Just a little aside, very few West Virginians work in the coal industry these days, about 28,000 and most of those live in the southern tier of counties. Support for coal is more of an emotional attitude for West Virginians. Much of rural West Virginia is made up of cattle ranches. Eastern West Virginia has a thriving home-building industry serving the affluent of Washington DC who maintain second homes in the state. The panhandle of West Virginia(think Harper's Ferry and Charles Town) and the Route 81 corridor have effectively become the outer suburbs of Washington DC and Baltimore. Due to West Virginia being a state with one of the oldest populations, the health care industry is very strong in the state, much of it run by the West Virginia University.
Interesting piece and especially interesting that states like Mississippi and Louisiana are doing better than they should be by emphasizing the education basics. That Mississippi, with its 48% black student enrollment, is a middling state in education scores is astounding. A basic truth of modern America is that blacks and Hispanics are limited in their education abilities and raw intelligence.
I would be fascinated if our host did a study on the solidarity state-by-state of whites for the Republican Party and of blacks for the Democratic Party. I would guess that there are no states where the blacks vote less than 90 % for the Democratic Party. But the states where whites vote Republican probably swing greatly. A state like Mississippi would have close to a 90 % white vote for the Republicans. Most of those whites voting Democrat in Mississippi would be professors at Ole Miss or Mississippi State or Southern Mississippi, the tiny white community in 83 % black Jackson, a few literary cranks like the late Walker Percy, and a few thousand white women shacked up with blacks. All the other whites of Mississippi vote Republican. In comparison, Republicans do worst in white states with few blacks like Massachusetts, Vermont, Washington and Oregon.
My guess is that it is a lot easier to raise these scores by slightly improving the low performers than to raise the already high performers. High performing students tend to do well under a variety of teaching policies while there is a tendency for state and local authorities to throw up their hands and just move the low performers through the system.
I grew up in Acton MA, a town that is neighbors with Concord and Lexington. We had a lot of Russians, Jews, Chinese, Indians - families who moved there and really cared a lot about their kids education. My classmates were smart. The teachers were good too. Basically the kids and teachers I met there were a lot smarter than the people I met when I went to college later at UMass Amherst.
I'd guess that education in those towns is getting worse. It used to be a nice "quaint" town you could walk to school, people left high school at lunch to walk to Dunkin Donuts and McDonalds, and parents could just come inside and walk around. Now it's like 3x as big, I think maybe they only keep the front door unlocked, and there are guards and you have to check in before you're allowed into the school. Way different atmosphere.
That last part isn't because it's becoming a bad neighborhood. It's fear of school shooters (which is more common--I think--in slightly better schools)
I think wokeness is just bad for teachers and students as it centres the student’s subjective mental state at the expense of external standards.
Non-religious people often very much like religious schooling for their kids. I can only assume this is because there is more discipline and less tolerance for everyone’s feelings.
I would be curious if there is a significant difference in performance between black students in some of these higher performing and more rural Southern states than those that live in urbanized Great Migration locations. I personally have no idea but would assume that black families that remained in their smaller Southern communities have more cohesiveness and expectations on personal behavior than fragmented urban ones.
You get a little of both. Harlem blacks tend to be descended from ambitious early 20th Century migrants, while Bed-Stuy blacks tend to be more 1960s welfare migrants.
Dallas and Charlotte tend to get black migrants from the Rust Belt moving to get better jobs in the 21st Century economy. Rust Belt cities often have blacks left behind by the changes in the economy.
I too was a very early reader. I remember distinctly being taken out of class aged five years and eight months for advanced group reading with older kids and having to read out loud a paragraph about gauchos in Argentina (late 1980s). I managed it.
There was environment as well as my nature at play - my parents had a tiny black-and-white TV which was on for maybe an hour a day. I was a bored only child and books were a distraction.
From looking at my own kids and their peers I think reading at five is extremely rare now. There is so much other visual stimulus for kids unless they are growing up in some kind of austere religious community.
