' example. They don't try to hide it at all up there. Shout out to Granny's Restaurant in Skant City. Best breakfast in the area.
    - squeefers 9mo ago
      when i hear of shit like that its in places like rural india. to hear it still happens in 2026 is proof america is in the dark ages. and how anyone lets it happen either.... id rather live in a third world country than that
      - hollywood_court 9mo ago
        It’s only going to get worse as long as our current administration is in place. They’ve made the bigots feel comfortable and safe expressing their hatred.
        squeefers 9mo ago
        but its not really stopped ever. even when obama was in he did nothing about it
ConceitedCode 9mo ago
Recent essay and data the article is based on - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographically-adjusted-performance-2024-national-assessment https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographi...
prodigycorp 9mo ago
Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
- CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
  When and where I was growing up, phonics was really only used remedially with kids who couldn't figure out how to read any other way.
  - prodigycorp 9mo ago
    I don’t remember how I learned to read but having a toddler who I’m now teaching to read, phonics have been a nice hook for him to wrap his mind around what’s on the page. I’m sure he’d be cromulent at reading without it, but we read together a ton and I don’t see him reading as accelerated without it.
- the_sleaze_ 9mo ago
  I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether. 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.
  - prodigycorp 9mo ago
    Good job by you! It’s heartening to see a teacher willing to switch things up too. 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.
  - 9mo ago
HanShotFirst 9mo ago
1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home. 2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days. 3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
- ch4s3 9mo ago
  >the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.) It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based. [1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of-reading-strategies-for-instruction https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...
TimorousBestie 9mo ago
I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.
- wildzzz 9mo ago
  Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.
  - TimorousBestie 9mo ago
    > Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism Not something I was advocating, thanks.
    - j_w 9mo ago
      "I'm against the solution which has been shown to work for [unsubstantiated reason]." Without providing any other proven-to-work solutions is basically advocating for the problem.
      - TimorousBestie 9mo ago
        It’s not the solution, it’s one intervention among others in a focus program. They had at least one other intervention going on at the same time (essentially, decriminalizing truancy—a “proven-to-work” solution by your standards, and one I do support), and probably more.
- ch4s3 9mo ago
  This might be the dumbest take I've read online in months. Alabama has had 1 case of measles in 24 years. Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools and has a 95.3% vaccination rate which meets the accepted threshold of 95% for heard immunity. One minute of searching could have turned this up for you. But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow childhood vaccine rates". Seriously, I can't fathom why you'd think the poorest students in Alabama shouldn't be receiving high quality in person education even in the face of imperfect ventilation. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.
ZeroGravitas 9mo ago
Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/state-district-trends/?grade=8 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g4_8/state-district-trends/?grade=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.
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
  > "shot up the national rankings" Also, y'know, not a phrase I would use with American schools. Let's have less shooting eh?
- ch4s3 9mo ago
  The sub headline is "Adjusted for student poverty", and is about reversing pandemic learning loss. The poorest students in the highest poverty districts in Alabama made significant gains since the end of the pandemic. You can see more detail here[1]. [1] https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ERS-Report-Final-1.31.pdf https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
- bitshiftfaced 9mo ago
  I disagree. It shows that the policies that they put into place gave them resistance to whatever it is about the pandemic that reduced scores everywhere else. As the article laid out, Alabama didn't just keep doing the same things.
cestith 9mo ago
Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  The latter will probably work much better. Good teachers get embittered and burned out through exposure to bad students (who are mostly bad because their parents are trash, and feeding the kids breakfast partially mitigates this.) Of course the teachers will tell you that paying the teachers more is the solution, but that doesn't seem to track with the evidence. Good schools, which are good because the students are good, tend to compensate their teachers less than bad schools. The teachers really aren't what make a school bad or good in the first place, and virtually no teachers start out being bitter assholes but are made to be that way after years of bad students. It's all downstream of social problems in the community causing kids to be raised poorly, and fixing that requires more nuance than just throwing money at teachers.
  - cestith 9mo ago
    But you get the best teachers by requiring a Masters and paying $40k a year while your school has three assistant principals and your district pays six figures apiece to multiple assistant superintendents, right?
    - mikkupikku 9mo ago
      The administrative busybodies soaking up so much of society's money is a problem, but not the reason bad schools are bad.
  - tstrimple 9mo ago
    I tend to think "good teachers" is a thing that doesn't really matter outside of niche 1-1 breakthrough moments. I know there are exceptions. Teachers who go way above and beyond, but that's not a scalable solution. A great teacher can make a difference in a handful of children. But they can't fix a fundamentally broken system. I tend to agree with you that it's not teachers that make a school good. It's the reputation and the parents who will move to areas based on said reputation. It's already selecting for parents who have the means and willingness to decide where they live to achieve better results for their child's education. They are invested in other ways as well. Thus bad schools don't necessarily have bad teachers. They have a concentration of complacent or actively bad parents who drag the entire experience down for everyone. Throw in the bulk of special needs kids who fall on the public school system that is not in any way equipped to actually handle them and it's no wonder very few kids are learning effectively.
snarf21 9mo ago
I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives. 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.
hyeonwho5 9mo ago
It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]: - 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-e11-the-outlier#transcript https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e... [2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA_Research-8-9-21_Revised2.pdf https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...
- ch4s3 9mo ago
  The debacle of instituting "whole language" instruction should be viewed as a great national shame.
cowpig 9mo ago
You can explore data directly here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE 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.
marysminefnuf 9mo ago
teacher here. there is a huge reason why we dont use reading levels to promote in michigan. its unfair to hold a third of the kids back because of biology. the kids develop early on in elementary school rapidly and kids born at the end of the year from september to december will always be a few months behind in development. unsurprisingly, the current statistic we have is that 1/3 of our 3rd graders are illiterate according to our state. not just having trouble reading, but cannot read at all. that tracks in my classroom, but we're getting better about it as the year progresses. Ive found that reduced screen time is the best way to get kids literate again in my homeroom.
insane_dreamer 9mo ago
Not a single state, including Alabama, has improved their 8th grade reading scores in 2024 vs 2019, and 38 states are worse in 2024 than 2019. And math is much worse. 51 of 53 States* have worse 8th grade Math scores in 2019 than 2024. (Again, not a single state improved.) My biggest takeaway is that it is in-person teaching, in the classroom, that actually helps kids learn, _not_ spending on "edtech". https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g4_8/state-district-trends/?grade=8 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g... (incl DC, PR, military)

