Is Mississippi a cheater? Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik seems sure of it. Last month, the Pulitzer Prize–winning opinion writer published a column saying that Mississippi’s widely acclaimed reading improvement was just a mirage. Essentially, he accuses the state of cheating.
Then, in a Tweet, he insulted former State Superintendent Carey Wright as a “shill for Mississippi’s fakery”:
This shill for Mississippi's fakery on reading scores unwittingly reveals the truth: Asserts first that state's racist social and health policies are "irrelevant" to educational achievement, but admits that social and health policies are a "challenge" for educators. Which is it?
— Michael Hiltzik (@hiltzikm) July 11, 2023
Such strong words should have solid backup. But Hiltzik hasn’t got it. His claims about Mississippi’s NAEP scores and retention policy are based on a debunked theory and are demonstrably wrong in ways that he should have known. In fact, he could have read about it in a Fordham piece I wrote in 2019! (More on that below.)
Hiltzik’s assertion, based on analysis by media bloggers Kevin Drum and, in more detail, Bob Somersby, is that Mississippi hasn’t actually improved reading instruction. Instead, it “gamed” its NAEP scores by holding back its lowest performing students. When the state brings these students back a year later, he argues, a year older and with a year more instruction under their belts, they do better and raise the state’s overall score, even without a single change to reading instruction.
The apparent gain, therefore, is just a “statistical illusion,” goes the argument, based on changing the mix of students, not actual improvement.
If true, this would be an important insight. I once thought so: In 2019, I published a piece based on the exact same premise and reached a similar, though less hyperbolic, conclusion.
But I was wrong, as I found when I dug in further. The assumption that I’d made, along with Hiltzik and the bloggers, was that Mississippi had just started retaining students. But the data show that it’s done so for at least twenty years, and at the same rates as under the current literacy law.
Retention by itself did nothing for them, mechanically or otherwise. Before 2013, Mississippi ranked forty-eighth for fourth grade reading, despite having one of the country’s highest retention rates. And after the reading retention law went into effect, the year-to-year rate changes had no discernible effect on NAEP results.
Moreover, the pandemic provided a clear natural experiment: What happens when retention stops? In 2021, Mississippi suspended its third grade retention requirement. When those students took the fourth grade NAEP in 2022, the “statistical illusion” should have worked in reverse, sending Mississippi scores tumbling, relative to other states.
Instead, although scores did fall, as they did in forty-four other states, Mississippi’s drop was less than the national average. And for low-income students—78 percent of Mississippi’s total enrollment, the highest in the country—the state’s rank improved from third to second in the country. In other words, relative to other states, the results held up with no reading retention at all.
I was happy to eat crow. I added a retraction to my 2019 piece explaining how I was wrong, and then wrote a new one with a better theory in these very pages: “Student retention and third-grade reading: It’s about the adults.”
But Hiltzik’s LA Times column did not mention any of this. Nor did the posts from the supporting blogs, one of which even quoted my original piece at length, ignoring my retraction. (Kevin Drum, to his credit, publicly reversed himself after reviewing the data.)
I, with others, have written to Hiltzik, sharing the data he didn’t seem to have and explaining the arguments he apparently hadn’t heard. He has not backed down. Indeed, he claims that California, where both he and I live, has nothing to learn from Mississippi. With California’s Black fourth graders a full year behind their peers in Mississippi, I can’t agree.
Hiltzik clearly has it in for what he calls “benighted” Mississippi. His column on reading takes a long detour to rail against the state’s health care policies. He ties it to reading with an almost glib non sequitur: Given the Magnolia State’s weak health care outcomes, “should we trust [its] statistics on reading scores?” He’s made up his mind in advance that the state can’t succeed.
Scrutinizing Mississippi’s NAEP results is a good thing, to be sure. Its experiment has huge significance. Today, it’s widely viewed as the leading national model for early reading policy, despite being a place that traditionally has struggled in student achievement. Skepticism is necessary—and so far, Mississippi has stood up to the test.
But Hiltzik’s skepticism isn’t constructive. It is uninformed smearing based on thin and debunked evidence. It is irresponsible and serves no one. We need to stand up with Mississippi against this kind of bullying and prejudiced rejection of what the data tell us. Mississippi can succeed, and kids everywhere deserve to benefit from what they are doing.
