Posted on 12/23/2025 3:35:45 AM PST by CFW
The education story of the year has been the “Southern Surge.” An intrepid group of southern states have led the nation in post-pandemic recovery. In a decade, Mississippi moved from 49th to seventh in the nation on fourth-grade reading scores, despite remaining the poorest state. According to Harvard’s 2024 Education Recovery Scorecard, Louisiana is the only state to recover to 2019 achievement levels in both reading and math, while Alabama matched pre-Covid scores in fourth-grade math alone. All other states continue to lag prior achievement levels.
Much of this success has rightly been credited to a handful of commonsense reforms: early literacy laws that require the use of phonics, the tightening of retention and promotion policies, universal literacy screeners in early grades, and rigorous curricula. But another factor may be these states’ strict disciplinary policies. The states seeing the greatest gains academically are also the ones doing the most to bring order and stability to their schools.
[snip]
These different approaches show in the data, beginning with how likely schools are to use punishments. For example, though Alabama and Washington report incidents to the Department of Education’s CRDC at similar rates, Alabama suspends students roughly two to three times as often as Washington. .....
[snip]
States like Alabama and Tennessee have recently spearheaded laws that give teachers more authority to remove unruly students from the classroom and compel administrators to impose more consequences. These laws faced opposition from equity advocates, but they go a long way toward explaining why classroom disorder didn’t worsen in the South, and why educational outcomes for poor students have improved so dramatically there—the very thing equity hawks claim to want.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
I read an article the other day that said southern colleges are also seeing a surge in applications. Students are leaving the northern "woke" colleges and applying to the more conservative southern SEC schools.
Let’s put it this way—rural southern schools which are not woke outpace northern schools.
Keeping the porn out? Wild guess.
Bkmk
More southern school districts are looking at Mississippi’s results and replicating them in their own districts. More and more states are requiring a return to phonics in reading instruction (it’s about time). Next they need to do away with the “new” math.
If you spend more time teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, instead of DEI slogans, students are naturally going to do better.
And of course, requiring civil behavior or risk expulsion from unruly students improves the learning experience for all students.
They are treated as sacred cows and behave accordingly.
One student can hijack an entire class with the teacher, rather than the student, fearing retribution from Administration.
Lived it!
I “lived it” as well and it was the 1970’s!!
Didn’t “shut down for two weeks(YEARS) to flatten the curve”
Our local schools here in rural MO shut down for two weeks like most things did for COVID. Then most everything went back to normal aside from all the plexiglas and arrows on the floor that we ignored.
Couple of the schools closed for another week later on when they had outbreaks. One school only shut down a single grade for a week.
The Northern commies with their unionized teachers shut down for two years. Southern schools used to generally be a year behind Northern schools. Two year shut down flipped that.
My daughter did her student teaching in Mississippi and loved it. In over 20 years of teaching and three states, Mississippi had the most eager learners. It was the billions spent on NCLB testing No Child Left Behind just another federal money scam.
My grandkids go to high school in Massachusetts and have either left for college or are about to. Two chose Southern colleges and the other two are looking exclusively at colleges in the South. The other 3 are in colleges in Southern CA. and Connecticut.
No they haven’t!
I don’t know, but I don’t think our schools in central midwest shut down very long. I was hospitalized with severe Covid, but from what I could see, we weren’t shut down too long. There was too much malarkey being spread about Covid as to masks & crap like that. Some people bought into it, but I don’t think that most did.
Is is really a Southern “surge”? Or is it that the Yankees have lost it?
The article answers that.
I personally know of a couple of parents from the NorthEast whose children all made the choice to go to Southern colleges because of the wokeness, etc. in Northern and Ivy League schools. I also know of parents whose adult kids in their 20’s that are moving to the South to escape the BS in the North and Wrst Coast. It’s a real “thing”.
Yes, they have.
Per capita cost per taxpayer, not per pupil.
What kind of wacked measurement is that? Just showing off the high deadbeat-to-baby ratio in the South?
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