Despite the valid criticism of Joseph Campbell’s popular work and Carl Jung as a psychologist, my high school English students both enjoyed and benefited from reading about Campbell’s accessible analysis of myth and his template for the hero’s journey.
Since these students were either tracking toward or in Advanced Placement Literature, they would be assessed on the AP test on their ability to analyze literature within a fairly narrow (and even reductive) New Criticism approach to draw meaning from fiction and poetry.
What helped them, I think, was having complicated ideas applied to pop culture (Star Wars, for example) and being given some structure for anticipating how authors create meaning in texts.
One of the most compelling concepts they gained from these entry points was the archetype. As a Jungian concept, the archetype is essentially biological, wired into the mind, and according to Campbell applying Jung, the result is what many people argue is universality (although what is often framed as “universal” is simply norms of a dominant culture).
The archetype of the hero, then, is repeated across religions and narratives.
The False Promise of Education “Miracles”
Since the 1990s, in education reform, an archetype has developed, the education “miracle,” which is both extremely compelling and ultimately the source of false promises (except for political and celebrity status gained):
The 1990s had the Texas “miracle,” the launching pad for George W. Bush from governor of Texas to president of the US.
From the late 1990s into the 2000s, the Florida “miracle” promised to replicate the education bona fides of Jeb Bush like his brother, hoping for but falling short of the White House.
The early 2000s boosted the career of Arne Duncan from the architect of the Chicago “miracle” to Secretary of Education in the Obama administration.
By the late 2000s, the Harlem “miracle” was popularized in the media and endorsed by Obama, heralding Geoffrey Canada in the documentary Waiting for Superman.
And currently, again spurred by the media, the Mississippi “miracle” grew out of a 2019 article and then a podcast, Sold a Story, boosting the career of Emily Hanford, who received an Education Writer’s Association award early in the process. [Note that Hanford introduced a smaller “miracle” school from Pennsylvania in her equally praised 2018 Hard Words.]
Some key elements recur in these education “miracles.”
First, each of these “miracles” received nearly uncritical media, political, and popular support. Miracle stories are incredibly compelling in the US because they are about schools, teachers, and students “beating the odds.”
Next, these “miracle” stories accidentally do show something important: The crisis/miracle/reform cycle never works because within a decade or two we go right back to another crisis/miracle/reform agenda (eerily different and almost exactly the same).
At the core of the “miracles” is standardized testing; occasionally the “miracle” is grounded in state testing (Texas) but a recurring test presence is NAEP (the Mississippi “miracle” was declared because Mississippi had outlier reading scores on grade 4 NAEP in 2019).
A final, and most damning, pattern in the “miracle” archetype is that they all are, at best, overstated and misleading, and, at worst, false.
Regretfully, the analyses by scholars always follow the declaration of “miracle,” and often remain in the scholarly world or come so late that almost no one cares (and almost no one enjoys saying these “miracles” are not true since they include our schools, teachers, and students).
Here is an overview of the debunked and discredited “miracles” from above:
Texas “miracle”: Haney, W. (2000). The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 8, 41. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v8n41.2000
Florida “miracle”: Jasper, K., Carter, C., Triscari, R., & Valesky, T. (2017, January 9). The effects of the mandated third grade retention on standard diploma acquisition and student outcome over time: A policy analysis of Florida’s A+ Plan. Policy Analysis. https://theoptoutfloridanetwork.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/e782a-executivesummary.pdf
Chicago “miracle”: Questioning the “Chicago Miracle,” Andrew J. Coulson
Harlem “miracle”: Followup on Fryer/Dobbie study of “Harlem miracle”; Beneath the Veil of Inadequate Cost Analyses: What do Roland Fryer’s School Reform Studies Really Tell Us? (if anything), Bruce Baker
Mississippi “miracle” [and Pennsylvania school in Hard Words]: On education miracles in general (and those in Mississippi in particular), Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky and Daniel H. Robinson [Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper, Gerald Coles] [1]
Before moving to the problematic role of test analysis in “miracle” claims, I agree with the closing comment on the concerns raised about the Harlem “miracle”: “We feel that the best response to success, in an area such as this one, is not to immediately celebrate and pour in funding; it’s to investigate further.”
