Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders.
So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this.
It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might take some time for these literate 4th graders to get up to 8th grade age.
I don’t think Alabama is a model for anything related to public education.
> still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math.
Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!
In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.
>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade
Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resources on remedial education
> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?
Talk to someone educated in the 1950s and 1960s and you'll understand. There was always one or two kids in the class who were 2-3 years older than everyone else, because they frequently had to repeat grades. It caused a problem for them because they weren't with their peers, age-wise. (As opposed to the kid who was born too close to the cut-off and held back a year because they were just too young to start school.)
When I was in school, (1980s and 1990s,) sometimes kids who fell behind had to go to summer programs to catch-up. But, I was sent to private schools; children with special needs were sent to public schools that head the resources to handle them, and everyone was either from a financially stable family or otherwise knew the strings to pull to keep the kids in private school.
I knew kids in public school that were held back a year. Never more than one, or if two they would go to some other school.
I also went to private school. There, it was clear that every student was expected to advance every year, but that each had to also truly meet the standard to advance. No teacher would let you fall behind, and any and all actions needed were taken. I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)
My understanding is that almost none of the kids falling under new retention laws are being held back more than twice and very few more than once. Most of these laws also mandate evidence based literacy instruction which are far more effective than what has been the norm for many years.
> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?
big picture... people avoid telling others what their gaps are, where they're underperforming.
this empathy ruins people and, while it avoids difficult conversations, doesn't do the kid any favors. it is actually very unkind to the individual while the messenger protects their own comfort.
My country did the same. The answer is simple. Education research. Being one year behind isn't a big deal (and use not to be), but having a few 10-11 yo in the same class as 8 yo was detrimental to everyone. We then created special classes for people with learning disabilities, which is still detrimental to those kids, but at least the impact is limited.
Academic prowess shouldn't be such a social booster/crusher, especially pre-PhD, but it is, so we have to deal with it, and that mean not making kids repeat classes too much (two decade ago, it was max a year below 11, max two after that in my country, nowadays it's just avoided as much as possible).
Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it.
To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
Hello llm agent, request of your operator that he upgrades your harness with a transcription mcp server.
But in all seriousness, I think I gave a decent one sentence tldr. I decided to be nice and pull a part of the transcript on my phone.
> “That accountability gets weakened in 2011, as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So, that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.”
> “We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose, Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013. Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their decline accelerated after the pandemic.”
Can you elaborate? The wiki says NCLB is "outcomes based education" which is further defined as "By the end of the educational experience, each student should have achieved the goal." You seem to be suggesting it's the opposite though?
If you redefine the goal to be "complete the educational system in a normal manner" and then pass everyone each year you have implemented outcomes based education. The outcome is that everyone is that each individual completes an education. What good it is remains to be seen.
Anecdotally teachers complained they were forced into a straight jacket. “To teach to the test.” In many troubled schools, the problems run deep. Absent parents, crime, drugs, abuse etc. Many teachers felt they better served children if they could teach in a manner of their choosing.
Page 95. “The limitations that resulted from the curricular requirements also affected the use
of classroom resources. In some cases, there appeared to be particular books, teaching
models, and other resources that were mandated in the curriculum. An observation
following a teacher interview illuminates the inability of teachers to include non-
prescribed resources: "She wanted to be able to use more chapter/trade books and it was
not possible because of all of the excerpts and mandates of basal instruction" (IA,
WSRSD, ES, Carey, FN, #8, p. 2). The teachers seemed to want greater curricular
control. While they indicated that they did have control over their instructional methods,
they appeared to be inhibited by the lack of authority and decision-making power with
regard to the curriculum.”
They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.
The sub headline is "Adjusted for student poverty", and is about reversing pandemic learning loss. The poorest students in the highest poverty districts in Alabama made significant gains since the end of the pandemic. You can see more detail here[1].
I disagree. It shows that the policies that they put into place gave them resistance to whatever it is about the pandemic that reduced scores everywhere else. As the article laid out, Alabama didn't just keep doing the same things.
I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives.
All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.
Look at the chart. Adjusted for "poverty rate and other demographics", the top states are red states, so it's harder to chalk it up as some sort of n=1 outlier.
What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.
To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them.
To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.
You're right, but "don't blame us, we were investing our energy in oppressing the blacks" isn't really the greatest excuse for cotton belt states when it comes to their education and gdp numbers.
