I’m Old Enough to Remember When the Idea of Mississippi Schools Being Top Notch Would Be a Joke

Posted: May 8, 2025 by datechguy in education
Tags: ,

Not anymore:

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.

When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results2 for student demographics, this is where Mississippi ranked:

  • Fourth grade math: 1st
  • Fourth grade reading: 1st
  • Eighth grade math: 1st
  • Eighth grade reading: 4th

And they’re not alone:

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.

So how did this happen?

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.

Five Quick Thoughts Under the Fedora Trump Completely Unafraid, Unexpectedly again, Anti Catholics Upset, A Minority View and A Big Baseball Surprise

Posted: May 4, 2025 by datechguy in baseball, dynasty baseball, economy, fun, under the fedora
Tags: , , ,

It’s amazing watching Donald Trump constantly owning the MSM during hostile interviews.

What a difference when you don’t need them for exposure.

During the Biden years it was constant that various figures kept coming in lower than “expert” expectations, and then were revised down months later.

We’re only 3 months into Trump and already we’ve had two months of Trump beating “expert” expectations.

And no I’m not sick of winning.

The funniest thing about the Trump as Pope thing isn’t JD. Vance’s excellent response to Bill Kristol.

The funniest thing about the Trump as Pope thing is the people acting the most insulted are those who hate the church the most.

Not any outrage over Washington state passing a law to violate the seal of confession but a Trump as Pope image, vapors!

I might be in the minority here but I think this season of Doctor Who has been surprisingly good.

There hasn’t been a lot of preaching or woke just stories and when Davies team decides they want to tell a good story they are certainly capable of doing so.

Let’s hope this continues.

Finally I haven’t written much about my 1973 baseball league but with 57 games to go I find myself two games up leading my division thanks to a 7-3 run by me and a 1-9 run by the team that was ahead of me.

In the 5 years of our league no team has ever repeated as a division winner although a few have managed to make the playoffs in multiple years in a row. This difficulty is by design is VERY unusual for a team to repeat in this league

Mind you every other division winner has a better record than me as do 2 wild card teams so if I hold on I don’t know if I’ll get anywhere but still, not bad at all!

The Media Has Been Reduced to Lying to Themselves

Posted: April 27, 2025 by datechguy in media

Count Rugen: Come, Sir, we must get you to your ship.

Westley: [smiles] We are men of action. Lies do not become us.

Count Rugen: Well spoken, Sir

The Princess Bride 1987

If you look anywhere in the media you repeatedly see the MSM selling the idea that Trump’s first 100 days were a failure, that Pete Hegseth is getting ready to resign, that the trade deals are all failing and that Trump voters are deserting him in droves.

Alas none of this is true and more importantly Trump voters who can be confirmed as Trump voters and not as nameless trolls on twitter are all in:

Luntz focus group of Trump voters to a man were still with him and Luntz couldn’t believe it.

The media narrative has long since reached its sell by date to conservatives and are instead trying to convince voters of the left that the Trump administration is about to fall and to convince themselves that they are on the winning path.

They should instead take this advice from Robert Stacy McCain on covering stories:

To be truly objective, you have to be able to get enough distance from your personal feelings in order to concentrate on the Three Rules of Journalism: Accuracy, accuracy and accuracy.

In recent months, we’ve witnessed a parade of big-time journalists trying to explain how they somehow overlooked a rather important fact, namely that Joe Biden was far gone in a state of senile dementia. Oh, these journalists tell us now, they were deceived — victims of a conspiratorial cover-up in the White House — even while many millions of ordinary Americans were pointing to the obvious evidence of Biden’s senility and shouting the truth on Twitter, Facebook, etc. These same big-time journalists who, since the election, have freely admitted the truth about Biden’s decayed mental condition, had previously denounced the truth-tellers as agents of a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. We were told that videos of Biden’s bumbling and stumbling were “cheap fakes,” and yet now — when the election is over, and there is no longer any advantage to the Democratic Party lost by admitting that Biden’s was unfit to serve as president — these journalists expect us to take them seriously when they claim they had no idea about it, back when the truth mattered most.

They have sold their souls to the Democratic Party, and whatever the Devil paid them, it was more than their filthy souls were worth.

Have I digressed into another pointless tangent? Perhaps so, but my point is that too many journalists got into this business for the wrong reason. They think of themselves as secular missionaries with a pious duty to “make a difference.” Well, hey, sweetheart, how about you just try to get the facts right, collect your paycheck and go have a beer?

If you’re not out to report the facts, you’re not reporting you’re selling something and that why Scott Jennings can beat a room full of CNN psychopaths’ every time, because he doesn’t have to sell anything, all he needs to do is tell the truth.

DaTechGuy Unexpectedly on the Radio Saturday 8-11 AM on WCRN’s Conservatively Speaking UPDATE: Or not

Posted: April 24, 2025 by datechguy in DaTechGuy on DaRadio
Tags: , ,

Michael Corleone: Just when I thought I was out they pull me back in.

Godfather 3 1990

Just got a call from my old radio partner Joe Mangiacotti  who is in charge these days at WCRN my old stomping ground.

Apparently old friend Mike Wade is ill and they needed a fill in host to avoid playing a repeat of a previous show and I hate to let down a friend who asks so Saturday Morning it will be 2012 all over again as I’ll be doing 3 hours on WCRN talking about the news of the week.

Should be fun.

Update: Then again it’s just possible that after two days of promoting a show that I was asked to do I might get to the station a half hour before the show and the door to find the building locked.

It’s further possible that after sending direct messages and using a borrowed phone I get no response so I just might wait till about 8:15 figuring they can play filler till then only to notice the door automatically unlock at 8 am at which time it’s likely I would run up the stairs, dash down the hallway and hurry into the studio at the nick of time to do the show only to find that nobody has told the engineer that I’m hosting today and it’s might even transpire that said engineer refuses to call either the station manager who asked me to fill in or the normal host of the show to confirm I’m supposed to be there so in that eventuality I would end up hearing home in a driving rain having wasted two days prepping for and promoting a show that never happens while wasting the morning of my day off for no purpose.

But how likely is that?

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