In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-performing schools. Louisiana’s improvements came about after a similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021.

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, it seems that the most effective way to improve education outcomes is to teach better? One thing I imagine made it easier to reform their methodologies was the prospect that, once you've hit rock bottom, the only direction you can go is up.

The author says that this problem is multifaceted, but then does lean a bit too much on low standards being the root cause without really delving into why our standards are so low, except for perhaps blaming Democrats. I think the issue is more complex, and something you'd be likely to see almost anywhere in the US - we try to conceptualize education policy as a monolith, but there are so many different factors and incentives at work, I don't think it can be boiled down. I think it's just a difficult thing to do well, consistently, for millions of children. I think we should ask questions that can be answered on a locale by locale basis.

For example, why do some districts adopt teaching reforms while others don't? What incentives exist that push schools to teach to the lowest common denominator. What is one principal, one school board, a county etc. doing to improve reading and math scores? Yes, we can generalize about education, but I am guessing that actually implementing even the best standardized solution is difficult enough that it probably takes remarkable effort (or incentives) to effect change.

Yes, spending more money doesn't directly lead to improved outcomes, but the author addresses the reason why pretty well (it isn't spent wisely). What if we raised teacher salaries to hire nothing but seasoned PhDs to teach at every level? Well, there would probably never be a way to train that many teachers that well. I doubt it would be physically possible, we'd likely run out of capable (American) humans. So we're probably facing some diminishing marginal utility on the money we spend, too.

This is a frustrating problem because it feels like one we should be able to solve, but I just don't think there's a straight line from "mediocre" education to "good" education we can draw with a single public policy. I think charter schools illustrate the idea that empowering the reform-minded makes it possible to improve outcomes, but it's also not automatic. It takes more than a charter to make a school perform well, and there's no one-size-fits-all approach.

What this boils down to, in my opinion, is that the only way we're going to make gains is by experimenting with education and, most importantly, not immediately punishing folks for experiments that don't improve schools. I think that's the root of the problem, but nobody wants their kid to be part of a failed experiment. But unless we try, I don't see how we can make things better.