Parents in my affluent Northern Virginia suburb seem like they're diligent about limiting screen time for their kids, and I'd guess that a majority of my son's (public school) kindergarten classmates are reading already. (I used 100 Easy Lessons to teach him when he was 4; I started tentatively when he was 3 1/2 but set the book aside when it became clear that he wasn't quite ready to focus for 20 minutes at a time.)
Of course our neighborhood is unrepresentative of the country as a whole in many ways. If you looked around our community pool at 5 on a summer afternoon you'd never guess that 40+% of American kids don't live with their father.
Do most kids learn to read after 5? Does that mean most people remember learning to read? Memories from before age 3 or so get erased. I remember a scene from my 3rd birthday (or 4th if you count the actual day I was born) but I have no memory of learning to read or not being able to read.
My parents have told me that I figured out how to read (I assume by making a connection between the written words in the books and the sounds my mom would speak as she read to me and my siblings) at age 3.
I have no memory of figuring that out, although I do have some other memories from when I was 2 and 3.
The earliest that I can firmly date is a picture taken with my cousin at an amusement park photo booth; I remember some details of that visit to the amusement park, including the two of us being corralled for the picture. I would have been 2 years, 4 months +- 1 month at the time.
This tracks with your long-running theme that "white" bourgeois values are actually very good for Peoples Of Color. And not surprisingly so are established pedagogical methods, like breaking down language and math into their fundaments and drilling students relentlessly on them.
I like this theme of, "The American Way--it's not just good for whites!" Hopefully we can keep this return to common sense rolling downhill.
"Republicans make better laws for nonwhites and Democrats make better laws for whites."
This is true outside of the US too (e.g., Scandinavian welfare states). It's funny how for all of their stated interest in diversity, white liberals have such a hard time groking the specific ways groups differ.
It’s like the joke about economists on a desert island: “How do you get everyone equally capable of reaching the same standards?” “Well, assume that everyone’s equally capable of reaching the same standards…”
A while ago Alec MacGillis sparked an interesting Twitter discussion on why SF, PDX and Seattle have been so much worse than Boston in social-order terms...
Boston has hard-headed Irish and Italian Catholics to moderate the woke craziness maybe? I wonder if the same logic applies to public education.
For a long time, City Journal has been covering the movement to abandon school discipline in the name of Equity. A single unruly student can tank an entire classroom (much less a whole throng of them). I wonder how badly the anti-discipline movement has damaged the performance of woke school districts.
In 1986 I went to a fireworks show in downtown Chicago and a couple of months later, a fireworks show in downtown Boston. I was struck by how after the show in Boston, the small number of blacks seemed scared of the whites. In Chicago, of course, blacks acted like they owned the sidewalks.
That's an interesting factoid about the two ways of learning to read. One of the smartest guys in my pledge class told me his reading was really messed up because he was a victim of the phonics fad but then years later I read that the problem with literacy was because we had abandoned phonics. I remember having phonics classes but I had been reading for years at that point so maybe it didn't affect me.
I had no idea that some adults read by sounding out words. I'm a whole word guy like Steve. Never occurred to me there was a different style.
Looking at those charts and considering the 35 being on standard deviation, doesn't it look like most states are doing about the same? Aside from the few outliers all the states are probably in the same place if you had those +- bands
Oregon being dead last is not surprising. That state is basically far left lunatic Portland combined with far right redneck countryside. Downtown Portland was the grossest city I’ve ever seen (and I commute to SF). Eastern Oregon was full of people, who when I told them of a rare wildlife sighting (eagle, rattlesnake), responded with “did you shoot it?”
I follow the Newton MA school board meetings on YouTube. While their 4th and 8th grades may be OK, the nice white lady fuckery has moved into high school, courtesy of some Great New Ideas from a trendy Asst. Super.
Newton P.S. got rid of tracked classes (college-bound and non) in their two high schools and instead put same grade level the kids all together in multi-level classes where osmosis was expected to benefit the back row kids while not hurting the front row kids at all. Alas.
