by Joe Miller
When I was in high school, my friends and I had this running joke whenever we encountered lists ranking states on pretty much any metric.
Thank god for Mississippi.
It seemed that West Virginia was always coming in at 49. But Mississippi was always there ensuring we weren’t at the very bottom.
That’s no longer the case.
In the most recent iteration of the Nation’s Report Card (the country’s leading assessment of educational attainment), Mississippi students ranked ninth in the nation. In 1992, only 41% of Mississippi fourth graders read at or above a basic level. Today, 65% do so.
By contrast, West Virginia’s fourth-grade scores declined by eight percentage points (from 61% down to just 53%) over the same period.
Mississippi’s scores are particularly impressive among the state’s least advantaged students. Economically disadvantaged fourth graders outperformed similarly situated peers in every state in the country.
The press calls it the Mississippi miracle. Students in Mississippi regularly outscore those in California, despite the fact that California spends about 50% more per pupil educating its students.
Mississippi has bucked a nationwide trend. Nationally. fourth grade literacy rates improved every year, peaking at 68% in 2015. They’ve since been in steady decline. This year’s scores dropped below the 1992 level. We’ve reversed a quarter century of progress in just nine years.
So, what is behind the Mississippi miracle? Kelsey Piper reports that it mostly comes down to better policy choices.
Piper points to three main pillars of Mississippi’s educational reforms.
First, the state adopted a reading curriculum that is backed by science.
That may sound like it should be an obvious thing to do, but it’s been surprisingly contentious. A movement called “whole language learning” has had a death lock on schools of education – the places that train our teachers – since the 1970s.
Whole language learning deemphasizes phonics (in which early readers learn to sound out words) in favor of context clauses (in which readers try to guess at the meaning of words based on pictures or nearby words).
A growing body of evidence suggests that brains don’t work that way. Indeed, even sophisticated adult readers who attempt whole language techniques with unfamiliar words get it wrong about half the time.
These findings led several (mostly Southern) states to require schools to adopt reading programs that incorporate phonics.
Of course, it doesn’t help to get a new curriculum if your teachers don’t know how to use it. So, the second pillar of Mississippi’s reform is extensive teacher training.
Teachers everywhere get a lot of training already, but a lot of that training tends to be curriculum-agnostic. Mississippi passed a statewide law in 2013 mandating that teachers be trained on the specific materials they are using.
John White, who spent nine years helping Louisiana implement elements of Mississippi’s playbook, notes that in the absence of explicit training on the curriculum, “teachers across America are barely using these shiny new objects – old habits win out.”
The third pillar of Mississippi’s reforms is accountability.
That’s the one that tends to be unpopular. Accountability means standardized tests. It means putting special scrutiny on underperforming schools. And it means requiring that third graders have grade-appropriate reading skills before advancing them to the fourth grade.
It’s not hard to see why this is unpopular. Principals don’t want to see their schools at the bottom of rankings. Teachers don’t want their pay tied to test scores. And parents certainly don’t want their kids to repeat a grade.
Absent the state (or federal) government imposing standards, accountability tends to wither on the vine.
Education officials in Mississippi are careful not to overplay the impact of their policy choices. Indeed, it’s notoriously hard to measure policy impact. A good scientist will measure causality by running experiments in which only a single variable changes. That allows us to know for certain that changing variable X results in outcome Y.
Social scientists don’t have that luxury. Doug Elmendorf, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office (and my former boss), liked to point out that we don’t have alternate Earths to experiment with. We can’t change a law in Mississippi-1 and compare it with an unchanged Mississippi-2.
The best we can do is to see whether states that are somewhat similar to Mississippi get similar results when they implement similar policies. (Economists call these “natural experiments.”)
So far, those natural experiments seem to validate Mississippi’s policies. Louisiana and Tennessee have seen large (though less dramatic) improvements in fourth grade reading scores after implementing Mississippi-style reforms.
West Virginia has begun to embrace similar reforms. The Third Grade Success Act (passed in 2023) mandates science of reading instruction, introduces new assessment benchmarks and requires schools to retain students who fail to reach those benchmarks.
In the most recent legislative session, lawmakers approved new resources for training teachers in science-of-reading instruction.
For her report on the Mississippi miracle, Piper chose a provocative title: “Illiteracy is a policy choice.”
Thankfully, West Virginia is beginning to make better choices.
