New England schools are failing. Time to take a lesson from Louisiana and Mississippi.

Ten years ago, New England's public schools were the envy of the country. On the Nation's Report Card, Massachusetts students led the United States across ages, subjects, and most demographic groups, despite wide achievement gaps. Vermont and New Hampshire were near the top. Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maine were in the middle of the pack. 

On the other end of the spectrum, states in the Deep South, riven by poverty and the legacy of segregation and slavery, sat at the bottom. "Thank God for Mississippi," politicians in other states said: No matter how bad their own results were, at least they weren't last. In all four of the major national tests - grades 4 and 8 math and reading - Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were near the bottom. 

But gradually, and then suddenly, that traditional order has begun to reverse...

Fourteen hundred miles southwest of the Northeast Kingdom lies another community with a conspicuous number of French last names and a memory of paper mills. Natchitoches Parish, in rural northern Louisiana, is a poor, majority-Black school system, most famous as the place Steel Magnolias was filmed.

Historically, Natchitoches was among the lowest performing school districts in Louisiana. But in the last five years, Natchitoches schools have shown incredible growth, obtaining their highest scores ever in grades 3 through 8 reading and math. While most of the nation’s education was cratering during COVID-19, according to an analysis from researchers at Harvard and Stanford, Natchitoches’ students gained more than a grade level in reading from 2019 to 2024. The analysis, which uses the NAEP as a common benchmark to make state tests comparable, places Natchitoches’ schools above the national average, likely for the first time.

Natchitoches Superintendent Grant Eloi was hired by the district in March 2020. During interviews, he bluntly told the School Board, “You’re a D district, propped up by a couple of A schools,” School Board chair Reba Phelps remembers. The schools were still shut when Eloi arrived, but he had been hired to improve them, not just reopen them.

“We said, ‘We have another public health crisis, which is our school system’,” Eloi says.“We have to act.”
On a recent Wednesday, the results of five years of action in Natchitoches were visible at L.P. Vaughn Elementary School, a low-slung brick maze of a school that serves more than 600 pupils in prekindergarten to second grade, almost all of them Black and poor.

In a first-grade classroom, teacher Laura Rogers sat at the semicircular “teacher table” with four students arrayed around her. Elsewhere in the brightly-colored classroom, other groups of children worked independently or read picture books.

Rogers glanced at her notes, then slowly enunciated a simple word, “gap,” careful not to let her Southern drawl stretch it into two syllables. Rogers asked them to think carefully about the word. Angel Angeles, a shy boy at one end, covered his face with his hands to think, then hesitantly raised them in front of him as if in prayer when Rogers told them to bring out their “choppers” to break down the word.

In the middle, Brooklyn Johnson strained over the table, as if it physically hurt her to hold in what she knew. “A!” she announced, when Rogers asked what letter produces the middle sound in “gap.”

Rogers and the students sliced their “choppers” vertically through the air to cut apart “g,” “a,” and “p” and then swept them horizontally to blend the sounds, speaking in unison as they went. Aeisha George proudly announced, “We spelled gap,” her beaded braids bouncing.

“Kiss your brain,” Rogers said, and Aeisha kissed her hand then tapped her forehead.

They moved on to the next word.

“Kiss your brain” may be a Laura Rogers specialty, but this lesson reflected an extraordinary level of cohesion with other teachers across her district, and even the state.

Since 2021, Rogers has sat through dozens of hours of extra training, required by the state, in the science of reading. Already, just weeks into the school year, her students have taken a timed literacy assessment. Under a recent state law, they will eventually have to pass a version of the same screener to reach Grade 4. But for now, Rogers has used it to set a baseline.

And the day before teaching this very lesson, Rogers learned it as a student herself. As part of a weekly “cluster meeting,” a master teacher led Rogers and her fellow first-grade teachers through every step.

Some teachers discussed the intricacies of the “chop” method, while others performed as struggling students in role-played lessons. Rogers returned to her classroom that morning with a detailed procedure and clear objectives.

Peer-coached meetings like this happen across the parish every week. Across town later that day at the grades 3 to 5 school M.R. Weaver Elementary, English teachers went over plans to focus on “sight words,” the roughly 300 words that make up about two-thirds of English writing. Master teacher Lindsay Weeks analogized the words to basic math facts, like the times tables. Students need to be automatic with those, she explained, so they can “spend their thinking time on harder skills.”

The cluster meetings and master teachers are all part of a new model Eloi installed, the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching’s TAP System. The program, which also includes incentive pay for teachers who produce strong growth, was previously used to great success by Louisiana state superintendent Cade Brumley when he led nearby DeSoto Parish in the 2010s.

“It’s more cost effective and easier to improve the quality of the folks you have than to try to go buy them somewhere,” Eloi says.

The first year of cluster meetings was not easy, everyone admits. Steven Harris, a Baptist pastor who sits on the School Board, says some teachers have resisted the amount of change over the last five years. “Those that stayed, they’re not complacent anymore,” he says.

Weaver’s Principal Armetrice Williams was named a Louisiana Principal of the Year honoree last year for the school’s rapid growth since she took over in 2020. Reading scores have improved dramatically, and the school’s state accountability rating has increased from an F to a C. The mindset has changed, Williams explains.

“Teachers can’t say what [the students] can’t do,” Williams says. “That’s not an option here.”

...Read the full article written by the Boston Globe at the link here.