35 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

eks391 9mo ago

Paywall

FuriouslyAdrift 9mo ago
https://archive.is/pbXg8 https://archive.is/pbXg8

hollywood_court 9mo ago

It's good to see Birmingham finally doing something right. It so easy to become distracted by the corruption and the drama surrounding the water board at the moment.

alphawhisky 9mo ago
Something something broken clock
- gruez 9mo ago
  Not really. The specific policies seem like plausibly good things, so you can't really dismiss it as "broken clock twice a day". >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. [...]

b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago

This is less "Alabama" and instead "one blue city in a red state making policy changes while the governer takes credit for it".

gruez 9mo ago
Look at the chart. Adjusted for "poverty rate and other demographics", the top states are red states, so it's harder to chalk it up as some sort of n=1 outlier.
- fncypants 9mo ago
  What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.
  - nixon_why69 9mo ago
    To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them. 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.
    - squeefers 9mo ago
      > your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.
      - the_sleaze_ 9mo ago
        No, gp is correct. Good public education is a profoundly good indicator of economic prosperity, though it is a long term investment.
        squeefers 9mo ago
        > Good public education is a profoundly good indicator of economic prosperity well yeah.... because for good schools you need good money. no money = bad schools. good schools dont appear in poor areas. thats the connection.

swaits 9mo ago

Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders. 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.

b40d-48b2-979e 9mo ago
It's also noteworthy that they have some of the most impoverished populations in their schools in the entire country.
- swaits 9mo ago
  Yes, indeed. I should’ve mentioned that in my comment.
NietzscheanNull 9mo ago
> still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. 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.
- swaits 9mo ago
  Yes. I realized I should’ve clarified that and edited it into my comment in parallel with your comment.
HanShotFirst 9mo ago
I expected to see that in the article, but it's not mentioned at all.
CGMthrowaway 9mo ago

NurembergDfens 9mo ago

[flagged]

squeefers 9mo ago
doesnt alabama have sundown towns? is this what i hear called "southern hospitality"?
- hollywood_court 9mo ago
  Arab and Cullman are the two that still operate like this based on my own anecdotes. But most of the Birmingham suburbs could probably also be classified as sundown towns. Arab/Skant City is the most 'in your face' example. They don't try to hide it at all up there. Shout out to Granny's Restaurant in Skant City. Best breakfast in the area.
  - squeefers 9mo ago
    when i hear of shit like that its in places like rural india. to hear it still happens in 2026 is proof america is in the dark ages. and how anyone lets it happen either.... id rather live in a third world country than that
    - hollywood_court 9mo ago
      It’s only going to get worse as long as our current administration is in place. They’ve made the bigots feel comfortable and safe expressing their hatred.
      - squeefers 9mo ago
        but its not really stopped ever. even when obama was in he did nothing about it

ConceitedCode 9mo ago

Recent essay and data the article is based on - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographically-adjusted-performance-2024-national-assessment https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographi...

prodigycorp 9mo ago

Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.

CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
When and where I was growing up, phonics was really only used remedially with kids who couldn't figure out how to read any other way.
- prodigycorp 9mo ago
  I don’t remember how I learned to read but having a toddler who I’m now teaching to read, phonics have been a nice hook for him to wrap his mind around what’s on the page. I’m sure he’d be cromulent at reading without it, but we read together a ton and I don’t see him reading as accelerated without it.
the_sleaze_ 9mo ago
I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether. 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.
- prodigycorp 9mo ago
  Good job by you! It’s heartening to see a teacher willing to switch things up too. 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.
- 9mo ago

HanShotFirst 9mo ago

1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home. 2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days. 3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)

ch4s3 9mo ago
>the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.) It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based. [1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of-reading-strategies-for-instruction https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...

