They teach using proven methods, like phonics.
They actually teach math.
They test and use that as real information.
They focus on results not on ideology.
They do NOT encurage using Paulo Freire's "methods".
The article suggests that someone from Maine would be reluctant to ask Mississippi for advice, given the stereotypes and biases that all Americans have absorbed over the years.
If the Maine Secretary of Education overcame his or her reluctance and did in fact ask Mississippi for advice, imagine their disappointment if the response was "we actually teach math".
Do you have a source for your response? I'm genuinely curious about what they changed to achieve this level of success. I'd be interested first for the actual educational methods, and secondarily I'd be interested in relating it to the idea of organizational changes that can produce relatively rapid reversals of a long term trend.
You can read a bit about it here [1]. They structure reading around 5 pillars, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension which is an evidence based approach[2]. Then if by the end of 3rd grade a student isn't reading at grade level they hold the student back to give them more time to learn to read so that they will be prepared for the more advanced material in 4th grade. I don't know as much about the math instruction.
> imagine their disappointment if the response was "we actually teach math"
And yet, looking at the chart in the article, that appears to be pretty much all there is to say.
Judging by results (based on the limited evidence in the article) Mississippi doesn't seem to be doing anything revolutionary. Their scores today are still significantly worse than Maine was in 2013.
The question we should be asking is "What is Maine doing wrong?" What caused their scores to decline precipitously since 2013?
This is a straight up guess, but the timing is really close: adoption of Common Core?
What I've seen of Common Core math is very different from how it's traditionally taught, to the point that parents don't understand it. I think I can see a thread in there, that it's attempting to teach what those of us good at math end up figuring out ourselves with numbers, but the examples online are bad and lead to further misunderstandings. So I could see teachers having similar issues, and students not learning very well because of it.
To put it in more techy terms, Common Core math is like learning computer science before learning your first programming language: probably possible, but it won't work well for most people.
I'm not sure what the Common Core curriculum for reading is, although on the whole Common Core math curriculum, it's a good system. You're right that often parents don't understand that—but that's due to Americans on the whole being uncomfortable and unskilled in mathematics. It does require teacher education, however, and lots of places are cutting that back.
> Proven methods... For what? Acing standardised tests?
Phonics is the proven method for learning how to read English. Quite controversially, a lot of states ditched or de-emphasized phonics in favor of some faddish "balanced literacy" idea that took the education establishment by storm, but doesn't actually work as well and led to bad outcomes, like poor literacy. Now that the damage has been done and is visible, a lot of states are now mandating phonics again.
I think there have been similar cycles with math.
Education is probably one of the areas where our cultural obsession with innovation and change leads to bad outcomes. It's not like reading is a new technology or prior generations were full of stupid people (though there are a lot of chauvinists who assume they were). At a certain point, new educational ideas are very likely to be worse ideas, but they're pushed and adopted because people are required to be "innovators."
I wonder if other languages receive greater benefits from phonics than English?
English is wild language with plenty examples of phonetic rules being broken.
Take a simple word like 'rough'. Learning the phonetics doesn't help with the word 'cough'. Neither help with words like 'though' and 'through'.
Words like 'read' and 'lead' cannot be properly pronounced without context clues. Not to mention all the odd-ball words in English like 'colonel'.
I also think location plays a role too. Where I am from, words like 'tin' and 'ten' are not pronounced differently at all [1]. In other parts of the US, that is not the case.
I do not doubt phonics is the best method method for learning to read. All I am saying is that the other methods must truly be abysmal for phonics to be the best.
Maybe? I'm not as familiar with reading pedagogy for other languages. However there are generally 5 components[1] and one is vocabulary which is how you distinguish Lead and Lead and Led.
You're right, English is kind of wacky, but this exists in other languages as well. For example there's significant Gaulish influence in French[2] and the written and spoken language offer a number of surprises for learners.
There's an amusing way to score how consistent the language orthography is: train an LLM on it, then measure the error rates for words it wasn't trained on. English is very bad on that metric: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
"Phonics" the term is mostly something that comes up in American context because there is a controversy on how to teach reading and writing English to begin with. In many other countries, the equivalent of phonics is simply the standard methodology that has been in use for so long that most people can't think of anything else, so it doesn't need a special term to describe it.
undoubtedly. Reading languages with clear phonetic rules like spanish can be quite easily learned by speakers. You only have to remember 27 symbols and their sounds.
If the Maine Secretary of Education overcame his or her reluctance and did in fact ask Mississippi for advice, imagine their disappointment if the response was "we actually teach math".
Do you have a source for your response? I'm genuinely curious about what they changed to achieve this level of success. I'd be interested first for the actual educational methods, and secondarily I'd be interested in relating it to the idea of organizational changes that can produce relatively rapid reversals of a long term trend.