I love hearing good news about Mississippi. When I read recently that there had been an improvement in education standards in our state, I was thrilled.

But then I looked at the data. The claims being made that there has been a ‘Mississippi miracle’ are not, sadly, substantiated by the facts.

Claims of a big improvement in literacy performance are based on National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores for 4th graders. These show that between 2019 and 2022, Mississippi moved up the national rankings, from 29th to 21st.

But when you look at the actual scores, the average reading score for a 4th grader in 2019 was 219. By 2022 the average reading score for a 4th grader had fallen slightly to 217. Far from improving, the scores went down.

The reason Mississippi appeared to rise up the rankings is because reading performance for 4th graders in other states fell even faster.

If you look more at the same data set, it turns out that only one in three 4th graders in 2022 were proficient in reading. A similar number are at or below basic level reading. I would not call that a ‘miracle’.

Those 4th graders tested in 2022 had had to endure almost two years of Covid lockdown disruptions, often having to be absent from the classroom. Despite that, the average score fell just 2 points. What does that say about the added value of being in a classroom?

As for the NAEP results for math, between 2019 and 2022, average 4th-grade scores in our state fell from 241 to 234. In other words, there was both an absolute and relative fall in performance. NAEP scores for 4th graders are only one way to measure education outcomes. Another benchmark is the ACT scores, which look at how students are performing at the end of 11th grade. The facts show falling proficiency, with an average ACT composite of 18.3 in Mississippi in 2016 falling to an average ACT composite of 17.4 in 2022. Again, these are the indisputable facts.

There are only four school board districts in the entire state in which the ACT composite score had not fallen over those six years.

Mississippi also uses state student performance scores from a variety of assessments to calculate reading and math proficiency. For the first time in more than two decades, the cumulative scores in 2022 for reading and math proficiency in Mississippi school districts appeared to show improvement. A sign of progress? Not really.

The apparent uptick in district proficiency scores between 2016 and 2022 in math and reading reflects the fact that in 2022 they stopped including end-of-course testing for seniors. The year before that change was made, there was no evidence of an improvement in standards.

The ‘progress’ in these state scores and consequential decline in the number of F-rated school districts is almost entirely a reflection of eliminating the end-of-course tests for seniors which raised proficiency percentages and increased the graduation rate.

If performance has not in fact improved, why might education bureaucrats and campaign organizations want us to believe that there had been progress? You only need to ask the question to answer it.

Doctoring data to sustain a fictitious narrative about improving education standards does our state a grave disservice.

Back in the old Soviet Union, local officials use to annually report record levels of agricultural output and an extraordinary increase in the number of tractors produced. Was this proof that the system was working? Quite the opposite. No one wanted to be the one not to report record rises. It did not pay to challenge the dodgy data.

The education system in Mississippi is not working either. It is deeply disingenuous to claim improvements in performance when the data shows a decline. Those making these claims must know the truth, but they chose to gloss over it. Mississippi deserves better than that.

Education progress is possible when the vested interests that run public education are no longer able to run the system in their interests. Progress will only come about when families in our state are given control over their child’s education tax dollars – as is about to happen in Arkansas.

The sooner people realize the truth about education standards in our state, the sooner they will demand parental power to put it right. The vested interests know that which is why they aren’t being honest with you.

With charter-school applications repeatedly being denied, it’s time to overhaul the approval process.

Last week, Mississippi’s Charter School Authorizer Board was doing what it does best: saying “no” to people applying to set up new charter schools. In the most recent batch, four out of five applications were rejected. This included, bizarrely, a request from an already successful school in Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta, to expand by opening a high school.

You might think that a Charter School Authorizer Board would be in the business of approving at least some new applications. Not, it seems, in our state, where the board has been cheerfully rejecting new applications for years.

It is now over a decade since the Mississippi Center for Public Policy helped pass legislation to allow more charter schools. After all that time, we have only eight charter schools in the entire state. Georgia has more than ten times that number. South Carolina has more than 70. Neighboring Arkansas (whose population is about the same as Mississippi’s) has 50, and Louisiana has 143.

