Thomas B. Fordham Institute - Advancing Educational Excellence

The Fordham Report 2006: How Well Are States Educating Our Neediest Children?

November 1, 2006

The Fordham Report 2006: How Well Are States Educating Our Neediest Children? appraises each state according to thirty indicators across three major categories: student achievement for low-income, African-American, and Hispanic students; achievement trends for these same groups over the last 10-15 years; and the state's track record in implementing bold education reforms. It finds that just eight states can claim even moderate success over the past 15 years at boosting the percentage of their poor or minority students who are at or above proficient in reading, math or science. In addition, most states making significant achievement gains--including California, Delaware, Florida, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas--are national leaders in education reform, indicating that solid standards, tough accountability, and greater school choice can yield better classroom results.

View the press release for this report

Contents

Mississippi

 


 


 

Mastering the Art of Failure

When poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote that "the art of losing isn't hard to master," she could have been writing about Mississippi schools, whose long history of economic dysfunction and educational malaise is well known. Although the state has made a few gains in educational reforms over the recent past, the inertia of history is proving to be a formidable foe.

Student outcomes in this poorest of all states rank at or near the bottom in every category except African-American graduation rates. In certain critical areas, such as reading proficiency among fourth-grade African-Americans, the state finishes dead last.

With nowhere to go but up, the state has made progress in student achievement among low-income and African-American eighth-graders in math. Be that as it may, the prospect that the Magnolia State will make the kind of radical change necessary to create a first-rate educational system appears relatively bleak.

The state earns a D+ overall for its reform efforts. Despite certain steps forward, such as a new law that says administrators in low-performing districts must boost results or lose their jobs, resistance to reform appears well entrenched.

"It's Band-Aids that the state is putting on the problems," says Forest Thigpen, president of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

There is some credibility in Mississippi to the argument that money for education is tight. It's not that the state is stingy with its budget-Mississippi spends 63 percent of its state funds on K-12 and higher education-but that it has such a small pot to begin with. Despite raising per-pupil spending by 20 percent and teachers' salaries by 16 percent over three years, in both categories the state remains near the bottom nationally. Of course, the cost of living is relatively low as well.

The financial picture darkened in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit. Although the storm largely spared the state's poorest region (the western Delta), it wrought havoc in other regions. Forty schools suffered either decimation or severe damage, and another 200 sustained lesser damage. Schools on the Gulf Coast were closed for about six weeks. The final school repair tab, for which the federal government is expected to pick up less than half, is expected to run between $700 million and $1 billion, according to state Superintendent of Education Hank Bounds.

An influx of federal funds for reconstruction and a post-Katrina loosening of casino gambling restrictions on the Gulf Coast are expected to help swell Mississippi's coffers in coming years. But concerns both financial and philosophical are blocking the way to reform.

For instance, the state has just one charter school, a former magnet school that, due to a restrictive state charter school law, lacks much of the flexibility that charters in other states enjoy. The legislature has charged a commission to craft a more flexible charter school bill before lawmakers reconvene in January 2007, but many in the House and Senate are already wary, forecasting its defeat.

"I don't know if [a charter school] is better" than a traditional public school for boosting achievement, says state Senate Education Committee Vice Chairman J.P. Wilemon, Jr., a Democrat from the mostly white northeast corner of the state. "And with the hard time we have funding education, can we afford right now to build new schools? I'm not sure we can."

Others, such as state Senator David Jordan (D), who represents a mostly African-American district in the Delta, raise a widely held concern that touches a particularly tender chord in Mississippi. He fears whites will use charter schools much as they used a spate of new private schools in the 1970s in the wake of federally required integration-as a scholastic haven for whites only.

"I don't think taxpayer dollars should be used to segregate the schools, and that's exactly what would happen," says Jordan, a member of the Senate Education Committee.

Given this political climate, Thigpen isn't optimistic that charters can gain ground this coming year. But he sees one hope for their future. As Louisiana relies on dozens of new charter schools to help rebuild New Orleans, he hopes African-Americans with firsthand experience of charter schools will convince fellow African-Americans in neighboring Mississippi to give them a try.

Charters aren't the only reform option being pushed in the state. Bounds, for instance, wants to restructure high schools into "workforce development centers." Every student, starting in ninth grade, would, with guidance, pursue one of seven career pathways.

The state Department of Education is also rolling out this fall new achievement standards in math, reading, language arts, and science. There's no doubt that stronger standards are needed in math and science-the Fordham Foundation scored the state's math standards a D and its science standards an F.

Still, as he seeks funding from an already strained state budget in the coming year, Bounds expects to wage an uphill battle in the legislature and beyond. "Education isn't valued in this state as highly as it needs to be," Bounds says.

Republican Governor Haley Barbour, however, predicts a bright future for reform. His approach is to give students more options by requiring that all have access to Advanced Placement courses, other college- level courses they can take for high school credit, and online courses in subject areas not otherwise offered at their schools.

Alternative certification also has backers in the state. Mississippi boasts three alternate routes to the classroom, including one that enables recent college graduates from around the country to serve two years in the Delta through Teach for America.

Even so, some in Mississippi education wonder whether the state has enough grit and wherewithal to require students to face high expectations. Currently, Mississippi's state tests are among the easiest in the nation. (Tougher statewide tests take effect this fall. According to Bounds, they are to be more closely aligned to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.) Moreover, though districts can implement higher standards if they so choose, few will do so in a state where more than half of district superintendents are elected to the position, according to Gerald Hasselman, associate professor of education at Mississippi College.

"If you're elected, you can't make too many hard decisions if you want to keep your job," Hasselman says. Yet people like having power to elect their superintendent, he adds, so that element of the status quo isn't likely to change.

Federal pressure under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is now the driving force for higher academic standards in Mississippi, according to Representative Wanda Jennings (R), who says, "It's not up to the state anymore." But Mississippi has found ways to lower the bar for NCLB, too: in 2004-05, just 11 percent of the state's 1,055 schools ranked as "needing improvement" for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress according to preliminary data. That's in spite of the state having some of the lowest national achievement scores in the nation.

In the meantime, Hasselman worries that too often, "we tell kids they're doing OK when they're not doing OK." And because few want to hear the hard truth, he expects conditions to stay largely the same.

"It's easy to tell the emperor that he's got nice clothes," Hasselman says. "In this state, the emperor is butt naked, but nobody wants to tell him that."

 

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