San Francisco Banned ‘Racist’ Algebra A Decade Ago. The Results Are Now In.

When you read enough news about the declining quality of schools in this country — particularly public schools — it’s easy for your eyes to glaze over after a while. All the stories sound the same. We spend nearly a trillion dollars on our public school system every year. And the results are objectively terrible. Only around one-third of 12th graders have English language proficiency — meaning they can barely speak English. The math numbers, as you might imagine, are even worse. Roughly 1 in 10 public school students experience “sexual misconduct” at the hands of a school employee (and that’s a conservative estimate that hasn’t been updated in two decades, before the LGBT movement was spending billions of dollars a year with the express goal of sexualizing children).

Meanwhile a quarter of students are “chronically absent,” meaning they miss at least 10% of the school year. Violent incidents in schools have increased by around 40% in the last couple of years. And so on and so on. We could easily drone on, for the next hour, listing all of the problems you’re already aware of.

But this is going to be a very different monologue because, for the first time in memory, there’s actually something to be hopeful about, when it comes to the public school system. And if you know anything about my career, you know that I don’t say that lightly. There’s genuinely a legitimate reason to believe that the education system in the United States may not be doomed — at least to the extent that we thought it was.

Thanks to a new finding that’s somewhat controversial, there’s a new path forward for educating American students. It’s a fairly obvious path — one that we never should’ve abandoned in the first place. But it’s an important path nonetheless. And if we continue in this vein, we could one day live in a safer, more educated and more literate society. We can finally reverse the trend of everything getting crappier.

But to understand the changes that may soon be coming, we need to start around a decade ago, when the Left made a deliberate decision to turn our already-terrible public schools into indoctrination camps with no standards whatsoever.

Amid the cultural revolution of Barack Obama’s first term, the state of California eliminated the algebra requirement for 8th graders. They also stopped failing students. They let students move on to the next grade level when they clearly weren’t qualified for it. And they turned every subject — even mathematics — into an exercise in “racial equity.” They taught students that everything, including algebra, was really a social justice issue. And these changes continued for many years afterward. 

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Credit: News 12/YouTube.com

Credit: Fox News/YouTube.com

Ostensibly, the idea behind all of these changes — and many more changes like these — was to help students who were supposedly “disadvantaged,” particularly racial minorities. Somehow, we were told, it was a good thing that students would graduate without the ability to read and write.

In reality, of course, the goal of these policies was to hide two very inconvenient facts. The first inconvenient fact was that public schools clearly weren’t doing their jobs. They were taking enormous sums of taxpayer money. And students, in turn, were getting dumber by every objective metric. So to prevent people from noticing this, the objective metrics were simply eliminated.

The second inconvenient fact, which the Left also wanted to hide, is that the allegedly “disadvantaged” students have not been underperforming because of white supremacy. Often, they’re underperforming because they lack discipline. They weren’t raised in stable households, and as a result, their behavior is incompatible with a functioning school system. They routinely engage in criminal behavior that disrupts the entire campus.

This is difficult to measure with precise statistics, because for the most part, public schools don’t report many fights (and other acts of violence) to law enforcement. That’s because, if the schools did file those reports, then they’d run the risk of being designated as a “persistently dangerous” school, which would mean that they’d lose their federal funding. So there’s a significant incentive for schools to bury the evidence of violence that students are committing. And of course, by the same token, the media doesn’t want to cover the violence, either. It would look racist to do so, since the perpetrators are almost always black — and very often, they’re attacking white students in large numbers.

This is a common theme, by the way. You have to keep this in mind whenever you see crime statistics. They’re much, much worse than the official numbers show. Black-on-white violence, in many cases, isn’t recorded at all. Remember the case we talked about yesterday, with the black judge who reduced the sentence of a black rapist by 50%, even though he demonstrated no remorse whatsoever? It was one of the most extraordinary cases we’ve ever talked about. She cut his sentence by more than 30 years, because he “fell through the cracks.” Meanwhile, the rapist mocked the victim repeatedly, and said he’d do it again. The judge said that she felt sorry for the rapist because he grew up in our “society” as an “African-American male.” So she gave him a pass because of white supremacy.

