Mississippi has become the fastest improving school system in the country.
You read that right. Mississippi is taking names.
In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi.1 By 2024, only four states had fewer.
Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama climbed the charts because they focused on core academic instruction when much of the country used ESSA as an excuse to focus on anything and everything else. It paid off.
How did Mississippi go from 49th in the country a decade ago to near the top today? And what can other states learn from it?
According to a recent piece by Grace Brazeale, a policy associate with the advocacy group Mississippi First, the state implemented a series of changes starting with the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. That law funded the state department of education to hire, train and deploy literacy coaches to the 50 lowest-performing schools. It also required schools to administer universal screenings to identify students with reading deficiencies early and to communicate those results to parents, and it required schools to hold back students who were not reaching a certain threshold by third grade.
Remember for all my life Mississippi was a punchline now it’s a success story for education. Amazing what can happen when you don’t focus on being woke and deal with reading and writing. I’ll give Glenn Reynolds the last word:
To be fair, for nearly all those years when Mississippi was a joke, it was ruled by Democrats.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” Fyodor Dostoevsky.
“‘Many are the strange chances of the world,” said Mithrandir, “and help shall oft come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.'” The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien.
A blockbuster story by the Wall Street Journal last week laid bare what most readers of Da Tech Guy have known since 2019. That Joe Biden was senile and in not in any way able to serve as president.
The mainstream media, which claims to be the protector of the public and the teller of the truth, either ignored, minimized, or on occasion, even verbally attacked people who claimed otherwise.
We were right, they were wrong.
The optics and stakes are different in Chicago, and in one way, the stakes are higher, as opposed to the Biden so-called presidency. Because Brandon Johnson, who was a defund the police radical in 2020, is mayor of Chicago and he’s ultimately in charge of public safety 2.7 million Chicagoans.
And Johnson minimizes criminality. But he maximizes racial discord, frequently turning criticism of him as a bigoted attack.
After a mini-riot last year, which apologists call “street takeovers,” Branjo dismissed the lawlessness. “They’re young, sometimes they make silly decisions,” he said. Johnson also stressed that it was wrong to “demonize” these real-life droogs.
The Wall Street Journal says Johnson is America’s worst mayor.
Prior to his election as mayor, Johnson was Cook County board commissioner, which is a part-time job. The board is a rubber-stamp body for Cook County Board president, Boss Toni Preckwinkle, the chair of the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, aka, the Chicago Machine.
Johnson was also a longtime paid organizer–and that means radical activist–for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union. It was their money–and their door-knockers–who put Branjo into the mayor’s office.
Yesterday, I saw this X post from former Chicago Tribune columnist, Eric Zorn, a liberal.
What an embarrassing failure @ChicagosMayor has turned out to be. This is shamefully hamhanded and uncollaborative.
Two days ago, in a classic Friday news dump stunt–and five days before Christmas–the Board of Education, all of whom were recently named by Johnson to replace the other members Johnson named, fired Chicago Public Schools CPO Pedro Martinez. That old board refused to fire Martinez, a Lori Lightfoot holdeover, because he stood his ground by refusing to take out a “payday” loan to pay for big raises for Chicago Teachers Union members.
Next month, per a new state law, a new board replaces the not-so-old board.
If Zorn warned about Johnson shilling for the Chicago Teachers Union over the needs of Chicagoans, I somehow missed it. I don’t recall a single mainstream, meaning liberal, Chicago journalist sounding the alarm that a leftist fox would soon be guarding the henhouse.
However, many Chicagoans, most of whom likely voted for Johnson’s moderate opponent, Paul Vallas, saw this disaster coming. There just were not enough of them to prevent this fiasco.
Martinez was fired Friday night, but he may stick around for six more months.
The national media didn’t do its job vetting a sick old man running for president. And it mostly ignored Senile Joe’s many senior moments.
The Chicago media looked the other way as Branjo successfully campaigned for mayor.
But the warning signs were obvious.
A Chicago alderwoman, Silvana Tabares, summed up Johnson and his Board of Education debacle perfectly.
“You’re not just firing a CEO. You are intentionally clearing a way to saddle taxpayers with billions in costs, and the district and yourselves personally with costly litigation,” the alderwoman said. “You are being used. The mayor is a walking conflict of interest.”
