It Turns Out Louisiana Is Getting Education Right – And Lots Of Other States Are Definitely Getting It Wrong

Nolan Mckendry has the story of Louisiana’s pretty stellar performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress report released this week, and it’s some really great news for public education in this state.

Which, let’s face it, is not something you’re used to hearing.

We’re not at the bottom of public education according to the NAEP “Nation’s Report Card” numbers anymore. In fact, we aren’t even close to the bottom. We’re now pretty close to average and getting better faster than anybody, at least with respect to our fourth- and eighth-graders.

Here’s the state’s NAEP report card…

You don’t want to go overboard celebrating being ranked 32nd out of 51 states (they’re including the District of Columbia in this), but when you were dead last seven years ago it’s some pretty breathtaking progress.

Particularly considering that this has come at a time when Louisiana has been hemorrhaging population in net outmigration, and the people leaving are disproportionately young families with kids looking for better economic opportunities – in other words, the upwardly mobile people whose kids you’d expect would be rocking the best grades.

Cade Brumley, the state’s school superintendent, is obviously doing a hell of a good job. The state legislature’s efforts in building a curriculum and plan for schools to follow, which have been pretty vigorous over the past several years, have paid off. And while there could have been more done to bring Louisiana back quickly from the stupid, destructive COVID lockdowns John Bel Edwards and other governors imposed four years ago, we’ve come back from that a whole lot better than most states. Lots of local school districts, spurred by parents who didn’t put up with COVID tyranny and demanded their kids go back to school, broke down Edwards’ lockdowns a lot quicker than many other states did.

Those are all good things. You’d expect they’ll pay off down the road.

And Louisiana could very well be able to ride some of this to economic development wins.

That said, the NAEP results are bleak as hell nationally

In 2022, states received $189 billion in funding for primary and secondary schools. The funding was supposed to go to programs that would allow kids to make up for the lost learning they were forced to experience during the pandemic.

Standardized test scores had fallen to levels not seen in forty years or more. The infusion of cash would, as the Biden administration promised, help kids catch up.

The most closely watched standardized test for primary and secondary school children is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It’s called “The Nation’s Report Card” because more students take this test than any other standardized test.

Nearly $200 billion spent to help kids catch up to pre-pandemic levels of competency in reading and math has been wasted. That’s the conclusion we can reach by looking at this year’s NAEP results.

“The percentage of eighth graders who have ‘below basic’ reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent,” reports the New York Times. “The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.”

Math scores were a little better but still below the levels achieved before the pandemic.

Who do we blame for this miserable failure? I’d like to blame teachers, but that’s far too simple. The entire educational structure of teaching and learning has been enslaved by woke ideology, and it’s creating a generation of imbeciles who can’t read, can’t write, and, worst of all, can’t think.

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

That’s from Rick Moran of PJ Media. He mentions Louisiana as a positive outlier…

What are they doing in Louisiana that’s different than many other public school districts? The state has focused on “the science of reading.”

The Times reports, “The resulting instruction typically includes a strong focus on structured phonics and vocabulary building.” It’s surprising because, as everyone knows, phonics is racist, and improving vocabulary is not the job of teachers.

Experts have no clear explanation for the dismal reading results. While school closures and other stresses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic deepened learning loss, reading scores began declining several years before the virus emerged.

In a new paper, Nat Malkus, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that declines in American children’s performance are echoed in tests of adults’ skills over the same time period. So while we often look to classrooms to understand why students are not learning more, some of the causes may be attributed to screen time, cellphones and social media, he argues.

This is a similar argument made by social scientist Jonathan Haidt, who advocates keeping smartphones out of kids’ hands until they’re 16. There are just too many distractions for the young minds of children to deal with when they’re trying to learn.

However, screen time and cell phones don’t affect third and fourth-graders. This is a problem with teaching and the resistance to changing the curricula and the way that children are taught.

I doubt whether union teachers will want to change even if it can be shown that kids would benefit from it.

Brumley, BESE and the Legislature have done everything they could to fight woke incursions in education and get schools to do the basics. And happily enough, it actually works – at least compared to what they’re doing elsewhere.

So the question is, are we just benefiting from the collapse of education elsewhere in the country or are we actually smartening up those kids? That’s a worthy subject for debate. But either way, it’s clear other states now have a lot to learn from Brumley and Louisiana. And that’s a nice change in an area that has been a sore subject for a very long time.

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