And guess what? We don’t know the race of his victim. Her identity is shielded. You won’t find the victim’s race listed in any media reports. If you look around, there are some indications that the victim was white. The attack took place in an overwhelmingly white area, for example. Is it possible that the judge went easy on the rapist because his victim was white? Is it possible that she saw the attack as a way to “strike back” against white people, who she considers members of a different tribe? We don’t know. It certainly seems possible, based on what the judge said in court.

Whatever the case, we can be sure of one thing: This crime, if it was indeed a black-on-white crime, will never be recorded as a black-on-white crime, in any statistical database. After all, the victim is anonymous. We can’t know anything about her. That’s how it works. That’s true in the criminal justice system. And it’s true in public schools as well.

For the most part, it requires a mass shooting in order for the media to cover violence that takes place in public schools. In that case, whatever the shooter’s motivation was — and regardless of whether the shooter identified as transgender or not — the media will immediately start talking about “gun control” and suspending the Second Amendment.

The truth is, you don’t really need news reports, or police reports, to understand what’s happening in American public schools — particularly the schools that are located in major cities. You can just go to the World Star Hip Hop website, and look up the massive database of documentary evidence that public schools are basically fight clubs for the “disadvantaged minorities” we hear so much about. It’s just one video after another, with titles like, “Messed up: Teacher Gets Jumped by Students at High School in Georgia,” and “Damn! Teacher fights student for smacking her during argument,” and “Damn! Student beats up teacher at Florida high school!.”

It’s content that we can’t share in its entirety. Videos depicting acts of violence, particularly acts of violence involving children, are banned from most social media and video-sharing platforms. And while you can understand why those policies are in place, you also have to acknowledge that, as a side effect, the fact remains that it’s not easy to watch videos that give you a realistic picture of everyday life in public schools. This is an aspect of American life — a very important aspect — that’s mostly shielded from the public.

So to recap: In the Obama era and beyond, public schools decided not to report most crimes to law enforcement, not to fail anyone, not to hold anyone back a grade, and not to teach difficult subjects. And there was a media blackout on the violence that was occurring in these schools. The idea was, “out of sight, out of mind.” If the schools were failing — and everyone knew they were — then at least we wouldn’t have to think about it very much. We wouldn’t have to deal with any uncomfortable statistics. And indeed, this line of thinking quickly spread. Colleges and law schools dropped standardized test scores. They started demanding DEI statements, to weed out conservatives — along with any independent thinkers. Schools, at every level, became expensive government-funded daycares. Students who actually wanted to learn, in the end, paid the biggest price. And our country, as a whole, suffered as a result. We started falling behind countries like China, which take education seriously.

And every few months, our education deficit grew larger and larger, by design.

Just last year, San Francisco public schools proposed yet another “equity policy,” which allowed students to pass with a grade of 40%, skip homework with no penalty, and retake tests indefinitely. Other blue states and cities followed with similar policies. And soon enough, their test scores began plummeting.

Take Massachusetts, for example, where they use the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, to measure student achievement. Massachusetts typically performs very well on standardized tests.

But lately, things haven’t been going so well.

As the Commonwealth Beacon reported late last year:

“NEW MCAS RESULTS reveal that the performance of Massachusetts public-school students remains far below pre-pandemic levels and shows few signs of improvement. The data follow National Assessment of Educational Progress scores released earlier this year in which the Commonwealth’s students scored at a 20-year low. … In 2010, Massachusetts jettisoned the nation’s best English language arts and math standards, replacing them with national academic standards known as Common Core that dramatically cut the amount of literature students read and slowed their progression to higher mathematics study. … Last year voters eliminated the requirement that students pass MCAS English, math and science tests to graduate from high school. … The overall portion of students meeting expectations fell from half before the pandemic to 42 percent now. The portion of students who failed rose from 11 percent to 18 percent. Only 39 percent met or exceeded expectations on the just-unveiled 8th-grade civics test.”

You’ll find similar stories from Maine to New York to California. They dropped the standards, and shortly afterwards, the performance of the students plummeted. Again, it all seemed inevitable. All of the numbers, everywhere, were dropping, year after year. Conservatives would complain about the numbers, but nothing would ever change. Politicians would throw more and more money at the problem, and reward the unions and the nonprofits with massive new contracts. And everything would get worse. This seemed like a death spiral that we couldn’t possibly pull out of.

But then something very strange happened in the state of Mississippi. The state’s fourth-grade reading scores went from 49th place in the country, all the way to ninth place, in the span of just ten years.

Credit: National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2024 results.

Their fourth-grade math scores, meanwhile, went from 50th in the country — dead last — to 16th. And when you adjust for demographics like poverty and race, as of 2024, Mississippi went to number-one.

Yes, from 2013 to 2024, regardless of how you measure the data, Mississippi pretty much leap-frogged the entire country.

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One of Mississippi’s main innovations was that, at the end of third grade, they started administering a reading fluency test. And this was a genuine test, with actual consequences. If students failed it, they’d be held back, and forced to repeat the grade. In a typical year, something like 10% of students failed the test in 2018. By 2022, that number was down to 7%. And if students failed this reading fluency test, and were held back, then they wouldn’t take the national test that’s used to measure Mississippi’s progress against other states. They’d have to wait another year.

So Mississippi began holding back far more students than most other states. They broke with the established consensus, and decided that children should actually learn to read before becoming fourth graders. (Under Mississippi law, students could be held back for a maximum of two years). Along the way, Mississippi enacted other reforms. In particular, Mississippi started teaching students to read using phonics, rather than context clues. So to give you an example of how this might work — if you teach a student using context clues, you might show them a photo of a barn, and say something like: “What building is that cow in? It starts with the letter ‘b’…And what word with a letter ‘b’ would make sense in this context?”

In other words, in the context method, teachers would challenge the student with a series of riddles, and basically push them to guess the right word.

Teachers would also offer suggestions like these, when students had trouble reading a word.

Credit: Deanna Jump @ Teachers Pay Teachers

“Look at pictures” and “Skip the word and re-read” and “Try a word that makes sense.”

It should be obvious what the problem is here. Guessing words, and skipping words and looking for clues elsewhere, is not a reliable strategy. The context system is basically cheating. You might get the right result, but you’re getting it for the wrong reasons. In order to actually learn to read, you need to be able to understand the relationship between letters and sounds, without relying on some hint that you’re able to dig up somewhere. 

And that’s what the phonics system — which Mississippi now uses — is all about. If you’re teaching a student using phonics, you’d tell them to go from left to right, and sound out the word “barn.” They don’t need a picture to provide context. They don’t need hints. They don’t need to skip the word, and try to circle back later. They learn a much more generalized, useful method of reading. And if they fail to understand this method, and bomb the test, then they get to try again the next year — and potentially, the year after that.

This is a system that’s clearly superior. You have to wonder if the “context” system wasn’t an intentional effort to sabotage the reading abilities of young children. That’s certainly been the result, based on these latest numbers from Mississippi.

But not everyone agrees with that assessment. You might have heard, in various circles, that some observers are doubting that the so-called “Mississippi Miracle” is actually real.

In particular, there’s a paper from a statistics professor named Howard Wainer who says that the numbers are highly misleading.

Here’s what he writes.

Prior to 2013, a higher percentage of third-graders moved on to the fourth grade and took the NAEP fourth-grade reading test [in Mississippi]. After 2013, only those students who did well enough in reading moved on to the fourth grade and took the test. It is a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores.

In other words, he’s saying that Mississippi’s 4th-grade test scores only went up because the state prevented the low-scoring students, at the completion of 3rd grade, from moving on to the fourth grade and taking the national test. His argument is that students aren’t actually becoming better readers; the state is just preventing its bad readers from taking the test. And you’ll find this analysis pretty much everywhere on the Left.

