Sigh. I am getting a bit tired of watching education leaders project their priors onto Southern Surge (and other) states, and I’m afraid Linda Darling-Hammond is doing just that.

Her piece was just written up by Claude Goldenberg: substack.com/home/post/…

… and here are my reactions:

I'm all for casting aside ideology and following the leaders. Yet I don't honestly feel that LDH has done her homework. Every time someone says "Louisiana followed Mississippi," it's a tell, letting us know she didn't look deeply into the reforms. As I’ve written in my piece on the Southern Surge, their reforms started at approximately the same time (2012-13), and with VERY different initial efforts. Only in very recent years did Louisiana "follow" some of MS's key reforms (ex. 3rd grade retention, teacher training), and vice-versa (MS has taken baby steps towards use of knowledge-building curricula). More here: karenvaites.org/publish…

Also, Wisconsin is in an absolutely awful state, with the biggest black-white reaching achievement gap in the nation and weak demographically-adjusted performance, as well a politically-elected superintendent whose DPI has actively dragged its feet on implementing key aspects of the new Act 20 reading law, especially curriculum upgrades. Again, I have written about WI multiple times, most recently here: karenvaites.org/p/wisco…

And Massachusetts has flat outcomes that have earned regular headlines in the Boston Globe (google "Northern Nosedive"), as well as districts so stuck in their ways that the legislature just unanimously approved measures to restrict local control on curriculum selection. I am not cheering the move in most states, but I am in MA. More on all of this here: karenvaites.org/p/congr…

We all need to get into these details— and accuracy is incredibly important. Her piece fails the "paying close attention" test.

I’m optimistic that we will see blue states take more of the actions in the Southern Surge states, and I am cheering Democrats like Rahm Emanuel for making this a Dem platform. Center for American Progress just reported on the Southern Surge reforms, much more accurately than LDH, as I noted in my 3/7 "Latest in Literacy" update: karenvaites.org/p/the-l…

And no less than Randi Weingarten has been spotted cheering Mississippi (reported here:

In other words, we can find certainly find bipartisan paths. But again, accurate reads of the landscape are essential.