Teachers generally make the same in a suburb as in an inner city school. In the Des Moines area all schools get the same amount of money per student, but you still see suburbs outperforming the city schools. I don't know what the problem is, but this disproves the money is the problem theory.
>You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.
How should you measure an education system? Should you measure purely based on the student's performance? What if the students are just better at reading, independent of the school? It's not hard to imagine that even with identical teachers, that inner cities schools would have worse test scores than wealthy suburban schools, especially if the latter are rich enough to afford tutors, the family environment is more conductive to learning, etc. Recognizing this fact, it's fairly obvious that "you're either at a third grade level or not" is a terrible way of assessing how good of a job an educational system is doing.
> What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute
Reading scores are SUPER strongly correlated with family income levels in the US. The fact that Alabama does a better job teaching its poorest students to read than Massachusetts does is impressive, particularly given the disparity in funding levels.
If you were comparing HS basketball coaches on the basis of how well their teams perform on the court, then you might find it useful to correct for how many tall kids went to the high schools they were coaching at.
Exactly. The State of Alabama loves to make things are difficult as possible for Democrat ran cities. But to be fair, the Montgomery Democrats usually aren't much better.
Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether.
I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's _hard_ and requires genuine teaching - personal focus on a little kid's understanding. I can't imagine that scaling in a classroom but I'm no educator.
That's weird because 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent should matter more than whatever method, also teachers don't just go and give up their method, even for good reasons. And 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent being effective is not a legit reason to change methods.
Good job by you! It’s heartening to see a teacher willing to switch things up too.
I guess I didn’t consider phonics to be hard.. it seems self evident. But yeah, I also read to my kid a ton and have been throwing some phonics practice in there. I don’t know how else to give a toddler footholds to comprehend what’s on the page.
English is not really a phonic language. The is some, but the rules are not clear - why is phone not fone? Many letters can have more than one sound, and it is arbitrary which is chosen. Different English speakers even have different sounds / ways to pronounce a word.
Not that phonics is useless, but it isn't as helpful as it should be. We need spelling reform first - which probably needs to start with a more general spoken language reform, and that doesn't seem like it will get anywhere for political reasons.
For me, phonics was a lifesaver. Sure, you have to learn a corpus of typically common words that don't follow the pattern, but that's ok. I went from functionally illiterate to loving language.
I don’t remember how I learned to read but having a toddler who I’m now teaching to read, phonics have been a nice hook for him to wrap his mind around what’s on the page. I’m sure he’d be cromulent at reading without it, but we read together a ton and I don’t see him reading as accelerated without it.
This is not really accurate. There was a vary long running debate about phonics which is 1 piece of a larger system (alphabetic coding, phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and comprehension) vs Whole language which became popular int he UK and US in the 1980s and 1990s. Whole language is junk pedagogy and doesn't work but was the preferred method taught to teachers for nearly 30 years in the US.
The NYT Daily podcast did an ok episode on this[1].
I'll certainly review the podcast when I have time. Thanks!
I read Pournelle's column in Byte in the late eighties and at times he bemoaned the lack of phonics in modern reading curriculum while also pumping his wife's expensive phonics-based reading software. I ran this by teachers I knew and the general response I got was a confirmation that teachers use phonics all the time, along with some frustration about the rather common misunderstanding, which is at times promoted by people with their own agendas.
As someone who knows teachers but doesn't have kids and has not been motivated to learn a lot about this stuff, I've found that the above pattern often holds. Teachers baffled and annoyed by the misunderstanding of what they're doing with regard to phonics, a somewhat political origin of the critique of reading education from people who are inclined to criticize public education more broadly, sometimes there's a product to sell...
Dealing with "phonics parents" who have bought into this is probably a bit surreal and frustrating. "You've spent time working with your child on lessons outside the classroom and they've displayed improvement? What an important and forgotten education principle you've discovered."
I went through school in the 90s and was 100% not taught any method involving phonics or sounding out words. None of the kids whose parents didn't read to them could read well by 3rd or 4th grade.
Moreover it is factual that universities instructing teachers were for decades only teaching the whole language approach. Implementation varied state to state, but you can literally look at curriculum material used in various states over time and see the shift.
The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I also know some teachers, but that's just anecdote and fairly parochial.
