America


Mississippi’s School ‘Miracle’ Isn’t Working in Other States


Many tried to copy it, but here’s why they failed.


I BY LISA SCHIFFREN


n 2013, mississippi ranked 49th in reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test for its fourth-grade students. It had been there for decades. Only Louisiana


was worse. Everyone accepted this as normal, given that Missis-


sippi had a huge child poverty rate, a very high proportion of Black students, and a relative- ly small budget for education. But by 2024, with a lot of


work, a fair amount of spend- ing, and a total revision of its K-3 reading curriculum and teacher training, Mississippi ranked ninth. The average fourth grader


in Mississippi now outper- forms the average fourth grad- er in California by a lot. That is especially true for


Black students, half of whom read at grade level in Missis- sippi, while only a quarter do in California. The media calls this aston-


ishing transformation the “Mississippi Miracle.” Others, mostly those who were involved in making


it happen, call it the “Mississippi Marathon” because it took a huge amount of work by educators, politicians, advocacy organization workers, and students over more than two decades. Right now, many states are trying to copy Mississippi.


But most are following a smattering of the “miraculous” and widely hyped bits of policy change and not the whole, long, difficult slog. It isn’t working for most. In 2013, Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promo-


tion Act with bipartisan support, and it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Phil Bryant. It mandated that schools adopt “science of reading” — requiring phonemic awareness, which is learning word


26 NEWSMAX | OCTOBER 2026


Schools adopted “science of reading” — requiring phonemic awareness, which is learning word sounds, matching sounds to letters.


sounds, matching sounds to letters, reading aloud fluently; and learning word meanings and general comprehension, which is understanding the meaning of text. Science of reading replaced “cueing,” in which children


were expected to use context cues, including pictures, to figure out (that is, guess) what a word is, instead of sound- ing out the letters that compose it. Cueing and “balanced literacy” are the reading pro-


grams that got us to our current state, in which roughly half of all fourth graders in most school systems are not proficient at reading at grade level.


Teachers were taught how to


teach the science of reading by coaches employed by the state. The state took over devising


curricula from the local schools. Under the Mississippi law,


there was a lot of testing of stu- dents, especially during the third grade, with reporting back to parents, who helped the efforts. And — key to the plan’s suc-


cess —third graders who did not pass reading tests did not prog- ress to fourth grade. Between 5% and 10% are held back each year. Rachel Canter, a senior fellow


at the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, was the head of Missis- sippi First, a nonprofit that was key to improving education in the state. She noted that, looking at


other states’ policies, she had seen “teacher coaching pro- grams with no accountability, no measuring of how kids start the school year or how they’re doing, no third-grade intervention programs or parental notification.” The ability to retain students who couldn’t pass the tests


was a large part of Mississippi’s success. So, it is a problem that other states do not hold back students who can’t read well enough to pass. