Every once in a while, a state or city discovers a new and better way to educate poor children. Inevitably, a group of skeptics arises to insist that this new way doesn’t work, that even attempting to shrink the gap between rich and poor students is a fool’s errand.
Strangely enough, these skeptics tend, with increasing frequency, to reside on the political left.
The most recent subject of this recurring dynamic is Mississippi. Once synonymous with terrible education, the state incorporated a set of educational reforms including teacher training, testing, retention (i.e., whether kids move forward or are held back), and a mostly phonics-based reading instruction, unlike the ineffective but popular “whole language” model that prevailed at the time. In a mere 10 years, the state’s fourth-grade reading scores rose from 49th place, in 2013, to the top 20, in 2023. Adjusted for race and income, Mississippi now does a far better job of teaching literacy than do many northern states seen as leaders in public education. In 2023, Maryland promptly hired Carey Wright, Mississippi’s superintendent of education, to oversee the state’s public schools.
Education reform has long split Democrats between, generally speaking, a moderate wing (led by, for instance, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and their progressive critics. Moderates have called for better incentives for attracting and keeping quality teachers (such as merit-based pay), better systems for tracking student progress, and better alternatives—such as public charter schools—to failing schools. Their critics from the left are skeptical of reforms designed to lift performance. And though these critics support public schools as community centers and providers of child care and secure middle-class jobs, they tend to dismiss any plan to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students, at least as long as poverty and inequality exist in the broader society.
Longtime progressive critics of education reform, including Diane Ravitch and Michael Hiltzik, have questioned the validity of Mississippi’s results. New Jersey Governor-Elect Mikie Sherrill responded incredulously in October when her Republican rival promised to copy Mississippi’s reforms: “He keeps citing places like Louisiana and Mississippi, I think some of the worst schools in the entire nation. If that’s where he wants to drive us to, I think voters better be aware of that.”
More recently, a new paper by Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky, and Daniel H. Robinson baldly claimed that Mississippi’s gains were entirely illusory and produced by a policy of excluding low performers. The paper, circulated in a viral social-media message by the progressive data scientist G. Elliot Morris, reaffirmed what many liberal minds have come to see as an eternal truth about education reform: It does not and cannot work.
This chorus seems to have neglected the paper’s many factual and conceptual flaws. Its central claim is that Mississippi is artificially raising its test scores by holding back underperforming third graders. But as the moderate-liberal education-reform advocates Karen Vaites and Kelsey Piper note, Mississippi’s test scores have risen steadily over the past decade, yet the average age of students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the state has held stable in recent years, and the share of students held back has actually declined. The new paper, published in the Royal Statistical Society magazine Significance, wrongly assumes that the lowest-performing students have simply disappeared, when in fact they have stayed in the state’s school system, which means they have been subjected to these tests, too.
The paper asserts, as a strange aside, that Mississippi’s fourth and eighth graders rank last in math, but Piper points out that this isn’t even close to true—the state’s fourth-grade math scores rank 16th nationally, its eighth-grade math scores rank 35th, and its demographically adjusted ranking in both categories is first. At no point does the paper mention the curricular changes that could have improved literacy rates in the state.
The authors of the paper contextualize their skepticism by noting that a number of previous education “miracles” turned out to be “hoaxes.” New Orleans, for example, implemented a citywide public charter-school system after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and saw significant boosts in test scores and college-entry and college-graduation rates a decade later. But the paper’s authors dismiss these benefits as “caused by a natural disaster.” Hurricane Katrina “tragically relocated about a third of the students who came from the poorest areas,” they write. “Removing thousands of low scorers immediately raised the average test scores of the students who remained” without “increasing any student’s individual score.” The authors use this to suggest that all major improvements in public education are similarly chimerical.
This characterization is wrong. The Tulane economist Douglas Harris, who has studied the effects of school reforms in New Orleans for years, told me by email,
“We exhaustively examined the various possible alternative explanations, and the results keep pointing to the school reforms, not demographic change or anything else.”
That such a flawed paper would have such a rapturous reaction on the left indicates just how eager progressives are to debunk any apparent success in education reform. That there are changes schools can make that actually raise scores and shrink achievement gaps cuts against the prevailing view on the left that poverty and other socioeconomic disadvantages are problems too big for schools to alleviate.
More than two decades ago, Richard Rothstein, the progressive critic of education reform and ally of teachers’ unions, dismissed the feasibility of meaningful progress in an essay called “Even the Best Schools Can’t Close the Race Achievement Gap.” In 2019, the populist financier Nick Hanauer wrote in these pages that he used to believe that poverty and inequality were a consequence of America’s failing education system. But after decades of investing heavily in public schools, “I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong,” he wrote. “Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.” (Nobody, of course, is proposing to ignore household incomes.)
Freddie deBoer, a Marxist cultural critic who writes often about American education, regularly insists that school reform does not and cannot work. “What pedagogical or administrative or technological or social or communicative or political interventions,” he has written, “reliably produce meaningful academic benefits such that those ‘left behind’ improve their station? What works? Nothing.”
Given this predisposition, it is not surprising that deBoer predicted that Mississippi’s success would prove illusory even before he had any specific statistical basis for his disbelief: “I’m confident that the supposed miracle in Mississippi is in fact not what it seems, probably a matter of some sort of data manipulation, likely in part due to some degree of systemic fraud and partially due to grey-area self-interest, institutional inertia, just-following-orders, etc. Could be wrong, but that’s my strong suspicion.”
Like deBoer, Wainer, Grabovsky, and Robinson subscribe to the view that big, positive changes in education can never hold up. “Extreme educational reform success stories are non-existent,” they write. Though it is certainly true that some apparent success stories have involved statistical meddling or outright cheating, these cases don’t prove the impossibility of improving schools any more than a list of corporate fraudsters would prove the impossibility of running a profitable business.
There are in fact many examples of cities, states, and school systems that have developed effective and scalable ways to shrink education gaps. Urban public-charter schools regularly outperform traditional public schools. Testing and accountability measures supported by both parties beginning with 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act produced slow but steady national gains until the pandemic’s disruptions in 2020.
The catch is that these reforms are challenging to enact and they generate political resistance. Teachers’ unions loathe accountability in general, and specifically hate merit pay or anything that makes it easy to fire a low-performing teacher. Affluent parents dislike the stress that comes with standardized testing. As Andrew Rice explained recently in New York magazine, teachers’ unions and dismayed parents worked together to dismantle regular testing, which helped bring about this era’s educational stagnation.
Democrats, meanwhile, have often found that the path of least resistance involves avoiding reforms that unsettle their coalition. Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 backed away from the Obama administration’s reform agenda. Party-aligned think tanks such as the Center for American Progress, which once championed reform, now focus on ideas like nicer school buildings and better teacher pay. Progressives used to talk about fixing achievement gaps. Now their ambitions have shrunk to simply holding the system together.
The left is hardly alone in giving up on schools as an engine of social mobility. Republicans have largely discarded their George W. Bush–era interest in education reform and settled for dismantling the Department of Education and turning school spending into private vouchers that parents can use with little oversight or accountability.
But the idea that poor kids are ineducable, and that the government is helpless to improve the situation, is at least consistent with conservative orthodoxy. For Democrats to adopt the same posture, merely because the hard work of lifting up educational opportunities for poor kids discomfits some of their allies, betrays their party’s most essential purpose.
