Writing for Skeptic, Daniel H. Robinson and Howard Wainer cast a doubtful eye on the Mississippi reading miracle. They open with a reminder that we’ve seen education “miracles” before.
Over a quarter century ago, “The Texas Miracle” was mentioned by presidential candidate George W. Bush as a model for educational reform. What was this Texas Miracle? It wasn’t a miracle in the same sense as an apparition of the Virgin Mary—last witnessed in 1531 in Mexico. Rather, it was observed that the Houston Independent School District had apparently experienced significant gains in student achievement simply by holding school administrators accountable for their students’ test performance. The Houston superintendent, Rod Paige, was later appointed by President Bush to be Secretary of Education. Sadly, the miracle turned out to be a hoax. Administrators were able to improve test scores by increasing the numbers of students who were categorized into special education so their scores would not be included in the overall average. Such a strategy to increase average scores by omitting the lowest scores is called left truncation of the score distribution. Note how the same strategy would boost life expectancy by only polling the living.
Ten years later, the El Paso Miracle involved a similar strategy. Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia had 9th grade low scorers transferred, dismissed, retained, or allowed to skip ahead to their junior year to keep them from taking the state-mandated 10th grade achievement test. To raise graduation rates, students received full course credit for taking a two-hour weekend class. Garcia spoke about his desire to become state education commissioner. Then he was arrested. We note that in the biblical past, those chosen to bestow miracles were very special people and were often canonized for their efforts (e.g., Acts 19:11 tells us that God’s miracles came through the hands of Paul). We know of no one who has compared Rod Paige or Lorenzo Garcia to St. Paul.
The idea of being able to summon a miracle to solve the age-old problem of poor and minority students scoring low on achievement tests has near universal appeal. Such miracles are, in Samuel Johnson’s delicious observation, “the triumph of hope over experience.” The same observation helps to explain the gush of enthusiasm in the public media immediately following reports of educational miracles. Over a century of experience in educational reform has taught us that unbelievable improvements in average student performance either (a) did not happen, or (b) were due to a strategy of limiting who was included in the assessment. Yet, because such smoke-and-mirrors miracles tend to be easier and cheaper than boosting student performance through smaller classes, better instruction, etc., we have little hope that using evidence to debunk such claims will eradicate the audience for a good miracle. The best we can hope for is a visible increase in skepticism and a demand for associated empirical evidence to support the claimed miracle. Experience has taught us that the smaller the reported effect of an intervention on the grand enterprise of education, the more likely it is to be true.
The latest educational miracle is the “Mississippi Miracle”—the miraculous turnaround of a state that only recently consistently ranked near the bottom of all states in education. Mississippi now leads the country as the fastest improving school system. The most recent 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results reported that Mississippi now ranks in a tie for 7th among all states in 4th grade reading, whereas in 2015, only three states scored lower than Mississippi. The rankings, when statistically adjusted, are even more impressive.