Mississippi Students Outperform NJ for Less than Half the Price. Nobel Laureate Points the Finger at Teachers Unions – Like the NJEA

Kudos to Matt Rooney of Save Jersey for looking beyond the NJEA’s blanket claim about New Jersey having “the best public schools in America” and digging into education statistics to draw his own conclusions. Rooney rightly focuses on Mississippi because it had long been ranked as the state with the worst education system but has reversed that: Mississippi 4th-graders now rank 9th in reading and 16th in math (up from 49th and 50th, respectively, in 2013). More importantly, Mississippi ranks 1st in the nation for its 4th-grade reading and math gains. Rooney outlines all the efforts the state has made to aid its struggling students, many of who are low-income. That’s quite a contrast with New Jersey, where the academic achievement of its large cohort of high-income students effaces the poor performance of its low-income students, with the NJEA preferring to elide over the achievement gap.

When adjusted for demographics, Mississippi is #1, New Jersey #16. But we would add this is only half the story. As our friends at NJEdReport accurately stated: New Jersey’s #1 ranking is due to New Jersey’s “large cohort of high-income students who score very well on standardized tests, which skews averages and effaces the academic outcomes of low-income students, disproportionately Black and Brown.” Mississippi does not have a large cohort of high-income students to skew its averages.

That’s where the Urban Institute‘s demographically-adjusted rankings come in. Their study compared like-students with like students; that is, high-income students with high-income students and low-income ones with low-income ones. The result: Mississippi outscored New Jersey in ALL categories. That is, Mississippi students — both high- and low-income — outscored New Jersey students in 4th-grade math and reading as well as 8th-grade math and reading. Overall, Mississippi was ranked 1st; New Jersey 16th.*

At less than half the price. What really should wake New Jerseyans up is what Mississippi and New Jersey spend on education. Rooney notes that Mississippi achieved this remarkable turnaround despite being an economically poor state and spending less than half of what New Jersey spends per capita: $12,324 vs. $27,234, respectively, according to US Census data.

Nobel Prize winner sounds alarm over the large number of students left behind. So why does New Jersey spend so much more while underperforming lower-spending states like Mississippi? Once again, NJEdReport provides an answer from Tyler Cowen’s interview with Nobel Prize-winning, MIT professor Daron Acemoglu on the urgent need to focus on the education — or lack thereof — of American children. Acemoglu states that America is entering a economic age where worker skills will be essential, but “about half of people in the United States in middle school read and write a couple of grades below.” He sounds the alarm:

We’re not doing anything. We’re just giving up on these people. I think that is what really bothers me, that somehow we … have resigned ourselves to give up on the education of about a third to a half of the youth.

Acemoglu: Money is not the problem, the teachers-union-dominated education system is:

We’re spending money. We’re throwing money at it, but we’re not really dealing with the root causes. Some of that money goes to a dysfunctional education system that’s become ideological … I am, in general, … in favor of unions because labor needs to be represented, but yes, teacher unions, right now, I think they need to be reconstituted because they no longer serve children’s interest.

In other words, if we are concerned about a “dysfunctional education system,” the generally pro-union Acemoglu is pointing the finger at the teachers unions because they have become “idealogical” and “no longer serve children’s interests.”

Just like New Jersey. New Jersey is the poster-child for Acemoglu’s point. We have a very powerful, politically influential teachers union in the NJEA. We spend a great deal of money, but our achievement gap between low-income and high-income students is very real. Thanks to Wake Up Call NJ, we know the facts: for example, 60% of New Jersey 6th-graders cannot do math at grade level and almost half of high school graduates must take remedial courses in college to make up for what they did not learn in high school. (We urge you go to the website and see all the data).

But the NJEA elides over these troubling facts with its blanket claim that New Jersey has the best public schools in the nation. Just like Acemoglu said, the NJEA appears to be giving up on the (low-income) underperformers by acting like they don’t exist. That’s not serving children’s interest.

For the record, Mississippi has a very weak, non-politically influential teachers union.

*Sunlight averaged the demographically-adjusted math and reading scores for 4th- and 8th-grade. Here are the top five: MS, LA, MA, TX, and IN.