How Mississippi turned its failing public education system around

: World Tribune; 11 April 2025; Hits: 16

by WorldTribune Staff, April 11, 2025 Real World News

Data earlier this year from America’s annual national “Report Card” on education showed that math and reading scores at America’s public schools are what the Independent Women’s Forum described as “plunging our country into an epidemic of illiteracy and innumeracy.”

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rankings, often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card,” found that one in every three 8th graders are functionally illiterate.

Writing for the Independent Women’s Forum in February, Angela Morabito noted: “As ‘below basic’ readers, millions of teenagers struggle to extract meaning from words on a page. As a result, putting a textbook in front of them is pointless. These students are on the brink of adulthood, and yet they stand no chance of understanding an employment contract or a lease agreement. They cannot comprehend articles like the one you’re reading right now.”

Reading scores for these middle schoolers have been declining for more than a decade, very much predating the pandemic implosion.

But bright spots are emerging.

Under Republican governors and legislatures, Mississippi has gone from near the bottom to the top of the NAEP rankings.

In 2012, the Republican leadership in the state introduced phonics-based instruction and began to hold back about 10% of third graders per year who failed a reading test.

Mississippi took the stop spot in the 2024 NAEP rankings for “demographic-adjusted” scores, meaning the data “adjusts for gender, age, race, ethnicity, free and reduced-price lunch status, special-education status, and English-language-learner status.”

By contrast, Oregon had the lowest demographic-adjusted score. Perhaps the wokest state in the union, the Oregon Board of Education has indefinitely paused the use of any standardized test as a graduation requirement.

Writer Steve Sailer characterized the new state of American education as the “Mississippi Miracle vs Oregon Outrage”:

“One surprise is that Mississippi, so long the subject of ‘Thank God for Mississippi’ exclamations from rival states struggling to stay out of last place on various measures, has lately reached the middle of the pack with a 245, for 29th place, ahead of much richer [states]. Mississippi’s students are 43% white, 47% black, and only 1% Asian…The Mississippi Miracle is number 1 after adjusting for its unpromising demographics, with comparable Louisiana in second. The Mississippi Department of Education’s press release boasts of Mississippi’s striking improvement since the legislature passed a number of laws in 2013 (modeled on Florida’s 2002 reforms) to get serious about teaching reading and math…

“Louisiana followed Mississippi’s lead, with comparable payoffs. Alabama has more recently followed its neighbors, which seems to have lifted Alabama’s test scores from awful to not-so-hot. Time will tell if Alabama follows its neighbors Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida into the adjusted top ten….Worst on the demographically adjusted list is Oregon, which has perhaps the highest percentage of truly Woke crazies in the country. Unadjusted, Oregon outscored the country on 8th grade math by 8 points in 2000, but trailed by 4 points in 2024…How is Mississippi doing it? How is demographically blessed Oregon botching up so badly? Is there a correlation between how states vote and how well their schools work?”

Mississippi officials were celebrating major improvements, including the following:

• Highest-ever rate of students scoring proficient or advanced in all four tests: 4th and 8th grade reading and math.

• No. 1 in the nation for achieving highest score increases in 4th grade reading and math since 2013.

• No. 9 in the nation for overall 4th grade reading scores and No. 16 for 4th grade math scores (up from No. 49 and No. 50 in 2013).

• Mississippi is one of only 13 states with gains in 4th grade math, which is the only subject and grade nationally that showed statistically significant improvements since 2022.

The 2024 scores also showed Mississippi’s black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged 4th graders outperformed their peers nationally.

Mississippi enacted three major education reform laws in 2013 that established the state’s first state-funded pre-K program, made reading instruction a major focus in pre-K through grade 3, and mandated that schools and districts earn annual A-F grades based on their students’ progress and achievement.

Literacy coaches were deployed to the state’s underperforming and failing schools. New policy also allowed “up to 15 charter schools a year to start in low-performing, D- and F-rated districts, without local school board approval.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the teachers unions which bankrolled the campaign of Mayor Brandon Johnson are being rewarded with major taxpayer-funded pay increases for public school teachers of at least 16% over four years. And Illinois Democrats have moved to launch an attack on home schooling.

A January report found that not a single student at a slew of Chicago schools can read at grade level.