Illiteracy is a policy choice

Why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner?

Many schools are reintroducing phonics-based reading programs, but that is just one policy change driving the “Mississippi Miracle.” (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage.

In my home state of California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad.

These numbers have been tumbling downhill in California and more widely across the U.S. for years now, and not just because of school closures during the pandemic. Nationwide, reading scores for fourth graders peaked back in 2015, and while the especially ugly 2022 outcomes were dismissed at first as COVID-19 outliers, scores have fallen further since. The decline is the worst for the kids who were already struggling; the test scores of the bottom 10% of students have dropped catastrophically.

But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVIDand has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.

The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”

Consider this the latest chapter of the “Mississippi Miracle,” which has seen the state climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally. This rise has received a great deal of coverage in publications ranging from The New York Times to The New York Post. And yet, it still feels as if what’s taking place in the Deep South still has been grossly undersold.

First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements.

Second, many people who aren’t too focused on education policy seem to imagine Mississippi has simply stopped underperforming, that they’re now doing about as well as everyone else.

This is not true. They haven’t just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools. Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)

There is very little more essential to a free society than universal literacy and adequate public education. It is a civil rights issue. It is the foundation for absolutely everything else.

To fail here is to lastingly abandon a significant fraction of our children to a lifelong struggle. And blue states have been failing. We have been spending lots of money on schools, but we have not been willing to muster the political will and effort necessary to hold those schools accountable for results and adopt teaching practices that actually work.

For a while, there was the excuse that it was hard to know what did work. But over the last 15 years, as Mississippi has scaled the state rankings and other southern states have mimicked its success, it has become clear that we do know — or we could, if we wanted to.

“People are at a loss and would rather refer to it as the “Mississippi Miracle” than look under the hood to see what is really happening,” Kareem Weaver, the executive director of FULCRUM, a literacy advocacy group here in Oakland, told me. “They aren’t doing anything that others can’t do. In fact, they are doing it with far less money than most state departments of education have at their disposal.”

We just have to ask ourselves: Are we going to do it, or is it unimportant to us whether our children learn to read?

“They have a common playbook”

Mississippi’s success is exciting. But perhaps even more exciting is that other states have achieved strong results with the same basic playbook. Louisiana clawed its way from 49th in the 2019 state rankings to 32nd (in fourth grade, where reforms are often visible the soonest, it went from 42nd in 2022 to 16th). Tennessee made it into the top 25 states for the first time.

John White spent nine years in the Louisiana Department of Education, working on a suite of reforms that made Louisiana the fastest-improving state in the country across a wide range of categories — reading, math, science, high school graduation rates. The first thing he did when we spoke, though, was to caution that we don’t actually know which of Louisiana’s reforms played a causal role.

Nonetheless, there are some obvious commonalities among the Southern Surge states. White names three, the first of which sounds obvious in retrospect but was in fact novel: The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.¹ This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound.

This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention — teach phonics! And you should, indeed, teach phonics. But making schools adopt the approach took more than a mere nudge. The Southern Surge states have tried earmarked funding, guidance to districts, and outright mandates to accomplish universal adoption.

“Those states all made a commitment to rigorous reviews of the highest quality published materials for students and some level of incentive — whether it was voluntary or involuntary — for districts to implement those curriculums,” White said.

So identifying the curricula that work, buying them for schools, and telling teachers to use them is part of the solution. But it’s only one part — you also have to ensure that teachers understand how to use the curriculum.

The second pillar, White told me, is “a scaled system of training those teachers on that curriculum — most teaching you get as a teacher is not training on the curriculum.”

Teachers, of course, already undergo a lot of training — and it’s mostly a waste of their time. That’s not because teacher training is unimportant but because we’re training them in the wrong things.

Billions of dollars are spent — and largely wasted — every year on professional development for teachers that is curriculum-agnostic, i.e., aimed at generic, disembodied teaching skills without reference to any specific curriculum.

