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Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

And yet it does. Are we ready to deal?

This spring, Paul Peterson and Michael Hartney showed that red states (as defined by 2024 presidential election votes) are overtaking their blue counterparts academically. But it won’t be easy for red states to continue their impressive run when President Trump is firing off scattershot executive orders advancing culture war priorities that have little to do with student learning. If they rock the next decade of NAEP results, will they be overlooked in the national conversation because they are too farm-y, too milquetoast, too difficult for coastal people to locate on a map?

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