Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
Education outcomes have been getting worse across much of the world, with reading and math scores falling to historic lows. The U.S. has seen some of the steepest declines in decades.
But, why does Mississippi look so different?
Mississippi education reformer Rachel Canter has been at the forefront of the state’s dramatic improvement in reading and math over the past few decades. Today, Derek is joined by Rachel to discuss the so-called “Mississippi miracle” (a name she says misses the mark!). Together they break down how years of policy changes and implementation transformed the state’s schools and how other states can replicate their success.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Rachel Canter discuss some possible reasons behind the decline of American education.
Derek Thompson: Rachel, I want to start with the bad news. American reading scores have been declining for roughly a decade. The latest [National Assessment of Educational Progress] results show that eighth-grade reading is at historic lows and 12th-grade reading and math are at their lowest level in decades. What the hell is happening in American education?
Rachel Canter: Yeah, so a lot of people have been talking about our decline in the last couple of years in the context of COVID, where we did see schools close, and we saw kids go home and not learn very much over the course of that year. And then we saw decline afterward, but really this decline started before COVID. We saw stagnation and then decline. And there’s been a lot of speculation as to why our students are going in the wrong direction, but it’s a really worrisome trend, and it is across the United States. We see it in every different type of community that students are learning less and know less now than they did a decade ago.
Thompson: And not just the United States. There were new [Programme for International Student Assessment] results just last week that showed that reading and math scores across rich countries in the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] have reached their lowest levels in the history of that test, the modern history of that test. Much of that decline also, to your point, started before COVID. If it was just the United States, then I would say, “Aha, we have a problem with American education policy. We have a problem with America’s science of reading and math.” The fact that this is happening everywhere around the world, or almost everywhere throughout developed countries, seems to rule in some other candidates for understanding what’s happening. So what does it tell you that so many different education systems are experiencing this decline at the same time?
Canter: Yeah, I think that there have to be some systemic factors that are affecting every country. And certainly we have lots of speculation both in the United States and globally about what could be causing these declines. And COVID certainly didn’t help. We know that kids being absent from school significantly impacts whether or not they’re going to learn things. You have to be in school to learn things. We know absenteeism has increased since COVID, but the fact that this started before COVID shows that there’s got to be something else going on in the social context that must be affecting kids. And we have a lot of ideas about the use of technology in school, the use of digital devices, whether or not we’re using the best methods of instruction, all these different things. But it’s most likely there’s not one single cause, that there’s a variety of causes that are both contributing to this decline and making it difficult for students to recover.
Thompson: Big problems attract big ideas, and American education has spent the last 25, 30 years cycling through a bunch of big ideas. You’ve got No Child Left Behind, there’s Race to the Top under Obama, there’s Common Core, charter schools, teacher accountability, personalized tutoring. It feels like every few years somebody announces that we finally figured out how to fix schools, and then inevitably that revolution disappoints. Why do you think education reform in the U.S. is such a scrapyard heap of silver bullets?
Canter: Yeah. So I tend to be very skeptical when people say, “This one thing is going to solve all our problems,” because education in any country, but certainly here in the United States, is very complex. There are different layers of authority and actors in the United States. Most education policy is made at the state level, and then you have local school districts, then you have local schools, and you have all of these different things that go into what a child actually experiences in any given classroom. And I think education, because it’s been difficult to improve at a scale the size of a state or the size of the country, people tend to get these wild ideas that maybe this one thing will save us.
It’s easier to believe in that one magic bullet than it is to think about a system and all of the different things that you have to change and all of the different people you have to affect in order to get change at scale over time. And I think that is why people have been so fascinated by the story of Mississippi, because that is what we have done, is prove that you can, over time, improve dramatically student outcome.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Rachel Canter
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman