The battle for public education that educates instead of indoctrinates has found an unlikely location — namely, the Deep South. The Urban Institute, a centrist think tank focused on societal data, has noted that when inclusion of outside factors such as economic strata transpires, the state boasting of the highest test scores in 2024 for fourth graders in both math and reading is ... drum roll, please ...

... Mississippi.

The nerve of those dang rednecks gettin’ all fancy with their readin’ and ‘ritmitic.

The findings thoroughly puncture the notion that all that is needed to fix our public schools is spending more money. Mississippi ranks 44th among states and the District of Columbia in the amount spent per student. So, what’s their secret formula for academic success?

There isn’t one. Note the mission statement on the Mississippi Department of Education’s website:

The Mississippi Department of Education seeks to create a world-class educational system that gives students the knowledge and skills to be successful in college and in the workforce, and to flourish as parents and citizens. To make this vision a reality, all students must be given multiple pathways to success, and teachers and administrators must continue to meet the challenges of this ever-changing landscape of public education.

Now, let’s compare this with a progressive state’s mantra. Specifically, Oregon.

The Oregon Department of Education fosters equity and excellence for every learner through collaboration with educators, partners and communities.

They should consider collaboration with the Oxford comma. But I digress.

A quick look at the numbers. Oregon ranks dead last in fourth grade math and reading. They rank second to last in eighth grade math and fourth to last in eighth grade reading. Oregon is 14th in the amount spent annually per student, coming in at $19,325. That is $7,251 more per student than Mississippi spends. No wonder Oregon is atrocious at teaching math. If it wasn’t its political leaders would live in daily fear of its residents being capable of doing the math and, in the course of said activity, discovering the wasteful spending of their tax dollars.

MORE: Amid Teacher Strike Trend, the Least OR Lawmakers Can Do Is Bring Union Negotiations Out of the Dark

Refer back to Mississippi’s mission statement. Aside from the obvious snark that its mention of providing the skills needed to eventually be good parents strongly implies knowing one’s gender is a necessary part of properly functioning in the act of making and rearing children, it states, without needing to state, the principle of personal responsibility. The Oregon way has no such strength.

MORE: Boos Rain Down As Oregon High School Transgender Runner Places 1st in Girls' State Championship Race

This demands self-discipline and the ability to understand that there are absolute, automatic answers to many life situations, which leads to math. The math-trained mind has the capacity to approach the complex, multi-layered factors inherent in functions required for successful adulthood, such as logically running a business. Balancing the need to control expenses while taking on the calculated risks needed for a company to expand requires a firm grasp of the absolutes learned through no other method than applying time-honored and time-tested mathematical principles. As the truism says, if your outgo exceeds your income, your upkeep will be your downfall.

Additionally (no pun intended), the math-trained mind understands that the colorblind, genderless world of numbers and calculations demonstrates true equality in a manner no puffed-up imagined realm of pseudo-intellectual superiority can evoke. The “progressive” mentality secretly abhors equality, as it shows that when provided equal resources and instruction in life’s mechanics, the artificial barriers of race and gender melt away. It also demonstrates the logical next step of uncovering the soft bigotry of low expectations combined with laying bare the thin veneer of deep racism held by those who, in their self-righteousness and desire to play God, act as though they are the living embodiment of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by behaving as the betters of those they claim to uplift.

Outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi, sits the intersection of Highway 61 and 49. Urban legend has it that in the 1930s, this is where bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for becoming what he could not have possibly foreseen would be his fate. Some 25 years after his death in 1938, Johnson became the most influential musician of the latter 20th century following his discovery by British musicians such as Eric Clapton and The Beatles, who brought the blues back to America and laid them on millions of white teenage ears who had never heard the genre on mostly segregated, homogonized pop radio. Even as Mississippi may not have been the exact birthplace of the blues but is unquestionably crucial in the genre’s establishment, so today the state derided by its Northern “betters” cannot be denied its place in proving what should be a known fact:

Numbers don’t lie.

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