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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.

Gove's reforms in England, as well as the recent improvements to reading education in Mississippi and other southern red states copying them suggest that it is less difficult than you would expect.

I'm ignorant about Mississippi, but I can only assume that the teacher's unions don't have the power they have in NY and Chicago.

That's not really an easily fixable problem once entrenched. Though the one in Chicago seems to have burned its popularity due to being particularly brazen with Brandon Johnson. On the other hand, they got what they wanted.

I don't think those examples actually touch on the point of difficulty, which is convincing every state to copy Mississippi in terms of whatever it is they did that caused improvements.

If Mississippi consistently produces better educated people than other states that sounds like a pretty huge advantage. I can imagine parents would want to move there to secure a better future for their kids, and companies would like to recruit the people living there.

That seems like a pretty good incentive for other states to follow suit.

I doubt it. School quality being better than other states' doesn't imply producing better educated people than other states, it implies producing a better delta in educated status compared to other states, controlled for the children's potential ceiling, and my guess is that both the floor and the ceiling for children in Mississippi are lower than for most other states. It is also but one of many, MANY dimensions by which parents measure their likelihood of moving to the state, and my guess is that Mississippi has a lot of negatives in other very important dimensions. Furthermore, even if those weren't true, this is the kind of thing that would take at least a decade to see confirmation on any meaningful differences in output, which means even more time before people start moving in meaningful numbers, and that gives plenty of time for people in other states to find and come up with excuses for why the differences in output, as measured by the education level of public HS graduates, isn't due to Mississippi's specific methods of educating.

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