Best: Mississippi.
Worst: Oregon.
The Urban League performed this calculation to create “apples to apples” comparisons between the states by normalizing age, demographic, and income groups’ representation in the sample. It is intended to measure the effectiveness of schools in improving outcomes vs just measuring the absolute values, which are distorted by vast differences in the number of different demographic groups who, on average, perform differently on tests regardless of where they go to school.
You would expect areas with few English as a second language learners and lots of upper-middle class parents, for instance, to perform better because the student body is better prepared. The parents would supplement the school’s instruction where necessary with tutors, individual attention, and parental pressure to perform. On the other hand, a poor, rural district with 40% immigrants would perform worse on average for similar reasons. So the Urban League tries to measure the per-student impact of the education itself by normalizing the distribution to exclude these factors.
Think of it as the same thing as adjusting a poll to reflect the population.
In contrast, Oregon, with the lowest demographic-adjusted scores, has a Board of Education that has indefinitely “paused” since 2020 the use of any standardized test as a graduation requirement
Most of this stuff isn’t rocket science
— Arjun Panickssery (@panickssery) April 7, 2025
Mississippi is the standout because it has driven its NAEP scores through the roof over the past decade since reforming its reading instruction to include phonics once again. Education reformers went on a rampage to eliminate phonics and replace the teaching method with “whole word” reading comprehension in the last century, and ever since, we have seen reading skills suffer. Mississippi reverted to phonics in the last decade and has seen its performance skyrocket.
Mississippi’s rapid rise up the ladder of educational achievement has been dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle,” although I have yet to hear somebody characterize the decline of states like Oregon with a nickname. Instead, Oregon has dropped testing since COVID to hide the decline.
Test scores have dropped like a rock since the disastrous COVID policies were put in place, and generally speaking, the states with the most harsh COVID policies have made their kids suffer the most.
That was both predictable and predicted, but because the majority of people who objected to the draconian COVID policies were conservatives or attacked as if they were, the left doubled and triple-downed on harsh COVID policies.
Remember when states that reversed harsh COVID policies were vilified for doing the right thing? I do. I do well because I was a COVID freedom activist here in Minnesota and was subjected to vicious slander on a daily basis. I watched some of the most brilliant and often most prestigious virologists and doctors get relentlessly attacked by public health officials who knew better, watched the Pravda Media get in line to endlessly repeat whatever they were told to by the government and academia, and watched with horror as the elderly and sick children died alone, separated from their families, so liberals would “own the cons.”
I can forgive the people taken in by these con artists, but I can’t forgive the con men like Fauci, Birx, Walensky, and the rest who knew what they were doing.
The same has been done to our kids in education. We have seen test scores plummet in places like Oregon, Chicago, and most of the places where liberals and teachers’ unions dominate, while states like Mississippi and Florida have been climbing the educational ladder at remarkable rates.
No doubt someone in Oregon, where they no longer even test the kids for fear of revealing the decline, will sneer at Mississippi. But the evidence is that the lefty states are doing a much worse job at educating kids than more conservative states in recent years. Ironically, the kids who suffer the most are the ones higher on the intersectional ladder, like minorities whose parents are not in a position to backstop the schools with outside support.
Again, this mirrors COVID policy trends, where “stay at home” orders fit the laptop class to a T, but “essential workers” whose job it was to keep the laptop class comfortable were still in the workforce, growing the food, preparing it, and delivering it to the doors of people who bitched that their avocado toast wasn’t perfect and was too expensive anyway.
Oh that Taylor Lorenz person is the $22 avocado toast lady. I thought the name was familiar. pic.twitter.com/sv0YrzCMUr
— joe (@joekv) March 10, 2021
There seems to be a 1:1 correlation between smugness and doing the wrong thing. No doubt this is an exaggeration.
Always wrong, never in doubt.
