Jackson Jambalaya

 State Auditor Shad White promoted school choice in a Wall Street Journal column earlier this week: 

The nation is paying attention: Mississippi is outperforming most other states in education, at least by one measure. Mississippi is among the 10 best states in the country for fourth-grade reading scores on national exams. Newspapers and politicians call it the “Mississippi Miracle.” Candidates for governor in other states are campaigning on the need to catch up.

It’s a remarkable achievement, but a problem lurks in the data. The test gains aren’t sticking once children reach middle school. Mississippi eighth-graders score belowthe national average in reading. Mississippi ACT scores in high school also fall belowthe national average. Mississippi’s children are getting off the launchpad, but they’re failing to achieve orbital velocity. 

The reasons for this are complicated, but one is that it’s simpler to teach reading in the early years than to teach reasoning, reading for meaning and information processing. Mississippi taught its fourth-graders to read by focusing on phonics (the basics), putting phonics coaches in schools, and then holding children back if they couldn’t read by the end of the third grade.

These were common-sense moves, but now comes the hard part: How do you teach a child to do more than say the words he sees on a page? A cookie-cutter approach—pounding phonics for every child—might work initially, but that stalls when you need to teach someone to understand a passage. Each child is different. More-flexible models are required for unlocking students’ minds as they try to understand the point of a prompt. When trying to understand a passage and make inferences, some young learners might find it easier to do so if they applied what they learned in a small team-based challenge following the reading as opposed to reading in silence in a classroom.

This means Mississippi’s recent decision to kill school choice is a devastating policy development. The state had a chance to take advantage of early learning gains, give parents options for where to send their children to school next, and supercharge their education, but politics got in the way. Leftist activists misled teachers and convinced the Legislature that the Mississippi Miracle was good enough—just keep doing what we’re doing. Rest of column.

Will the legislature approve school choice? Stay tuned.