The good news is that the study to figure out just what went so horribly wrong will only take another couple years to generate the numbers upon which serious cogitation can commence and an action plan for achieving excellence can be discussed, debated, drawn up, planned, launched, implemented, evaluated and revised, then the new plan discussed, debated, ....
Figure any real change can be avoided until about the time that Asst. Super secures a position in a larger, more richly supported district with nicer white ladies (or is ready for retirement, whichever comes first).
I definitely remember learning to read in the first grade. I think that is pretty standard. What I remember most was how ingenious I thought the alphabet was and its simplicity. I guess I learned through phonics.
My experience was much the same. I'd just turned six, and was starting first grade. I of course knew all of the letters and sounds from kindergarten, but neither my parents nor my kindergarten teacher had really connected that info to the act of reading itself.
My first-grade teacher used phonics, which made that crucial link. I remember it quite clearly: once I'd been informed that this was what letters and their sounds were *for*, that was pretty much the last reading lesson I ever needed. I too remember thinking that all this stuff was a great idea, because now I could read whatever I pleased. It felt like a superpower.
Our typical lobster and french fries diet washed down with a Moxie has certainly hurt my state’s math skills.
What’s Oregon’s excuse?
George Floyd, apparently.
Just a little aside, very few West Virginians work in the coal industry these days, about 28,000 and most of those live in the southern tier of counties. Support for coal is more of an emotional attitude for West Virginians. Much of rural West Virginia is made up of cattle ranches. Eastern West Virginia has a thriving home-building industry serving the affluent of Washington DC who maintain second homes in the state. The panhandle of West Virginia(think Harper's Ferry and Charles Town) and the Route 81 corridor have effectively become the outer suburbs of Washington DC and Baltimore. Due to West Virginia being a state with one of the oldest populations, the health care industry is very strong in the state, much of it run by the West Virginia University.
I think Charles Murray lives in WV and commends it as less crazy and more virtuous than the DC metro?
I enjoy living here but it isn't heaven. I had a murder occur ten days ago one mile from my house. A drug deal gone bad.
Even John Denver admitted WVa was just "almost heaven".
Same with Bob Denver. But he was a big pothead.
Really? He seemed like a great intellect on that TV show.
Gilligan was no lie. He and Mary Ann, the squeaky clean girl from Kansas, were big potheads.
WV is in the process of eventually getting rid of their state income tax. More people will be moving there and that will improve things more.
Interesting piece and especially interesting that states like Mississippi and Louisiana are doing better than they should be by emphasizing the education basics. That Mississippi, with its 48% black student enrollment, is a middling state in education scores is astounding. A basic truth of modern America is that blacks and Hispanics are limited in their education abilities and raw intelligence.
I would be fascinated if our host did a study on the solidarity state-by-state of whites for the Republican Party and of blacks for the Democratic Party. I would guess that there are no states where the blacks vote less than 90 % for the Democratic Party. But the states where whites vote Republican probably swing greatly. A state like Mississippi would have close to a 90 % white vote for the Republicans. Most of those whites voting Democrat in Mississippi would be professors at Ole Miss or Mississippi State or Southern Mississippi, the tiny white community in 83 % black Jackson, a few literary cranks like the late Walker Percy, and a few thousand white women shacked up with blacks. All the other whites of Mississippi vote Republican. In comparison, Republicans do worst in white states with few blacks like Massachusetts, Vermont, Washington and Oregon.
My guess is that it is a lot easier to raise these scores by slightly improving the low performers than to raise the already high performers. High performing students tend to do well under a variety of teaching policies while there is a tendency for state and local authorities to throw up their hands and just move the low performers through the system.
Yep.
Or old Democrats.
