Public discourse on education in the US has a long and tedious history of shouting either “crisis” or “miracle” while often basing both of those on misunderstanding or willing misrepresenting students, teacher, and public schools.

Politicians and the media, it seems, are fatally committed to crisis/miracle discourse—especially when the topic is student reading proficiency.

In the current Reading Crisis cycle that has it roots in 2018/2019 media narratives about failed reading instruction and repeated misunderstanding about NAEP reading data, the miracle-of-the-moment is Mississippi, often held up as a template for other states to follow.

As I have detailed, Mississippi reading reform is more mirage than miracle, and states should be skeptical about rushing to (again) adopt copy-cat legislation.

While the Mississippi “miracle” story continues to be sold, a new and insidious version of that story has emerged with an ugly undercurrent of the Trump/MAGA playbook—pitting Red v. Blue states at the expense of students.

The new combatants in the Reading War are Mississippi versus California (see HERE and HERE).

Several problems exist with comparing and then pitting MS against CA in terms of student achievement and teaching/schooling; however, let’s start with the big picture context of poverty and measurable student achievement.

As the US spirals toward disrupting SNAP and punishing people living in poverty, it is worth noting that the largest group in poverty is children, who lack economic or political power:

Related, then, in 2024, Maroun and Tienken replicated a research conclusion that has existed for decades, finding the following:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.

Further, they recommend:

Although some education policy makers in the United States claim that standardized test results are an important component of a comprehensive system of educational quality control, the results from decades of research on the topic suggest otherwise. The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

Thus, the fundamental problem with comparing MS and CA is the use of NAEP and other testing data to make broad claims and draw conclusions about educational success or failures.

Next, comparing MS and CA falls into the culture of poverty trap by treating poverty as monolithic.

While both MS and CA have significant populations of students in poverty, MS faces racialized and significantly rural poverty challenges while CA confronts a multilingual and racialized poverty challenge that is both urban and rural.

These are not the same, and frankly, since CA has nearly half of the student population as multilingual learners, reading proficiency is incredibly complicated to address in the context of racial inequity as well as poverty.

Even acknowledging those differences, most of the MS/CA comparisons are carelessly simplistic; consider the reading trends for both states based on NAEP grade 4, the most common basis for media discourse about reading:

Since 1998, both states saw growth with CA achieving a more steady improvement. However, there is no data-based evidence of a reading crisis for either state or across the US. [Note that MS has had two spikes in growth, one being well before the so-called MS model, again suggesting that ascribing “miracle” to the current model is misguided.]

MS and CA do demonstrate that educational success and failure are linked to many factors, notably the Covid-dip. That many factors impact student achievement—and that almost 2/3rds of those factors are beyond the walls of schools—discounts claims recently that the MS model, which includes a change in instruction and teacher training, is some sort of silver-bullet for success.

Research shows that only grade retention is causally linked to higher test scores, however.

Education reform, including reading reform, is highly political and even politicized in the US. Neither political leaders nor media are immune to knee-jerk declarations of crisis or miracles.

The reading achievement in neither MS nor CA makes a case for red/blue political theater—unless you have your agenda set regardless of the evidence.

Both MS and CA face tremendous hurdles when teaching literacy in the context of poverty, racism, and multilingual learners. Those hurdles are made more complicated by silly political games, especially when those games are designed to ignore the most important data about the impact of out-of-school factors on student achievement.

One valid comparison between MS and CA is that when the Washington Post falsely claimed CA had adopted the MS model, Martha Hernandez responded by highlighting the unique nature of CA’s needs:

Let’s be clear, AB 1454 is not about narrowing literacy instruction to one approach. Rather, it’s about realizing California’s long-standing, comprehensive vision for literacy that meets the needs of all students — including our state’s 1.1 million English learners.

The bill has been described in the media as California’s new “science of reading” bill, but this shorthand fails to accurately reflect the legislation’s comprehensive scope and intention.

MS, on the other hand, seems determined to lean into the politics of their model, a conservative politics that uses the red/blue tensions to further ideological agendas.

Our students deserve not only better social and educational reform but also not being used as a political football by adults who should know better.