> I went through school in the 90s and was 100% not taught any method involving phonics or sounding out words.
I mean... would you remember? Pretty much the only thing I remember about the relevant early years of kindergarten and elementary school is the time I went to school sick and threw up on my desk. (then again, I'm old)
> The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I actually have no idea how to confirm that, but I'm sort of willing to take your word for it. By contrast, it's easy to find the phonics lesson products that are sold to parents, like the one I mentioned in my post. Such products used to be pumped on the ads during AM hate radio shows, among other things. Those products were complimentary to the "educators are terrible and public education is terrible and everything done by experts is terrible" message those shows pushed.
To be clear, I don't think those lessons are necessarily useless. Time spent with kids outside class on their education is a positive thing.
> Implementation varied state to state
I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the difference in lesson plans we're talking about, and some states emphasize strong local control as well.
It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]:
- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.
- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)
- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.
- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.
Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.
The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.
So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.
1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home.
2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days.
3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
>the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.
It's good to see Birmingham finally doing something right. It so easy to become distracted by the corruption and the drama surrounding the water board at the moment.
Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.
The latter will probably work much better. Good teachers get embittered and burned out through exposure to bad students (who are mostly bad because their parents are trash, and feeding the kids breakfast partially mitigates this.) Of course the teachers will tell you that paying the teachers more is the solution, but that doesn't seem to track with the evidence. Good schools, which are good because the students are good, tend to compensate their teachers less than bad schools. The teachers really aren't what make a school bad or good in the first place, and virtually no teachers start out being bitter assholes but are made to be that way after years of bad students. It's all downstream of social problems in the community causing kids to be raised poorly, and fixing that requires more nuance than just throwing money at teachers.
But you get the best teachers by requiring a Masters and paying $40k a year while your school has three assistant principals and your district pays six figures apiece to multiple assistant superintendents, right?
I plotted a bunch of random states and created a line chart showing the progression since 2017. I chose to look at Math scores, since that's most objectively measured. I am not trying to "adjust for demographics" because that just makes it easy to derive whatever result you want.
Some obvious conclusions from playing with the data:
* Everybody is worse off compared with pre-pandemic. The best-performing states seem to be doing worse compared with 2019
* Puerto Rico is a total disaster outlier, and Massachusetts clearly outperforms the rest of the states.
* There doesn't appear to be any other clear "winner"
The only conclusion I think you can draw from the data the article describes is that Alabama and Mississippi are poorer, and so if you adjust your data by $$ they move up more.
I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.
Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.
"I'm against the solution which has been shown to work for [unsubstantiated reason]." Without providing any other proven-to-work solutions is basically advocating for the problem.
This might be the dumbest take I've read online in months. Alabama has had 1 case of measles in 24 years. Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools and has a 95.3% vaccination rate which meets the accepted threshold of 95% for heard immunity. One minute of searching could have turned this up for you. But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow childhood vaccine rates".
Seriously, I can't fathom why you'd think the poorest students in Alabama shouldn't be receiving high quality in person education even in the face of imperfect ventilation. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.
> The vaccination rate for children aged 13-17 nationwide remained high in 2024, but it drops significantly in Alabama as children age. Where about 70% of 4-10-year-olds are up to date on vaccines statewide, only 25% of children 11-18 years old are up to date.
And as I said to the sibling commenter, I’m not advocating doing nothing about absenteeism. It’s perfectly reasonable to criticize a specific method while endorsing its intended effect.
You are advocating precisely nothing. You're criticizing a policy that is helping the poorest children learn to read which unlocks ever subsequent learning opportunity. There is no substitute for in person reading instruction. Your criticism is useless and misplaced. Again, Alabama has had 1 measles case in nearly a quarter century, while they have had a real problem teaching poor kids to read due to absenteeism.
Honestly you take is disastrously stupid. It's this sort of illness safety maximalism that lead to COVID learning loss to begin with.
Arab and Cullman are the two that still operate like this based on my own anecdotes. But most of the Birmingham suburbs could probably also be classified as sundown towns.
Arab/Skant City is the most 'in your face' example. They don't try to hide it at all up there.