Why I shouldn't skim - first time through I read the following
"Granted, Ed School profs are the dumbest professors on average,"
as
"Granted, Ed School profs are the dumbest professors on the planet,"
However, meaning wasn't too far off
I grew up in Acton MA, a town that is neighbors with Concord and Lexington. We had a lot of Russians, Jews, Chinese, Indians - families who moved there and really cared a lot about their kids education. My classmates were smart. The teachers were good too. Basically the kids and teachers I met there were a lot smarter than the people I met when I went to college later at UMass Amherst.
I'd guess that education in those towns is getting worse. It used to be a nice "quaint" town you could walk to school, people left high school at lunch to walk to Dunkin Donuts and McDonalds, and parents could just come inside and walk around. Now it's like 3x as big, I think maybe they only keep the front door unlocked, and there are guards and you have to check in before you're allowed into the school. Way different atmosphere.
That last part isn't because it's becoming a bad neighborhood. It's fear of school shooters (which is more common--I think--in slightly better schools)
I think wokeness is just bad for teachers and students as it centres the student’s subjective mental state at the expense of external standards.
Non-religious people often very much like religious schooling for their kids. I can only assume this is because there is more discipline and less tolerance for everyone’s feelings.
I would be curious if there is a significant difference in performance between black students in some of these higher performing and more rural Southern states than those that live in urbanized Great Migration locations. I personally have no idea but would assume that black families that remained in their smaller Southern communities have more cohesiveness and expectations on personal behavior than fragmented urban ones.
I can see it being the opposite, with the northern urban blacks being descended from more ambitious ancestors who moved north after WWII.
You get a little of both. Harlem blacks tend to be descended from ambitious early 20th Century migrants, while Bed-Stuy blacks tend to be more 1960s welfare migrants.
Dallas and Charlotte tend to get black migrants from the Rust Belt moving to get better jobs in the 21st Century economy. Rust Belt cities often have blacks left behind by the changes in the economy.
I too was a very early reader. I remember distinctly being taken out of class aged five years and eight months for advanced group reading with older kids and having to read out loud a paragraph about gauchos in Argentina (late 1980s). I managed it.
There was environment as well as my nature at play - my parents had a tiny black-and-white TV which was on for maybe an hour a day. I was a bored only child and books were a distraction.
From looking at my own kids and their peers I think reading at five is extremely rare now. There is so much other visual stimulus for kids unless they are growing up in some kind of austere religious community.
Parents in my affluent Northern Virginia suburb seem like they're diligent about limiting screen time for their kids, and I'd guess that a majority of my son's (public school) kindergarten classmates are reading already. (I used 100 Easy Lessons to teach him when he was 4; I started tentatively when he was 3 1/2 but set the book aside when it became clear that he wasn't quite ready to focus for 20 minutes at a time.)
Of course our neighborhood is unrepresentative of the country as a whole in many ways. If you looked around our community pool at 5 on a summer afternoon you'd never guess that 40+% of American kids don't live with their father.
Do most kids learn to read after 5? Does that mean most people remember learning to read? Memories from before age 3 or so get erased. I remember a scene from my 3rd birthday (or 4th if you count the actual day I was born) but I have no memory of learning to read or not being able to read.
Probably yes to both?
My parents have told me that I figured out how to read (I assume by making a connection between the written words in the books and the sounds my mom would speak as she read to me and my siblings) at age 3.
I have no memory of figuring that out, although I do have some other memories from when I was 2 and 3.
The earliest that I can firmly date is a picture taken with my cousin at an amusement park photo booth; I remember some details of that visit to the amusement park, including the two of us being corralled for the picture. I would have been 2 years, 4 months +- 1 month at the time.
This tracks with your long-running theme that "white" bourgeois values are actually very good for Peoples Of Color. And not surprisingly so are established pedagogical methods, like breaking down language and math into their fundaments and drilling students relentlessly on them.
I like this theme of, "The American Way--it's not just good for whites!" Hopefully we can keep this return to common sense rolling downhill.
"Republicans make better laws for nonwhites and Democrats make better laws for whites."
This is true outside of the US too (e.g., Scandinavian welfare states). It's funny how for all of their stated interest in diversity, white liberals have such a hard time groking the specific ways groups differ.