“A huge industry is invested in these workshops and trainings,” argued a scathing 2020 article by David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. “Given, on average, barely more than a single day of professional support to learn about the new materials; knowing that their students will face assessments that lack any integration with their curriculum; and subject to principals’ evaluations that don’t assess curriculum use, teachers across America are barely using these new shiny objects — old habits win out.”

Mississippi improved its training through a 2013 law mandating that elementary school teachers receive instruction in the science of reading. It also sent coaches directly into low-performing classrooms to guide teachers on how to use material. “Mississippi started with teacher training. Tennessee and Louisiana added teacher training in different years,” Karen Vaites, founder of the Curriculum Insight Project, told me. Without the training, the effort to find and buy high-quality curricula can go to waste.

The third pillar is everyone’s least favorite, but it’s equally crucial. “Number three is clear accountability at the district level, at the school level, at the educator level, and at the student and parent level,” White said.

Accountability, of course, means standardized tests, requirements that students master reading before they are advanced to the fourth grade, and rankings of schools on performance. Accountability is no fun; when there aren’t active political currents pushing for it, it tends to erode. But it’s badly needed.

“Schools have gotten very distracted,” White told me. “And at the same time, many states have been loosening the incentive structures that exist to focus on reading and math knowledge and skills. I think you have to question that. I think you have to see that these states have all had stringent accountability as a core tenet and have done it over successive administrations even when it wasn’t a popular thing to do.”

In Mississippi, a child who isn’t capable of reading at the end of third grade has to repeat the grade — a policy called third grade retention.² Alabama and Tennessee have implemented it too. Research has found that third grade retention doesn’t harm students in non-academic ways and tends to help them academically — but, of course, it’s upsetting for kids, frustrating for families, and unpleasant for educators. Unfortunately, that’s probably part of why it works.

“What matters most is not the students who are retained, but what the policy does to adult behavior,” education reporter Chad Aldeman argued. “Mississippi required schools to notify parents when their child was off track and to craft individual reading plans for those with reading deficiencies. In other words, the threat of retention may have shifted behavior in important ways.”

Vaites agreed: “It means that educators pull out all the stops to make sure that they get every child reading by the end of third grade. And every possible stop includes having really strong assessment protocols to know which kids need support. Making sure that you’re targeting tutoring.”

What is most surprising about the third grade retention is that it happens a lot less than you would think, Vaites added: “It makes the adults just get every kid that they possibly can get across the line.”

So there’s your formula: Select really excellent, high-quality curricula and aggressively teach teachers how to use those curricula instead of putting them through generic “skills” training that won’t impact their classroom practices much. Measure how well students, schools, and districts are doing and hold back kids who aren’t reading at the end of third grade.

Why aren’t we doing this?

A good deal has been written on the Mississippi Miracle and some about the rising scores in other southern states. But there hasn’t been the sort of saturation coverage that was lavished on past pushes for education reform, which helped turn them into national causes celebres. Unlike the “Waiting for Superman”-era of charter school enthusiasm that swept the country in the 2010s, we aren’t seeing magazine cover stories and slick documentaries about reformers like White. There’s no high-profile philanthropic movement to spread these reforms or politicians with national ambitions who have made this their pet project.

I personally help run a microschool in my community, which means I talk with other people about education issues fairly often. And anecdotally, most parents I speak to have not heard of the Mississippi Miracle at all — or, if they’ve heard of Mississippi’s success, it’s as a one-off rather than the spearhead of a trend.

Why not?

“This is just a politically awkward story,” education policy expert Andy Rotherham told me. “It’s all these red states. This is a very ideological field. People struggle with calling balls and strikes.”

Vaites agreed. “I think the story is going untold for the same reason journalists ignored the successful school reopening stories in Florida and the rest of the Sun Belt in August 2020: The appetite to tell positive stories in red states is low.”