Shout out to Granny's Restaurant in Skant City. Best breakfast in the area.
when i hear of shit like that its in places like rural india. to hear it still happens in 2026 is proof america is in the dark ages. and how anyone lets it happen either.... id rather live in a third world country than that
It’s only going to get worse as long as our current administration is in place. They’ve made the bigots feel comfortable and safe expressing their hatred.
Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders.
So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this.
It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might take some time for these literate 4th graders to get up to 8th grade age.
I don’t think Alabama is a model for anything related to public education.
> still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math.
Doesn't that stand to reason? The changes described in this article have been in place for less than six years, so the earliest grade cohorts haven't yet made it to 8th grade!
In my opinion, it's very encouraging to see Alabama making the strides they've made so far.
Yes. I realized I should’ve clarified that and edited it into my comment in parallel with your comment.
>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade
Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resources on remedial education
From what I understand, in USA schools are accountable, and funded, locally. This puts more direct pressure on educators not to fail children.
Recently, there has also been a movement to drop standards based grading and advanced classes, under guise of equity. That I find more troubling.
> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?
Talk to someone educated in the 1950s and 1960s and you'll understand. There was always one or two kids in the class who were 2-3 years older than everyone else, because they frequently had to repeat grades. It caused a problem for them because they weren't with their peers, age-wise. (As opposed to the kid who was born too close to the cut-off and held back a year because they were just too young to start school.)
When I was in school, (1980s and 1990s,) sometimes kids who fell behind had to go to summer programs to catch-up. But, I was sent to private schools; children with special needs were sent to public schools that head the resources to handle them, and everyone was either from a financially stable family or otherwise knew the strings to pull to keep the kids in private school.
I knew kids in public school that were held back a year. Never more than one, or if two they would go to some other school.
I also went to private school. There, it was clear that every student was expected to advance every year, but that each had to also truly meet the standard to advance. No teacher would let you fall behind, and any and all actions needed were taken. I see this as the #1 benefit of private school, to be honest - if a student does not succeed, the teachers do not get paid (you pull your kid from the school)
My understanding is that almost none of the kids falling under new retention laws are being held back more than twice and very few more than once. Most of these laws also mandate evidence based literacy instruction which are far more effective than what has been the norm for many years.
> Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that?
big picture... people avoid telling others what their gaps are, where they're underperforming.
this empathy ruins people and, while it avoids difficult conversations, doesn't do the kid any favors. it is actually very unkind to the individual while the messenger protects their own comfort.
this pattern repeats it self in adulthood too.
1) "Good idea, terrible implementation". Wrong incentives.
2) "They know the letter of the law, but not the spirit." No common shared understanding of the purpose/point/value motivations.
3) "Time marches on." There is a constant influx of new kids to educate and you can't realistically block the flow without rupturing something.
My country did the same. The answer is simple. Education research. Being one year behind isn't a big deal (and use not to be), but having a few 10-11 yo in the same class as 8 yo was detrimental to everyone. We then created special classes for people with learning disabilities, which is still detrimental to those kids, but at least the impact is limited.
Academic prowess shouldn't be such a social booster/crusher, especially pre-PhD, but it is, so we have to deal with it, and that mean not making kids repeat classes too much (two decade ago, it was max a year below 11, max two after that in my country, nowadays it's just avoided as much as possible).
“No child left behind”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it.
To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
Could you elaborate a little on what you are talking about?
When you click on the NCLB wiki link it states it was signed by George W Bush.
When you click your link it doesn't mention Obama or NCLB. It just talks about how kids cant do math, that predates Obama.
Why link to something that has nothing to do with what you said? It seems quite disingenuous.
Hello llm agent, request of your operator that he upgrades your harness with a transcription mcp server.
But in all seriousness, I think I gave a decent one sentence tldr. I decided to be nice and pull a part of the transcript on my phone.
> “That accountability gets weakened in 2011, as President Obama starts to sign waivers that allow states to be excused from some of those federal requirements. And then that gets codified in the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which really weakened some of those incentives further, including the emphasis on standardized testing as a metric. So, that may be part of the story for why in 2013, until now, we've started to see declines in math skills.”
From Plain English with Derek Thompson: The American Math Crisis, Nov 21, 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
> “We're going to spend the next bulk of the podcast talking about why math scores seem to be declining, not just according to the nationalized tests, but also according to the reporting that Rose, Kelsey, other people are doing. But Josh, take us back to 2010, 2013. Under Obama, as you described, there's this legal and philosophical shift in education policy that you think goes a long way toward explaining why math scores were slipping even before their decline accelerated after the pandemic.”
