Not anymore:
Mississippi has become the fastest improving school system in the country.
You read that right. Mississippi is taking names.
In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi.1 By 2024, only four states had fewer.
When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results2 for student demographics, this is where Mississippi ranked:
- Fourth grade math: 1st
- Fourth grade reading: 1st
- Eighth grade math: 1st
- Eighth grade reading: 4th
And they’re not alone:
Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama climbed the charts because they focused on core academic instruction when much of the country used ESSA as an excuse to focus on anything and everything else. It paid off.
So how did this happen?
How did Mississippi go from 49th in the country a decade ago to near the top today? And what can other states learn from it?
According to a recent piece by Grace Brazeale, a policy associate with the advocacy group Mississippi First, the state implemented a series of changes starting with the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. That law funded the state department of education to hire, train and deploy literacy coaches to the 50 lowest-performing schools. It also required schools to administer universal screenings to identify students with reading deficiencies early and to communicate those results to parents, and it required schools to hold back students who were not reaching a certain threshold by third grade.
Remember for all my life Mississippi was a punchline now it’s a success story for education. Amazing what can happen when you don’t focus on being woke and deal with reading and writing. I’ll give Glenn Reynolds the last word:
To be fair, for nearly all those years when Mississippi was a joke, it was ruled by Democrats.
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