Is the quality of applications in our state that much worse than in those other states, or is the political self-interest of the public-education establishment more entrenched here?

In its own defense, the Charter School Authorizer Board might say that it has a duty to reject any suboptimal applications since that might mean allowing suboptimal charter schools to exist. To this one might reply by asking whether the board is aware of how suboptimal some existing non-charter schools are. To reject charter-school start-ups because they are not perfect is absurd.

Thanks to public-education protectionism in Mississippi, the board will not even consider applications for new schools unless they are from districts given a grade of F by the state department of education (which makes assessments based on such factors as test scores and graduation rates). Saying no to charter-school applications in districts consistently given low grades means consigning those children to poorly performing schools. Besides, shouldn’t it be up to parents to decide if a charter school is good enough? Right now, Mississippi’s eight charter schools are heavily oversubscribed, suggesting that parents vastly prefer charter schools to the existing public-school alternatives.

It has also become clear that the old education order in Mississippi is unwilling to allow more than a token number of charter schools in our state, and certainly not enough so that they might compete against the self-serving education bureaucracy.

What is to be done?

Changes around the edges won’t be enough. The role of the Authorizer Board needs to change.  First, the process for approving or rejecting needs to be done transparently, on the basis of objective, clearly stated criteria. Second, the Authorizer Board should be redirected to focus on granting broad approval to organizations wanting to set up and run charter schools; its approval should not be required for each individual proposal. And third, although it certainly should not be necessary to obtain the Authorizer Board’s approval for changes in the way existing charter schools are being run, as is currently the case, once the board gives would-be charter-school operators broad approval to set up and run the schools, those providers ought to be free to get on with doing so as, in effect, licensed charter-school operators in the state.

Perhaps even more radically, the Charter School Authorizer Board needs to lose its monopoly on approving applications. As has happened in other states, alternative institutions — such as public universities — ought to be granted the authority to approve them. Having multiple authorizers would prevent a public-sector monopoly from stifling innovation.

Charter schools in states that allow far more of them come in all shapes and sizes. Some are stand-alone schools; others are part of what is in effect a chain. The providers of charter-school education gain invaluable experience from running the schools. The Mississippi Authorizer Board, on the other hand, has none.

The Biden administration is seeking to “cancel” student debt by transferring what individual students owe to the American taxpayer.

Opponents question why Americans who never graduated from college, and had none of the attendant benefits of a degree, should pick up the tab for those who did. Defenders of the Biden order counter with the observation that tens of millions of young Americans are weighed down by debts they may never be able to repay.

What both sides ought to ask is why we are sending so many young Americans to take college degrees in the first place. If students really are struggling to pay off college debts, does that not raise some fundamental questions about the value of what they are being taught?

More and more young Americans are, it seems, questioning the value of a college degree. Today, only 42 percent of Americans aged 18-24 are enrolled in college or graduate school. That figure represents a significant drop since 2010 when the percentage attending college peaked.

More does not mean better when it comes to university, and if anyone in America is in doubt, he should look across the Atlantic at the British experience.

In my native Britain, a mere 15 percent of young Brits went to college or university in 1980. Since then, it has been the objective of every UK government to encourage more people to go to university.

By 1990, one in four were going to university. 20 years after Prime Minister Tony Blair set a target of having half of all young people attend, that target was reached in 2019. Today, almost 60 percent of young women in England pursue higher education.

Having so many studying at university sounds impressive. But the rapid expansion of higher learning has come at a price. It is often the students themselves who pay that price through large debts and degrees that don’t always add much value.

UK universities have become big businesses, and their business model has been to borrow to expand. In order to accommodate the 2.6 million students now in higher education, there has been a sustained building boom around university campuses over the past couple of decades, with lots of gleaming new buildings.

The borrowing binge British universities have been on has seen vast debts run up against a flow of revenue that schools expect to receive from students taking out state-subsidized loans.