I saw it coming and so did many others: Johnson is indeed a walking conflict of interest.
The Chicago media is an embarrassing failure.
Which brings me to this point: Is the local media in other towns and cities as bad as it is in Chicago?
Are these “guardians,” like Brandon Johnson, in fact foxes guarding the hen houses?
The hateful group’s four-page spread includes no bylines or any information connecting the articles to their respective authors, nor is there any solicitation for outside perspectives or reactions from readers.
The only words on the front-page masthead is a quote from a poem by woke extremist scholar Sophia Armen, which reads, “You, genocider — who remembers you?”
It almost goes without saying that I disapprove of the opinions of this paper and the people who write and distribute it on campus.
That being said I completely approve of this method of expressing these at best misguided and at worst violently anti-Semitic opinions.
It’s not occupying buildings or disrupting classing or any form of physical violence. It’s expressing their opinion is an open way and a person is not required to own or read said opinion if they don’t want to.
In short it’s making an argument and frankly there is no reason why such a weak argument can’t be countered by people making a counter argument.
By all means feel free to attack the paper and those who write and distribute it but I’m with Sarah Hoyt when she says:
FREE SPEECH INCLUDES THE RIGHT TO PUBLICLY EXPOSE YOURSELVES AS A**HOLES
The 1st Amendment covers everybody. Even A**holes. Full stop.
Johnson was a longtime paid organizer for the radical Chicago Teachers Union. And by the way, when someone calls himself an organizer, consider that a code word for left-wing radical. He was also Cook County Commissioner, a part-time job. Cook County government doesn’t have much power.
Branjo is an empty suit with an empty head.
Chicago is broke, thanks to fiscal mismanagement by Richard M. Daley, Chicago is essentially bankrupt. Its municipal pension funds are the worst funded in the nation.
Daley belongs in that worst mayors ever list too.
But the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson’s former employer and the chief financial backer of his mayoral campaign, wants a big raise for teachers. To pay for that, as well as a looming pension bill for non-teacher CPS employees, Branjo ordered the CEO of CPS, Pedro Martinez, to take out what the media is collectively calling a high interest “payday loan” to pay for both. CPS faces a $500 million dollar deficit while Chicago proper faces a nearly $1 billion deficit. CPS bonds are rated as junk.
Martinez said no to the mayor, and in solidarity with him, the entire school board, all seven of them Johnson appointees, resigned, in short, the Friday Afternoon Massacre.
In Brandon Johnson’s Chicago, things can always get worse.
Johnson quickly replaced the school board with seven new members, who have so far done nothing. Martinez hasn’t been fired and no payday loan has been taken out. In a few weeks, that board will be replaced with a hybrid board, half elected—the election is this week–and half appointed by Johnson.
Apparently, there is no vetting at Chicago’s City Hall. Competence is absent too.
Another of Branjo’s recent board appointees, Olga Bautista–a socialist–faces accusations of anti-semitism, which led Illinois’ treasurer, Susana Mendoza, a Democrat, to comment on X, “Springfield should intervene. There clearly needs to be Chgo City Council vetting, oversight & consent of these mayoral appointments to the Chgo Public School Board. Antisemites should be automatically disqualified, full stop. As should socialists calling for the fall of the U.S.”
Mendoza, a Democrat, is rumored to be considering a mayoral run in 2027.
Meanwhile, another radical left-winger, Kennedy Bartley, a top Branjo aide who is in charge of lobbying with other public officials, including the City Council, on behalf of the mayor, has called Chicago Police officers “f*cking pigs” and has made anti-Semitic comments on social media. She’s still on the job.
Johnson is rumored to have a police detail of 125-150 officers.
Clearly, being an anti-Semite, or at the very least, anti-Israel, is on the checklist to be included in leftist government employment circles.
And incompetence is on that checklist too.
As I’ve mentioned a few times at DaTechGuy, the warning signs were all there with Brandon Johnson. Chicagoans voted him in anyway.
While Chicago has some able aldermen–Brendan Reilly, Anthony Beale, and Ray Lopez come to mind–there are many leftist losers there too.
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