Among many problems with the media and political focus on “miracle” schools in US education is that these stories are focusing on outlier outcomes to argue they provide a template for universal education reform.
For example, Jeremy Margolis offers an interesting look at outlier success in New Hampshire:
The rural town of Hill — population 1,100 — has few of the attributes typically associated with top-performing public schools. The community’s median household income is $82,000, just 26% of adults have a college degree and roughly half of students are eligible for free and reduced lunch.
But students at Hill’s elementary school had the second best reading standardized test scores in the state last year, when adjusted for their socioeconomic status. The finding, part of a Concord Monitor analysis, came as somewhat of a surprise to even the school’s principal.
The article also includes an important graphic that centers the use of outliers (highlighted in red) as possible models for reform:
Margolis does make the mistake found in much of education journalism by focusing on outliers; however, this coverage isn’t as reductive as the current obsession with Mississippi and the Southern Surge.
Before examining the problem with outliers, and Mississippi specifically, I want to recognize that Margolis offers two important, and different, perspectives about the effective reform found in those outliers.
One is acknowledging the effectiveness of small schools.
And the other—despite the article again focusing on the “science of reading”—is key, I think:
Curriculum: Though all districts used a science-of-reading-based curriculum, there did not appear to be a specific magic bullet. Curricula ran the gamut.
Wonders from McGraw Hill and Fundations from Wilson were popular options. School leaders stressed that teachers had agency [emphasis added] to make professional decisions on how they used the curriculum materials available to them.
“There’s a lot of junk in those programs that aren’t necessary for every class,” Kivela said.
Increasingly across the US, teachers are confirming that much of the mandated “science of reading” programs are failing, in short, a lot of tax payer funds have been spent unnecessarily on “junk.”
If our national conversation on reading could shift to small schools and teacher agency, I believe we could make some progress. That is as long as we stop seeking “magic bullets” and one-size-fits-all solutions to complicated challenges.
However, at the core of the problem with outliers is that we should never use outliers to generalize or to mandate the norm.
Despite our cultural beliefs in the US about bootstrapping and rugged individualism, the reality is that low education achievement remains mostly causally linked to socioeconomic factors in students’ homes, communities and schools. [1]
High poverty and high minority schools scoring above the norm are, of course, worth applauding. But outliers will never be effective templates for universal reform because most “miracle” education reform has always failed when reformers attempt to scale that success—notably in the charter school movement.
Ironically, outliers in scientific analysis distort the ability to make generalizations, and scientific inquiry tends to remove outliers for careful analysis.
But there is another problem with the story around outlier education success, for example, Mississippi.
Mississippi, like almost all states in the US, has a proficiency cut score on state testing that correlates with the “basic” achievement level on NAEP:
Since Mississippi’s major reading reform established around 2012-2013, the state’s grade 4 reading scores on NAEP have gradually increased to about 65% of students scoring NAEP basic or above:
However, that achievement percentage is high compared to the state testing, on which students have averaged about 51% proficiency from 2019-2025; here is the most recent data:
The discrepancy between the state percentage being lower than the NAEP percentage, Mississippi retaining about the same number of students K-3 for over a decade, and Mississippi having the same race and socioeconomic achievement gaps as 1998 suggest that the so-called “science of reading” reforms (structured literacy, LETRS training, etc.) are not the cause agents for improved reading tests scores at the state or NAEP levels.
While the outlier achievement in NH seems linked to small schools and maybe teacher agency coupled with targeted professional development, assessment, and even school culture, the Mississippi scores are likely the result of changing student populations tested through grade retention.
Both Mississippi and Florida experience significant drops from grade 4 to grade 8 reading on NAEP and retain large numbers of students by policy in grade 3. Grade retention appears to be the determining factor in short term reading score gains that disappear over time.
While I must emphasize again that it is statistically and scientifically a mistake to use outlier data to make generalizations or to create templates for universal reform, I think that anyone concerned about reading proficiency would be better served by thinking about New Hampshire (or better yet, the Department of Defense schools), and stop the “miracle” school propaganda that has never served reform well.
Note
[1] Maroun, J., & Tienken, C. H. (2024). The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States. Education Sciences, 14(2), 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129
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