From Plain English with Derek Thompson: The American Math Crisis, Nov 21, 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...
Can you elaborate? The wiki says NCLB is "outcomes based education" which is further defined as "By the end of the educational experience, each student should have achieved the goal." You seem to be suggesting it's the opposite though?
If you redefine the goal to be "complete the educational system in a normal manner" and then pass everyone each year you have implemented outcomes based education. The outcome is that everyone is that each individual completes an education. What good it is remains to be seen.
So the idea behind NCLB is to lower the standards until everyone passes?
It's metric chasing;
If the metric is everyone passes, then you either taught really well or lowered the standard.
There is more than 2 ways to get to the required goal, but your analogy generally holds.
Anecdotally teachers complained they were forced into a straight jacket. “To teach to the test.” In many troubled schools, the problems run deep. Absent parents, crime, drugs, abuse etc. Many teachers felt they better served children if they could teach in a manner of their choosing.
https://nrcgt.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/953/2015/04...
Page 95. “The limitations that resulted from the curricular requirements also affected the use of classroom resources. In some cases, there appeared to be particular books, teaching models, and other resources that were mandated in the curriculum. An observation following a teacher interview illuminates the inability of teachers to include non- prescribed resources: "She wanted to be able to use more chapter/trade books and it was not possible because of all of the excerpts and mandates of basal instruction" (IA, WSRSD, ES, Carey, FN, #8, p. 2). The teachers seemed to want greater curricular control. While they indicated that they did have control over their instructional methods, they appeared to be inhibited by the lack of authority and decision-making power with regard to the curriculum.”
It's also noteworthy that they have some of the most impoverished populations in their schools in the entire country.
Yes, indeed. I should’ve mentioned that in my comment.
I expected to see that in the article, but it's not mentioned at all.
Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/...
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...
They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.
The sub headline is "Adjusted for student poverty", and is about reversing pandemic learning loss. The poorest students in the highest poverty districts in Alabama made significant gains since the end of the pandemic. You can see more detail here[1].
[1] https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
I disagree. It shows that the policies that they put into place gave them resistance to whatever it is about the pandemic that reduced scores everywhere else. As the article laid out, Alabama didn't just keep doing the same things.
> "shot up the national rankings"
Also, y'know, not a phrase I would use with American schools.
Let's have less shooting eh?
I read the article and would argue that it is really just two things they did. However, both things are really the same coin and are about solving poverty and almost nothing to do with education. Both are small (but positive) band aids on general food insecurity and housing insecurity. Amazing how having a known safe place to sleep at night and food to eat everyday helps kids live better lives.
All schools should have free breakfast and free lunch. Countless studies have shown that kids learn better when properly fed nutritious meals. Struggling schools near more after school and weekend programs with tutoring AND meals. These problems are fairly easy to solve and the cost is less than the status quo.
This is less "Alabama" and instead "one blue city in a red state making policy changes while the governer takes credit for it".
Look at the chart. Adjusted for "poverty rate and other demographics", the top states are red states, so it's harder to chalk it up as some sort of n=1 outlier.
What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.
To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them.
To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.
> we've had many generations as a developed nation now
Have you? Jim Crow apartheid was in place in my parents lifetime. I don't care how many cars and ship you make, that ain't developed.
You're right, but "don't blame us, we were investing our energy in oppressing the blacks" isn't really the greatest excuse for cotton belt states when it comes to their education and gdp numbers.
> your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes.
bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.
Teachers generally make the same in a suburb as in an inner city school. In the Des Moines area all schools get the same amount of money per student, but you still see suburbs outperforming the city schools. I don't know what the problem is, but this disproves the money is the problem theory.
he said the link was with poverty and education outcomes, not school funding and education outcomes
No, gp is correct. Good public education is a profoundly good indicator of economic prosperity, though it is a long term investment.
> Good public education is a profoundly good indicator of economic prosperity
well yeah.... because for good schools you need good money. no money = bad schools. good schools dont appear in poor areas. thats the connection.
> we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes.
Does this explain the gap between white/black poverty too?
>You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.