Almost £20 billion of these state-backed loans are made to students in England each year (the figure is even higher if students in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are included). The value of outstanding loans at the end of March 2022 reached £182 billion and is expected to be around £460 billion (at current prices) by the mid-2040s.

UK universities have expanded by taking on debts. These debts are themselves serviced by state-backed debts taken on by students. It’s a house of cards built on IOUs, and one that is so precarious that, according to a recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a dozen or more British universities might soon find themselves insolvent.

As the cost of borrowing increases, it is only a matter of time before some British universities start to ask for the government to bail them out. I wonder if all those brand-new student accommodation buildings that have sprung up will be housing students in a decade or so.

In order to maximize revenues, many UK universities have resorted to trying to attract ever larger numbers of overseas students, whom they can charge higher fees. For some overseas students, paying those fees, almost irrespective of the quality of the education they get, is a price worth paying as a means of migration. American universities have seen a dramatic increase in overseas student numbers for similar reasons.

Dramatically expanding the number of universities in Britain has made many of them degree factories. Courses consist of modules, in which students are instructed on what to think, rather than necessarily how to think. Perhaps this is inevitable, given the sheer volume of students that universities now process.

The rise of degree factories has meant more standardization of higher education, not least the standardization of thought. The romantic notion of a university is that it is a community of free thinkers, cheerfully pursuing scientific and intellectual inquiry. Many British universities are very different from that.

Many UK universities have become cheerless institutions in which standardized thinking is rigorously enforced. In one British university recently, a feminist academic was driven from her post by the relentless hounding of balaclava-clad students who accused her of “transphobia.”

Leftist dogmas, prevalent among university faculty, have become long-established campus orthodoxies. Critical Race Theory and ideas about intersectionality influence how many liberal arts and humanities courses are taught.

It is not only in the humanities where standards have suffered. In some science departments at some British universities, scientific empiricism seems to have given way to what one might call “inductivism.” That is to say, observations are made, a general theory is formed, then more observations are made supposedly justifying that theory. The result has been an endless succession of university-backed “scientific” models, on everything from climate change and Covid to the economy and inflation, that proved to be spectacularly wrong.

A big part of the problem is that university expansion in Britain has not been accompanied by effective consumer choice. With state subsidies and state-backed loans, students are not paying the true cost of their education. The system lacks the discerning customers (students) needed to ensure that the suppliers (universities) deliver a quality product.

British universities, in common with most of their American counterparts, have a number of academics on tenure. This makes it almost impossible to remove them unless, of course, they transgress from campus orthodoxies. Worse still, perhaps, the system of accreditation focuses on processes rather than the value of degrees.

Many British universities have become state-subsidized degree factories, churning out mediocre credentials that do little to equip students for what comes next. Perhaps it would be no bad thing if the number of students enrolling in universities fell, in America as well as in Britain.

Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy and is a former Member of the British Parliament. 

Too many Mississippi kids are missing out on a good education. Our state has some of the worst outcomes in primary and secondary education in America.

Despite certain counter claims by those within the education bureaucracy that the outlook has been improving, if you measure the academic performance of Mississippi students in terms of ACT scores, things have not been getting better. In fact, the Covid crisis is likely to have made things even worse. 

So, what can we do about it? Quite a lot, actually.

Our new report out this week, Transforming Mississippi Public Education, proposes a series of key reforms that are needed if we are to give Mississippi students a better standard of education.

We all know that many Mississippi school districts have been underperforming for years. But until now, every time that this gets pointed out, the conversation moves on to money. If only there was more funding, we are constantly told, things would be better.

Our report shows that the problem is not a lack of funds. Over the past twenty years, real spending per student has increased by a quarter, and over the past thirty years, per student spending has risen about 60 percent. The trouble is that there has been nothing like a 60 percent improvement in standards.

The problem is not a lack of funding, but rather what the education system does with the money they have.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Jackson, MS): Today the Mississippi Center for Public Policy released a report on the state's K-12 Public Education System, identifying issues and offering solutions.