“We have been slow to learn the lessons of successful states when the politics don’t line up,” Weaver told me.

There’s also just a pervasive sense of complacency about schools in blue states and cities, where, at least until recently, local school boards have been more interested in issues around equity than measurably improving learning outcomes. Some of that is burnout from the last round of education reforms, which were viewed in progressive circles as assaults on teachers’ unions that focused too much on teaching to the test. But I routinely see people on the American left say that our schools are doing well, and I’m not sure whether they are unaware that one-third of our graduating seniors can barely read and interpret passages of text or just think that it’s fine.

And maybe our schools are doing OK compared with Europe, a continent that has barely experienced economic growth in the last several decades. But they’re doing poorly compared with what we know can be achieved.

The most successful literacy-focused charter schools serving poor, historically low-performing populations hit 90% to 95% literacy rates. Even many students with significant intellectual disabilities can become proficient readers with the right instruction. No state has figured out how to do that statewide, but it’s a useful reminder of what is achievable: with good instruction, almost every single student can learn to read. Until we are reaching rates like those nationwide, we are condemning hundreds of thousands of children to a life of limited opportunities completely avoidably.

Every single parent in the country should be showing up to school board meetings to ask why these reforms are not being done in their schools and their communities. Whatever embarrassment we feel about having to admit Mississippi beat us should be thoroughly outweighed by our overwhelming delight at having a roadmap to do better.

But leaving this up to local school districts isn’t enough. In Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, states drove the reform agenda. And a sustained, centralized effort elsewhere will be necessary to replicate what they’ve done. You cannot go through replacing bad curricula with good curricula on a school-by-school or district-by-district basis; you’ll see some improvements in some places, but they’ll be temporary, not typically outlasting a single superintendent or involved school board team.

Change takes time, and sustained changes like the ones in the South require sustained commitment from multiple administrations. Decisions that are made one by one across hundreds of school districts and towns — the model for how curriculum planning happens in most of the U.S. — will not be as good as decisions made at the state level based on strong evidence, with implementation funded and accountability for results.

During our conversation, White argued that while most state constitutions envision that they will have a strong role in education, in practice they’ve tended to devolve power to local districts. Many governors and legislators never wanted the responsibility of enforcing accountability standards that were envisioned in the No Child Left Behind reforms of the early 2000s, and they retreated from them when they had a chance.

“State regulation of local entities is not a popular thing, so the states have become passive,” White said.

The lesson of the Southern Surge isn’t that states need to take over education, White said, but rather that they need to “play their rightful role better than they do today.”³ That means delivering the curricula, training, and accountability that actually work to those schools and then letting them do the rest.

But for the government to take on its rightful role is clearly going to require pressure from its constituents. So that’s my advice to every reader who isn’t a policymaker — move to Mississippi for better education, or else demand that your state copy Mississippi’s homework.

1. While today, the programs in Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and, to a lesser extent, Alabama, Texas, and Florida have a bunch of common elements, they tended to adopt them in a different order. Mississippi was actually a bit late to mandating high-quality curriculum. But if anything, the staggered adoption is helpful for making the link between quality curriculum and results clear.

2. Skeptics of whether Mississippi has really stumbled on a winning formula often mention the state’s third grade retention policies as a reason to not be overly impressed with their results — and Mississippi does hold back more students than most other states. But the average age of a Mississippi student taking the fourth grade NAEP tests has not risen, so that can’t be the driver of the state’s improvements. More broadly, while the exact shape of Mississippi’s rise does depend a lot on which specific result you look at, I think we’re well past the point where you can dismiss the state’s improvements as a statistical mirage.

3. Potentially of interest to readers of this website: White also gave a nod to the book “Abundance” by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, which among other things argues that effective state governments need to be able to act without adding onerous red tape or delegating their crucial powers to local governments. “Part of the abundance hypothesis is about governmental players doing what it is they were supposed to do according to the law and not more than that,” White said.