America


Southern Schools Stage Stunning Resurgence


Focus on teaching basics yields big gains in reading and math at half the cost of blue states.


C BY DAVID A. PATTEN


all it a “southern surge” or the “Mississippi Mira- cle” — whatever the catch- phrase, the trend is clear:


Southern K-12 education, once dis- paraged by elite Northern educators as hidebound and backward, is stag- ing a comeback. Test scores show Southern edu-


cators are schooling their Northern counterparts in student achievement. Mississippi, the nation’s poorest


state as measured by residents living below the poverty level, has jumped from No. 49 to No. 7 nationally based on fourth-grade reading scores. Mis- sissippi also leads the nation in post- pandemic math gains. Alabama, where absenteeism was so


bad one in four students would typi- cally be AWOL, now boasts the lowest truancy level of all states.


28 NEWSMAX | MAY 2026 Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the coun-


try in post-pandemic era reading improvements. Florida has been named the No. 1


state in the nation for education two years in a row. While the North still has impressive educational strongholds, including Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the growing divergence in educational costs versus outcomes is unmistakable. In fact, in Mississippi or Louisiana, low-income kids are more likely to attain reading proficiency than they are in California, Massachusetts, or New York. A low-income fourth grader living


in Mississippi is almost twice as likely to attain math proficiency compared to a low-income student growing up in Oregon. And Oregon, Maine, and Califor- nia all score below the national aver-


age in fourth-grade math. That stark reality explains why


New York Times columnist Nicho- las Kristof recently wrote an impas- sioned plea urging blue states to


U.S. STUDENTS HOPE TO CATCH UP IN SCIENCE . . . TO SLOVENIA Top-ranked nations based on the international science testing of 15-year-olds:


Rank Nation 1


2 Japan 3 China 4 Taiwan


5 South Korea 6 Estonia


7 Hong Kong 8 Canada 9 Finland 10 Australia Ireland


11


12 New Zealand 13 Switzerland


14 United Kingdom 15 Slovenia


16 United States Singapore


Score 561 547 543 537 528 526 520 515 511


507 504 504 503 500 500 499


SOURCE: OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025


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