The report reveals that:

• Academic standards among Mississippi public schools are poor, and no significant improvement has been documented with validity.
• The problem in K-12 education is structural, not merely a lack of money.

The report then goes on to set out a roadmap to address some of the systemic obstacles to improving public education in the Magnolia State. The report calls for:

• Capping administration costs: Some school board districts spend too much money on bureaucracy. Today’s report shows the steps that are needed to ensure money goes into the classroom instead.
• Open enrollment: Instead of automatically enrolling children in schools, the report shows how Mississippi families could be given a new right to choose a school for their child.  
• Multiple charter school authorizer boards: Today’s report reveals that less than half of one percent of Mississippi students attend a charter school.

“Today’s report shows what we need to do to address Mississippi’s historic education underperformance,” said Douglas Carswell, President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. “The great news is that right now there are a number of bills in the state legislature that would give us the three key reforms we need to transform Mississippi education.”

Carswell continued saying, “HB 874, the Mississippi Scholarship Act, would ensure that every parent had a choice to get the best for their child. HB 1349 and SB 2177 would achieve open enrollment. There are also two bills in the Senate that would begin to cap administration costs, and I am excited to see HB 1194, which would establish multiple authorizer boards to ensure that we get more Charter Schools across the state.”

For media inquiries, please reach out to Stone Clanton, [email protected].

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Public school enrollment continues to decline in Mississippi, with 2018 being the seventh consecutive year that less students are enrolled than they were the year before.

According to the latest numbers from the Mississippi Department of Education, 470,668 students are enrolled in public schools. This includes both district and charter school students. If the 1,641 students in charters are removed, the number dips slightly to 469,027.

In 2012, total enrollment was 492,847. And there was no competition from charters at the time. This represents a drop of about 4.5 percent over the past seven years.

What is causing the decline?

The state population has declined over the previous couple years. But if we go back to 2012, the population compared to today is largely stagnant. And maybe even a little higher today depending on 2018 Census estimates. And Census data doesn’t show a major change in the ages of the population so we have roughly the same number of children ages 5-18 today that we had in 2012.

So, it is not due to outmigration. And we see that even when we look at specific districts. While Rankin county isn’t growing at the pace it was over the prior two decades, the county has grown about 4.5 percent since 2012. Yet, enrollment in the Rankin County School District has dropped slightly from 19,448 to 19,206 this year. This is a drop of a little over 1 percent. Not huge, but not the numbers you would expect in a growing suburb.

When you look at enrollment among younger students, the numbers though are more staggering. Kindergarten enrollment has gone from 1,569 in 2012 to 1,365 today, a drop of 10 percent. Enrollment in first grade has decreased from 1,611 in 2012 to 1,438 this year, a decrease of almost 11 percent.

What about areas of the state that are losing population? That certainly includes the city of Jackson. Jackson Public Schools have seen the greatest decline in terms of real numbers. And they are the district most impacted by parents having a choice in their child’s education through charter schools.

In 2012, 29,738 students were enrolled in JPS. Today, they are under 24,000 students. This represents a drop of 20 percent, far greater than the 5 percent decline among the city’s population during this time. And the decline is 32 percent among kingergartners. The Hinds County School District, though much smaller, saw a 10 percent drop in students from 6,267 in 2012 to 5,619 today.

Also in the Jackson metro area, both Clinton and Madison county posted enrollment gains over the past seven years. Clinton grew from 4,756 to 5,310, a 12 percent gain. Madison grew by 6 percent, from 12,507 to 13,302.

Winners and losers

Outside of the Jackson metro area, we saw enrollment trends largely mirror migration trends.

Desoto County long ago passed JPS as the largest school district in the state and it continues to grow though the pace has slowed some. Today, enrollment stands at 34,392, a 5 percent gain from 2012.

Harrison County, the fourth largest school district in the state, has grown by 7 percent, from 14,037 to 15,010. The Harrison County School District is one of five districts in the county. Biloxi and Gulfport also posted gains, of 17 and 8 percent respectively.