Regretfully, “miracle” stories often usher in policy way before anyone “investigate[s] further.”
Misunderstanding Standardized Test Scores
From test scores in Pennsylvania to NAEP score in Mississippi, the current reading crisis, “science of reading” policy response, and model “miracle” in the form of Mississippi (ExcelinEd, Jeb Bush’s think tank, provides states a reading legislation template, and notably, the Mississippi reform depends heavily on grade retention as Florida did, does) reflects the core importance and problems with test data analysis and claims in the crisis/miracle/reform approach to education.
Here, I will focus on Mississippi, but these patterns are across all of these “miracles.”
The origin story of the Mississippi “miracle” almost reads like parody. In the New York Times (no less), Emily Hanford notes Mississippi—historically at the bottom of education in the US—had outlier exceptional 2019 NAEP grade 4 reading scores, including this odd section:
What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores [emphasis added], but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.
From this valid statement, however, Hanford and hundreds of other journalists, ed reformers, commercial reading program marketers, and politicians have explicitly known for sure what absolutely no one has proven through, ironically, scientific research—that the “science of reading” raises reading proficiency in students.
Here and across the media use of NAEP scores, most people have misrepresented and misunderstood NAEP achievement levels as well as “reading proficiency.” States use “proficient” as an achievement level equal to NAEP “basic,” but there is no uniform definition of “grade level” reading in the US and no uniform ways to measure reading from state to state or state to NAEP.
In short, reading tests are a mess.
Next, advocates of the Mississippi “miracle” started by focusing on average NAEP grade 4 reading scores, but have begun to change what test data matter as some have noted problems with the story: Mississippi (like Florida) has exceptional grade 4 reading scores, but by grade 8, those scores are back at the bottom.
So the game has begun to change.
Some have begun adjusting test scores by poverty and demographics, establishing Mississippi as the top state in the US. The ugly aspect of this is that a statistical technique doesn’t remove those students from poverty and racism, but this approach feeds not addressing poverty and racism.
Others have begun to compare Black student scores in Mississippi with other states, but again focusing only on grade 4.
This is because the “miracle” falls apart when you add in grade 8, even if you continue to compare Black students across states:
Another test score shift and trick (one that occurs in the school report card debates) is to either focus on raw scores or on score improvements.
High performers prefer raw scores, and low performers (historically Mississippi) prefer improvement measures since it is easier for low performers to improve.
While both data points can be useful, it is important to understand that often these “improvement measures” are between different populations of students. The best analysis may be tracking a population of students across many years for improvement, but this is rarely done and impossible for NAEP, which uses random sampling.
The short version of the test problem in “miracle” school stories is to return to the Coles quote in the subhead: “[M]uch of it is contrived evidence to ‘prove’ pre-existing conclusions.”
The key flaw in the “miracle” story is always that test scores are used to prove what advocates already believe, and not to draw valid (and complicated) conclusions from that data.
Since A Nation at Risk and then magnified by the George W. Bush Texas “miracle” to NCLB era, ed reform has been mostly about politics and ideology, not improving the learning and lives of school-aged children in the US.
Education “miracles” make for compelling news articles, documentaries, and podcasts; however, this is a truism that we seem to forget: If it seems to be to good to be true, it is probably neither good nor true.
As Campbell would warn, leave the miracles to fiction, and choose instead to be firmly grounded in the complicated reality before us. And be prepared when the factual truth isn’t what you had hoped for.
Note
[1] See this example of changing population of students being tested to distort high-accountability data: Moving Children, Distorting Data: Changes in Testing of Students with Disabilities in Connecticut from 2000–2013, Robert Cotto
Recommended
Thomas, P.L. (2016). Miracle schools or political scam? In W.J. Mathis & T.M. Trujillo, Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA. Charlotte, NC: IAP.
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