TimorousBestie 9mo ago

I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.

wildzzz 9mo ago
Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.
- TimorousBestie 9mo ago
  > Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism Not something I was advocating, thanks.
  - j_w 9mo ago
    "I'm against the solution which has been shown to work for [unsubstantiated reason]." Without providing any other proven-to-work solutions is basically advocating for the problem.
    - TimorousBestie 9mo ago
      It’s not the solution, it’s one intervention among others in a focus program. They had at least one other intervention going on at the same time (essentially, decriminalizing truancy—a “proven-to-work” solution by your standards, and one I do support), and probably more.
ch4s3 9mo ago
This might be the dumbest take I've read online in months. Alabama has had 1 case of measles in 24 years. Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools and has a 95.3% vaccination rate which meets the accepted threshold of 95% for heard immunity. One minute of searching could have turned this up for you. But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow childhood vaccine rates". Seriously, I can't fathom why you'd think the poorest students in Alabama shouldn't be receiving high quality in person education even in the face of imperfect ventilation. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.

ZeroGravitas 9mo ago

Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/state-district-trends/?grade=8 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/... https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g4_8/state-district-trends/?grade=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.

ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
> "shot up the national rankings" Also, y'know, not a phrase I would use with American schools. Let's have less shooting eh?
ch4s3 9mo ago
The sub headline is "Adjusted for student poverty", and is about reversing pandemic learning loss. The poorest students in the highest poverty districts in Alabama made significant gains since the end of the pandemic. You can see more detail here[1]. [1] https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ERS-Report-Final-1.31.pdf https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
bitshiftfaced 9mo ago
I disagree. It shows that the policies that they put into place gave them resistance to whatever it is about the pandemic that reduced scores everywhere else. As the article laid out, Alabama didn't just keep doing the same things.

cestith 9mo ago

Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.

mikkupikku 9mo ago
The latter will probably work much better. Good teachers get embittered and burned out through exposure to bad students (who are mostly bad because their parents are trash, and feeding the kids breakfast partially mitigates this.) Of course the teachers will tell you that paying the teachers more is the solution, but that doesn't seem to track with the evidence. Good schools, which are good because the students are good, tend to compensate their teachers less than bad schools. The teachers really aren't what make a school bad or good in the first place, and virtually no teachers start out being bitter assholes but are made to be that way after years of bad students. It's all downstream of social problems in the community causing kids to be raised poorly, and fixing that requires more nuance than just throwing money at teachers.
- cestith 9mo ago
  But you get the best teachers by requiring a Masters and paying $40k a year while your school has three assistant principals and your district pays six figures apiece to multiple assistant superintendents, right?
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    The administrative busybodies soaking up so much of society's money is a problem, but not the reason bad schools are bad.
- tstrimple 9mo ago
  I tend to think "good teachers" is a thing that doesn't really matter outside of niche 1-1 breakthrough moments. I know there are exceptions. Teachers who go way above and beyond, but that's not a scalable solution. A great teacher can make a difference in a handful of children. But they can't fix a fundamentally broken system. I tend to agree with you that it's not teachers that make a school good. It's the reputation and the parents who will move to areas based on said reputation. It's already selecting for parents who have the means and willingness to decide where they live to achieve better results for their child's education. They are invested in other ways as well. Thus bad schools don't necessarily have bad teachers. They have a concentration of complacent or actively bad parents who drag the entire experience down for everyone. Throw in the bulk of special needs kids who fall on the public school system that is not in any way equipped to actually handle them and it's no wonder very few kids are learning effectively.

snarf21 9mo ago

I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives. 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.

hyeonwho5 9mo ago

It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]: - 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-e11-the-outlier#transcript https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e... [2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA_Research-8-9-21_Revised2.pdf https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...

ch4s3 9mo ago
The debacle of instituting "whole language" instruction should be viewed as a great national shame.

cowpig 9mo ago

You can explore data directly here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE 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.

marysminefnuf 9mo ago

teacher here. there is a huge reason why we dont use reading levels to promote in michigan. its unfair to hold a third of the kids back because of biology. the kids develop early on in elementary school rapidly and kids born at the end of the year from september to december will always be a few months behind in development. unsurprisingly, the current statistic we have is that 1/3 of our 3rd graders are illiterate according to our state. not just having trouble reading, but cannot read at all. that tracks in my classroom, but we're getting better about it as the year progresses. Ive found that reduced screen time is the best way to get kids literate again in my homeroom.

insane_dreamer 9mo ago

Not a single state, including Alabama, has improved their 8th grade reading scores in 2024 vs 2019, and 38 states are worse in 2024 than 2019. And math is much worse. 51 of 53 States* have worse 8th grade Math scores in 2019 than 2024. (Again, not a single state improved.) My biggest takeaway is that it is in-person teaching, in the classroom, that actually helps kids learn, _not_ spending on "edtech". https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g4_8/state-district-trends/?grade=8 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g... (incl DC, PR, military)