In Jackson County, the Jackson County School District dropped 3 percent, from 9,518 to 9,209. Similarly, the Pascagoula-Gautier School District experienced a 1 percent decline, from 6,902 to 6,866. However, Ocean Springs grew by 6 percent, from 5,590 to 5,936 students.

Lamar county became the sixth district in the state to pass 10,000 students this year. The district has grown by 13 percent over the past seven years, from 9,404 to 10,624. Also in the Pine Belt, Hattiesburg had a drop of 14 percent, falling from 4,608 students in 2012 to 3,953.

The school district which saw the greatest percentage decline, among the 30 largest districts in the state, was Greenville, which saw a 22 percent drop. The district dropped from 5,714 students to 4,480. Jackson and Columbus both lost 20 percent of their student enrollment, followed by Meridian’s 16 percent loss.

Certainly, some of the decline is due to outmigration. But there appears to be more to the story. The state does not track private school enrollment or the number of children who are homeschooled, but the number of children leaving district schools is greater than the number of children leaving the state.

School district enrollment change, 2012-2018

Mississippi’s Dyslexia Scholarship program provides hope to families whose children are not receiving the support they need in their assigned, district schools. And at the same time, it saves taxpayer dollars.

During the first three years of the program, from 2013 through 2015, it saved taxpayers $1.4 million, or about $6,500 for every child that received the scholarship. This is according to a new study from EdChoice. In 2013, the savings totaled $204,536, in 2014, the savings increased to $458,296, and in 2015, the savings were up to $780,497.

In 2012, the Dyslexia Scholarship became Mississippi’s first private school choice program, providing a scholarship to students with dyslexia equal to the base student costs of educating a child in Mississippi. For the first three years, that ranged from $4,400 to $4,700.

Source: EdChoice

This program is wildly popular among participants, growing from 32 in 2013 to 237 today. Still, there are major limitations to the program that have prevented it from reaching all that it was designed for. To participate, a private school must be accredited by the state. Therefore, the numerous private schools that provide dyslexia therapy services, but are instead accredited by other associations, are not allowed to participate.

On numerous occasions, parts of families have been uprooted so their children could attend a school like the 3-D School in Petal while another member of the family stays home to work.

Two years ago, the legislature debated, and the Senate passed, a bill that would have expanded the program to all accredited private schools who meet the dyslexia therapy qualifications. But the House chose to go with a much narrower expansion, and many families still remain in the dark when it comes to receiving the services their children need.

A new report places Mississippi in the middle of the pack when it comes to providing parents with additional options in the education of their children.

Center for Education Reform’s Parent Power Index placed Mississippi 23rd overall, but gave the state a score of just 58, which is an F. That wasn’t terrible compared to everyone else. Indeed, the national average is only 52 percent, with 29 states earning an F.

“The Magnolia state’s weak charter school law and modest opportunity scholarship programs do not provide needed opportunity for students in the state. Additionally, Mississippi has thus far done very little to promote innovative options that foster personalized approaches to learning. While some robust teacher quality mechanisms work well and school board elections are held during general elections, Mississippi has a long way to go before parents have true power,” the report notes.

CER gives Mississippi a D for the state’s charter school law, ranking it 38th among the 45 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have charters.

More than 2,300 children in Mississippi exercise school choice and while that number is growing, it is still just a sliver of overall student enrollment. That is largely due to the limited availability of charter school seats, scholarships in the ESA program, and schools authorized to participate in the Dyslexia Scholarship.

Each of Mississippi’s neighboring states did slightly better, earning a D. Louisiana was the highest at 16th overall. Florida was the top-rated state in the nation for parental empowerment, while Indiana was second and Arizona third.

“Parent Power is the degree of access parents have to impact education opportunities. The Parent Power Index measures the ability in each state of a parent to exercise choices, no matter what their income or child’s level of academic achievement, engage with their local schools and school board, and have a voice in the education systems that surround them,” CER writes.