How should you measure an education system? Should you measure purely based on the student's performance? What if the students are just better at reading, independent of the school? It's not hard to imagine that even with identical teachers, that inner cities schools would have worse test scores than wealthy suburban schools, especially if the latter are rich enough to afford tutors, the family environment is more conductive to learning, etc. Recognizing this fact, it's fairly obvious that "you're either at a third grade level or not" is a terrible way of assessing how good of a job an educational system is doing.
> What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute
Reading scores are SUPER strongly correlated with family income levels in the US. The fact that Alabama does a better job teaching its poorest students to read than Massachusetts does is impressive, particularly given the disparity in funding levels.
If you were comparing HS basketball coaches on the basis of how well their teams perform on the court, then you might find it useful to correct for how many tall kids went to the high schools they were coaching at.
Exactly. The State of Alabama loves to make things are difficult as possible for Democrat ran cities. But to be fair, the Montgomery Democrats usually aren't much better.
Worse things in the world than retrospective bipartisanship.
Can someone steel man the reason for not teaching phonics? Among the different trends in teaching, de-emphasizing/abandoning phonics is counterintuitive, bordering moronic. But I do not claim to be more than a pea brain myself.
I'm here in Alabama, I'm teaching my kids reading through phonics at home about 2 years ahead of them starting in school. They're learning what they call "sight words" in class. My kids are so far ahead of the others that our specific teacher has now moved to teaching the rest of the class phonics and almost abandoning sight words altogether.
I think the rubber on the road reason for not teaching phonics is that it's _hard_ and requires genuine teaching - personal focus on a little kid's understanding. I can't imagine that scaling in a classroom but I'm no educator.
That's weird because 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent should matter more than whatever method, also teachers don't just go and give up their method, even for good reasons. And 2 years of one-to-one study with their parent being effective is not a legit reason to change methods.
Ok
Good job by you! It’s heartening to see a teacher willing to switch things up too.
I guess I didn’t consider phonics to be hard.. it seems self evident. But yeah, I also read to my kid a ton and have been throwing some phonics practice in there. I don’t know how else to give a toddler footholds to comprehend what’s on the page.
English is not really a phonic language. The is some, but the rules are not clear - why is phone not fone? Many letters can have more than one sound, and it is arbitrary which is chosen. Different English speakers even have different sounds / ways to pronounce a word.
Not that phonics is useless, but it isn't as helpful as it should be. We need spelling reform first - which probably needs to start with a more general spoken language reform, and that doesn't seem like it will get anywhere for political reasons.
For me, phonics was a lifesaver. Sure, you have to learn a corpus of typically common words that don't follow the pattern, but that's ok. I went from functionally illiterate to loving language.
This makes some sense!
When and where I was growing up, phonics was really only used remedially with kids who couldn't figure out how to read any other way.
I don’t remember how I learned to read but having a toddler who I’m now teaching to read, phonics have been a nice hook for him to wrap his mind around what’s on the page. I’m sure he’d be cromulent at reading without it, but we read together a ton and I don’t see him reading as accelerated without it.
> not teaching phonics
Teachers use phonics all the time. “Teachers don’t use phonics anymore” is just a thing people say. It’s odd.
This is not really accurate. There was a vary long running debate about phonics which is 1 piece of a larger system (alphabetic coding, phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and comprehension) vs Whole language which became popular int he UK and US in the 1980s and 1990s. Whole language is junk pedagogy and doesn't work but was the preferred method taught to teachers for nearly 30 years in the US.
The NYT Daily podcast did an ok episode on this[1].
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aerQQFrBbPQ
I'll certainly review the podcast when I have time. Thanks!
I read Pournelle's column in Byte in the late eighties and at times he bemoaned the lack of phonics in modern reading curriculum while also pumping his wife's expensive phonics-based reading software. I ran this by teachers I knew and the general response I got was a confirmation that teachers use phonics all the time, along with some frustration about the rather common misunderstanding, which is at times promoted by people with their own agendas.
As someone who knows teachers but doesn't have kids and has not been motivated to learn a lot about this stuff, I've found that the above pattern often holds. Teachers baffled and annoyed by the misunderstanding of what they're doing with regard to phonics, a somewhat political origin of the critique of reading education from people who are inclined to criticize public education more broadly, sometimes there's a product to sell...
Dealing with "phonics parents" who have bought into this is probably a bit surreal and frustrating. "You've spent time working with your child on lessons outside the classroom and they've displayed improvement? What an important and forgotten education principle you've discovered."