They’re all using this paper to make the case that the Mississippi Miracle is actually fake. They have a vested interest in making this claim, of course. If the Mississippi Miracle is real, then their entire philosophy of education has just collapsed. All of the justification for their racial equity programs is gone, too.

But the big problem with their reasoning is that Mississippi is not preventing low-performing students from taking the test. Instead, the state is delaying the administration of the test for a small number of students. They aren’t being expelled. They aren’t being “disappeared.” Eventually, they’ll take the national test. And their scores will definitely be reflected in the totals, over a 10-year period.

And to be clear, the number of students taking the test in 4th grade has remained very high in Mississippi, even with the new policy in place. It’s not like they’re only letting five kids take the exam.

As Steve Sailer pointed out, in Mississippi, “The response rate for both 4th and 8th graders was above the national average in 2022.”

So even when they’re holding students back, they have more students taking the test.

Here’s how the journalist Kelsey Piper responded to the professors’ argument. She has a detailed rebuttal on her Substack. Here’s the key paragraph:

A student that repeats the third grade does not conveniently vanish off the face of the earth. They just take third grade again, and then they move on to fourth grade. The state still tests them; they just do so a year later. … [Additionally], Mississippi has been gaining ground steadily for two decades, so any explanation for their results needs to explain steady gains, not a one-off jump … For all of these reasons, while weaker students having an extra year to learn to read is almost certainly contributing to Mississippi’s scores, it cannot explain Mississippi’s gains since 2003 — or even much of Mississippi’s gains since 2013.

So the big drive-by “debunking” of Mississippi’s achievement doesn’t hold up. But the other argument you’ll hear from Leftists who are enraged by the Mississippi Miracle is that by the 8th grade, the state was no longer ranking number one (or even number nine). So they’re saying that the gains are mostly concentrated at the 4th-grade level. And actually, that’s true, at least for now.

One of the charts we showed earlier actually illustrates that decline.

Credit: National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2024 results.

As you can see, from 2013 to 2024, Grade 8 Reading in Mississippi went from 50th to 41st, and Grade 8 Math went from 49th to 35th. So these are not quite as earth-shattering as the Grade 4 numbers. But the state is no longer dead-last in the 8th grade, which is where they were before.

And that’s an impressive achievement, when you consider the demographics that are involved. As Sailer puts it: “Mississippi 8th graders being only 4 unadjusted points behind the national average for all races is not bad. By 8th grade, Mississippi’s black students’ reading score has fallen to the national black average, but that’s still better than you’d expect for what’s perhaps the poorest and most rural black population in the country.” So we still have significant, across-the-board improvements in reading and math ability in Mississippi, from 4th grade on up.

That’s why it’s a very good sign that other Southern states — which Leftists have long dismissed as hopeless — are taking a similar approach as Mississippi. And they’re seeing significant improvements as well.

Since 2019, Louisiana went from 50th in the nation to 16th, in terms of 4th-grade reading. Alabama went from 49th to 34th.

So this is a reproducible, clear improvement in public schooling. It’s the first good news to come out of the public school system in at least a decade. And it didn’t come about because they threw more money at the problem, or because of affirmative action, or because of “racial equity.” It came about because the state of Mississippi recognized that people — including children — respond to incentives. If you tell students that it doesn’t matter whether they pass or fail, or learn or don’t learn, then fewer students will pass, and fewer students will learn.

On the other hand, if you attach real consequences to success and failure, and if you stop giving context-based “cheats” during reading lessons, everything changes. Students — including many black students — are capable of reading at a higher level, much earlier. And it’s pretty revealing that, the moment this massive improvement emerges, the very first thing that Leftists attempt to do is undermine it. They claim it’s fake. And they publish papers that misrepresent what’s actually happening.

It couldn’t be more obvious that these people desperately want our education system to remain dysfunctional and useless. You will not find anyone who resents education more than the well-educated. They know that an illiterate country is one that’s much easier to control. And by making their state — and the entire American south — a much more literate place, Mississippi has struck one of the biggest blows against the Leftist project in the past decade. Like Louisiana and Alabama, it’s time for many more states to follow their lead.