This podcast was inspired by Karen Vaites extremely well documented piece on the recent improvements in reading in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama.
There haven’t been a lot of bright spots in American education in the last few years. The learning loss from Covid has become more obvious as the years have worn on and the only state that has seen improvement in their reading scores since 2019 is Louisiana.
Wait, Louisiana? I’ve been loosely following education data for over a decade and Louisiana has famously been toward the bottom of the reading and math assessment tests. As recently as 2013, they ranked in the bottom 5 states for 4th grade reading.
But in the last 5 years, Louisiana isn’t just the only state that improved their reading scores, but they’ve improved it substantially, rising 0.3 grade levels since 2019. The next best state lost 0.1 grade levels. That is an enormous difference. What on earth happened in Louisiana?
Fortunately, I read and follow Karen Vaites. Karen is a reading education advocate who I first met in 2022 when she presented an enormously helpful and optimistic vision for helping parents advocate against Covid restrictions in schools. She is not apolitical so much as she tenaciously brings the focus back to the kids and helping them get the best education they can.
Karen recently wrote about the “Southern Surge”. This is her term for the literacy playbook that was pioneered by Louisiana and has been adopted parts by Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. If you look at the chart above, you’ll see that all 4 of these southern states are in the top 10 for stemming the learning loss since 2019.
To understand this stunning success, we’re also talking with Rod Naquin, a Louisiana teacher who has been neck deep in the curriculum and policies that have led to this wonderfully good news for southern students.
We Can Improve Education
There is a certain “doomer” perspective on education that says that most studies showing improvements in education are due, not to better teaching methods or better curriculum, but to selection effects. Basically, private schools do better because they select the smart, rich kids out of the population. School districts that score higher aren’t better at teaching, they’re just richer.
While there is some truth to this, I’ve seen it lead people to a place where they don’t believe there is much of a difference between good and bad education, only good and bad students. They don’t believe you can really improve education at a population scale.
The Southern Surge argues otherwise. Furthermore, from our conversation here and digging into the details, it becomes clear that there isn’t a rigid blueprint toward improving reading for young students. The improvements come from teachers who understand the fundamentals of the science of reading and are given some flexibility to apply the appropriate curriculum and strategies with their students.
It’s also clear that this only works if everyone cares about the students. Teachers have to care and work hard with students to help them improve. Administrators have to care enough to guide the teachers toward better curriculum. Politicians have to care enough to provide funding for incentives to get teachers into workshops on how to teach advanced reading. The final point of this is that all this care finds its way to the students, who start to care about this thing that everyone around them cares about.
We can improve our educational system, but we have to do so with clear eyes and a relentless drive toward the results we want. We have to have patience. Louisiana is so far ahead because they started earlier. We hope to see similar accelerating improvements from Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee in the next 5-10 years. Hopefully, a further validation of this strategy will help it spread and we can turn around from the tragic educational loss of the pandemic.
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