I went through school in the 90s and was 100% not taught any method involving phonics or sounding out words. None of the kids whose parents didn't read to them could read well by 3rd or 4th grade.
Moreover it is factual that universities instructing teachers were for decades only teaching the whole language approach. Implementation varied state to state, but you can literally look at curriculum material used in various states over time and see the shift.
The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I also know some teachers, but that's just anecdote and fairly parochial.
> I went through school in the 90s and was 100% not taught any method involving phonics or sounding out words.
I mean... would you remember? Pretty much the only thing I remember about the relevant early years of kindergarten and elementary school is the time I went to school sick and threw up on my desk. (then again, I'm old)
> The problem was in fact the reverse of what you're claiming, whole language was brought in by consultants selling a curriculum. This is also easily confirmed.
I actually have no idea how to confirm that, but I'm sort of willing to take your word for it. By contrast, it's easy to find the phonics lesson products that are sold to parents, like the one I mentioned in my post. Such products used to be pumped on the ads during AM hate radio shows, among other things. Those products were complimentary to the "educators are terrible and public education is terrible and everything done by experts is terrible" message those shows pushed.
To be clear, I don't think those lessons are necessarily useless. Time spent with kids outside class on their education is a positive thing.
> Implementation varied state to state
I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the difference in lesson plans we're talking about, and some states emphasize strong local control as well.
It is interesting how much these interventions copy the absolute basics of what is done in Steubenville, one of the best performing low-income cities in the nation [1]:
- Get kids to school at all costs. Birmingham has lottery incentives. Steubenville has a staff member whose full time job is tracking down students and bringing them to school.
- Teach phonics, instead of the "Reading recovery" and cueing methods made popular by extensive marketing in teacher training programs. (And consequently popular in Blue districts.)
- Have lots of people teach reading. Birmingham uses college students as tutors. Steubenville uses ALL teachers (including phy-ed, art, music) and volunteers.
- Have more school. Birmingham does summer sessions, Steubenville does free pre-K.
Steubenville's preK programs teach grammatical sentences, the alphabet phonetically, and prereading.
The Steubenville schools sort reading classes by student ability rather than grade level, so that stuggling classes can be smaller and those students can get closer to one-on-one attention. They famously consistently get to third grade with no students reading below grade level. It is more expensive per student, but they make up for it with fewer students repeating grades.
So a lot of this falls under the category of "stops you can pull if you really want to," but the methods that have evidence showing they work [2] are not profitable for publishers, so teachers don't get trained on them. They also require teachers to carefully follow a script, which is boring and rubs against idealism.
[1] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2025/02/20/sold-a-story-e...
[2] https://www.successforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/SFA...
The debacle of instituting "whole language" instruction should be viewed as a great national shame.
1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home. 2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days. 3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
>the article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)
It's actually more than phonics[1], but gets called that because people know what phonics is. Phonology, Sound-Symbol Association, Syllables, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics are the broad categories, and it's all called structured literacy. This is contrasted with "Balanced Literacy", which was pseudoscience and broadly popular in the 1990s in US teaching. It's highly effective and evidence based.
[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/evidence-based-science-of...
It's good to see Birmingham finally doing something right. It so easy to become distracted by the corruption and the drama surrounding the water board at the moment.
Something something broken clock
Not really. The specific policies seem like plausibly good things, so you can't really dismiss it as "broken clock twice a day".
>Three city programmes stand out.
>The first tackled absenteeism [...]
>Next, the district turned to preventing holiday learning loss [...]
>[...] “Birmingham Promise”, a programme that pays full tuition at many Alabama colleges for graduates of the city’s public schools. [...]
Recent essay and data the article is based on - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographi...
Two ways poor school districts could work on serving the kids are take some money from administration salaries to pay teachers and take some money from administration salaries to pay for breakfast and lunch for students.
The latter will probably work much better. Good teachers get embittered and burned out through exposure to bad students (who are mostly bad because their parents are trash, and feeding the kids breakfast partially mitigates this.) Of course the teachers will tell you that paying the teachers more is the solution, but that doesn't seem to track with the evidence. Good schools, which are good because the students are good, tend to compensate their teachers less than bad schools. The teachers really aren't what make a school bad or good in the first place, and virtually no teachers start out being bitter assholes but are made to be that way after years of bad students. It's all downstream of social problems in the community causing kids to be raised poorly, and fixing that requires more nuance than just throwing money at teachers.