It’s like the joke about economists on a desert island: “How do you get everyone equally capable of reaching the same standards?” “Well, assume that everyone’s equally capable of reaching the same standards…”
A while ago Alec MacGillis sparked an interesting Twitter discussion on why SF, PDX and Seattle have been so much worse than Boston in social-order terms...
https://x.com/AlecMacGillis/status/1644716170807746560
Boston has hard-headed Irish and Italian Catholics to moderate the woke craziness maybe? I wonder if the same logic applies to public education.
For a long time, City Journal has been covering the movement to abandon school discipline in the name of Equity. A single unruly student can tank an entire classroom (much less a whole throng of them). I wonder how badly the anti-discipline movement has damaged the performance of woke school districts.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/who-killed-school-discipline
https://www.city-journal.org/article/suspension-reform-is-tormenting-schools
https://www.city-journal.org/article/who-misbehaves
https://www.city-journal.org/article/sanity-on-discipline
https://www.city-journal.org/article/confronting-the-student-behavior-crisis
Massachusetts may be liberal in theory, but in practice not so much.
The West Coast is liberal in both.
In 1986 I went to a fireworks show in downtown Chicago and a couple of months later, a fireworks show in downtown Boston. I was struck by how after the show in Boston, the small number of blacks seemed scared of the whites. In Chicago, of course, blacks acted like they owned the sidewalks.
Sadly, due to “youth” mobs, Chicago’s downtown fireworks shows are no longer.
" or even Chicago." What? Hey!
That's an interesting factoid about the two ways of learning to read. One of the smartest guys in my pledge class told me his reading was really messed up because he was a victim of the phonics fad but then years later I read that the problem with literacy was because we had abandoned phonics. I remember having phonics classes but I had been reading for years at that point so maybe it didn't affect me.
I had no idea that some adults read by sounding out words. I'm a whole word guy like Steve. Never occurred to me there was a different style.
Looking at those charts and considering the 35 being on standard deviation, doesn't it look like most states are doing about the same? Aside from the few outliers all the states are probably in the same place if you had those +- bands
Oregon being dead last is not surprising. That state is basically far left lunatic Portland combined with far right redneck countryside. Downtown Portland was the grossest city I’ve ever seen (and I commute to SF). Eastern Oregon was full of people, who when I told them of a rare wildlife sighting (eagle, rattlesnake), responded with “did you shoot it?”
I follow the Newton MA school board meetings on YouTube. While their 4th and 8th grades may be OK, the nice white lady fuckery has moved into high school, courtesy of some Great New Ideas from a trendy Asst. Super.
Newton P.S. got rid of tracked classes (college-bound and non) in their two high schools and instead put same grade level the kids all together in multi-level classes where osmosis was expected to benefit the back row kids while not hurting the front row kids at all. Alas.
The good news is that the study to figure out just what went so horribly wrong will only take another couple years to generate the numbers upon which serious cogitation can commence and an action plan for achieving excellence can be discussed, debated, drawn up, planned, launched, implemented, evaluated and revised, then the new plan discussed, debated, ....
Figure any real change can be avoided until about the time that Asst. Super secures a position in a larger, more richly supported district with nicer white ladies (or is ready for retirement, whichever comes first).
I definitely remember learning to read in the first grade. I think that is pretty standard. What I remember most was how ingenious I thought the alphabet was and its simplicity. I guess I learned through phonics.
My experience was much the same. I'd just turned six, and was starting first grade. I of course knew all of the letters and sounds from kindergarten, but neither my parents nor my kindergarten teacher had really connected that info to the act of reading itself.
My first-grade teacher used phonics, which made that crucial link. I remember it quite clearly: once I'd been informed that this was what letters and their sounds were *for*, that was pretty much the last reading lesson I ever needed. I too remember thinking that all this stuff was a great idea, because now I could read whatever I pleased. It felt like a superpower.
That was great.