So there’s your formula: Select really excellent, high-quality curricula and aggressively teach teachers how to use those curricula instead of putting them through generic “skills” training that won’t impact their classroom practices much. Measure how well students, schools, and districts are doing and hold back kids who aren’t reading at the end of third grade. –Kelsey Piper
That’s Kelsey Piper on The Argument, in her essay, “Illiteracy is a policy choice.” Here, her argument is that the reading scores of American schoolchildren are slipping into the abyss, except for… Mississippi?
Consider this the latest chapter of the “Mississippi Miracle,” which has seen the state climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally. This rise has received a great deal of coverage in publications ranging from The New York Times to The New York Post. And yet, it still feels as if what’s taking place in the Deep South still has been grossly undersold.
First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements.
Second, many people who aren’t too focused on education policy seem to imagine Mississippi has simply stopped underperforming, that they’re now doing about as well as everyone else.
This is not true. They haven’t just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. –Kelsey Piper
I launch all of my books at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. They are by far and away the most professional bookstore I’ve ever had the privilege of signing at and due to the extraordinary efforts over time of their owner and proprietor, Barbara Peters, and her monthly BookNews they have a mailing list of customers from around the world. I remember standing in the minuscule little mailing room in the back of their first store, watching as a fax machine printed out orders one after the other, the first from Germany, the second from Brazil, the third from Japan. If I have a fan in Timbuktu who wants the new book, the PP can get it to them.
But here’s the thing. When the audience gathers at the PP, I look around and see almost uniformly gray hairs. The [very] few younger people present are there almost invariably to buy books for their parents or grandparents.
I’m grateful as hell anytime anyone shows up at all, and that fans buy my books in a volume large enough for me to pay my grocery bill. But I’m worried that my audience (and the audience of my fellow writers and for writers to come) is aging out and is not being replaced by new generations of readers.
I’m familiar with all the excuses, which usually involve too much time spent exclusively on one screen or another. But I think there’s another reason.
Piper is right. My generation was the last one that was taught how to read.
This does not augur well for the future of my profession. Fortunately, Mississippi (and Tennessee and Louisiana) are showing us how to get back to the basics. Go here to read about it, and maybe advocate for the program with your state legislators. You’ll be right behind me.
But for the government to take on its rightful role is clearly going to require pressure from its constituents. So that’s my advice to every reader who isn’t a policymaker — move to Mississippi for better education, or else demand that your state copy Mississippi’s homework. –Kelsey Piper
#thiswritinglife Chatter Illiteracy is a policy choice Mississippi Miracle Poisoned Pen Bookstore reading