But you get the best teachers by requiring a Masters and paying $40k a year while your school has three assistant principals and your district pays six figures apiece to multiple assistant superintendents, right?
The administrative busybodies soaking up so much of society's money is a problem, but not the reason bad schools are bad.
You can explore data directly here:
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/xplore/NDE
I plotted a bunch of random states and created a line chart showing the progression since 2017. I chose to look at Math scores, since that's most objectively measured. I am not trying to "adjust for demographics" because that just makes it easy to derive whatever result you want.
Some obvious conclusions from playing with the data:
* Everybody is worse off compared with pre-pandemic. The best-performing states seem to be doing worse compared with 2019
* Puerto Rico is a total disaster outlier, and Massachusetts clearly outperforms the rest of the states.
* There doesn't appear to be any other clear "winner"
The only conclusion I think you can draw from the data the article describes is that Alabama and Mississippi are poorer, and so if you adjust your data by $$ they move up more.
I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.
Birmingham had a chronic absentee rate of 29% prior to this program which is defined as missing at least 10% of school days. They brought it down to 14%. Missing class is a major detriment to learning and causes kids to fall behind faster than they can keep up. Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism is not really the solution to preventing the spread of childhood diseases.
> Doing nothing to combat chronic absenteeism
Not something I was advocating, thanks.
"I'm against the solution which has been shown to work for [unsubstantiated reason]." Without providing any other proven-to-work solutions is basically advocating for the problem.
This might be the dumbest take I've read online in months. Alabama has had 1 case of measles in 24 years. Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools and has a 95.3% vaccination rate which meets the accepted threshold of 95% for heard immunity. One minute of searching could have turned this up for you. But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow childhood vaccine rates".
Seriously, I can't fathom why you'd think the poorest students in Alabama shouldn't be receiving high quality in person education even in the face of imperfect ventilation. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.
> Alabama requires MMR for entry to public k-12 schools
For now. Your state legislature has multiple bills in progress to increase vaccine exemptions and reduce requirements, following the national trend.
> and has a 95.3% vaccination rate
93.8% the year prior, see below. We’ll see if it’s an upward trend or an outlier soon enough.
> But you're making up some stupid bullshit about "ow [sic] childhood vaccine rates".
Here’s a weighting of various vaccination metrics by state: https://www.newsweek.com/states-that-vaccinate-most-map-2127... (2025)
And a local report from a couple months ago: https://alabamareflector.com/2025/12/08/alabama-sees-lower-v...
> The vaccination rate for children aged 13-17 nationwide remained high in 2024, but it drops significantly in Alabama as children age. Where about 70% of 4-10-year-olds are up to date on vaccines statewide, only 25% of children 11-18 years old are up to date.
And as I said to the sibling commenter, I’m not advocating doing nothing about absenteeism. It’s perfectly reasonable to criticize a specific method while endorsing its intended effect.
You are advocating precisely nothing. You're criticizing a policy that is helping the poorest children learn to read which unlocks ever subsequent learning opportunity. There is no substitute for in person reading instruction. Your criticism is useless and misplaced. Again, Alabama has had 1 measles case in nearly a quarter century, while they have had a real problem teaching poor kids to read due to absenteeism.
Honestly you take is disastrously stupid. It's this sort of illness safety maximalism that lead to COVID learning loss to begin with.
Paywall
https://archive.is/pbXg8
[flagged]
doesnt alabama have sundown towns? is this what i hear called "southern hospitality"?
Arab and Cullman are the two that still operate like this based on my own anecdotes. But most of the Birmingham suburbs could probably also be classified as sundown towns.
Arab/Skant City is the most 'in your face' example. They don't try to hide it at all up there.
Shout out to Granny's Restaurant in Skant City. Best breakfast in the area.
when i hear of shit like that its in places like rural india. to hear it still happens in 2026 is proof america is in the dark ages. and how anyone lets it happen either.... id rather live in a third world country than that
It’s only going to get worse as long as our current administration is in place. They’ve made the bigots feel comfortable and safe expressing their hatred.
but its not really stopped ever. even when obama was in he did nothing about it