{"id":26652,"date":"2023-07-07T17:21:47","date_gmt":"2023-07-07T21:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=26652"},"modified":"2023-07-07T17:25:29","modified_gmt":"2023-07-07T21:25:29","slug":"la-times-draws-on-expertise-of-paul-l-thomas-in-article-about-ms-reading-scores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/la-times-draws-on-expertise-of-paul-l-thomas-in-article-about-ms-reading-scores\/","title":{"rendered":"LA Times draws on expertise of Paul L. Thomas in article about MS reading scores"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Furman University&#8217;s Paul Thomas, an education professor, is cited in an article appearing in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/story\/2023-07-03\/how-mississippi-gamed-national-reading-test-to-produce-miracle-gains\">Los Angeles Times<\/a> about Mississippi&#8217;s seemingly &#8220;miraculous&#8221; gains in fourth-grade reading scores. Calling the glowing reports &#8220;a statistical illusion,&#8221; columnist Michael Hiltzik points to other factors besides instructional technique in Mississippi and elsewhere that predict reading outcomes. For that, he turns to Thomas to support his argument. Hiltzik writes, &#8220;Education expert Paul L. Thomas has identified the key factors as &#8216;food and work security, healthcare, [and] class size.&#8217; Those get neglected in the literacy debate, he observed, &#8216;even though these conditions combined would dwarf any measurable impact of teacher quality or program\/standards quality.&#8217;\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Los Angeles Times columnist looks at how Mississippi &#8220;gamed&#8221; its national reading test scores to produce &#8220;miracle&#8221; gains. He turns to Furman&#8217;s Paul Thomas to reveal the most likely predictors of reading success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":257,"featured_media":21825,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,6,2163],"tags":[955,2162,838,2161],"class_list":["post-26652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-in-the-news","category-los-angeles-times","tag-mississippi","tag-reading-outcomes","tag-reading-proficiency","tag-statistics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/257"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}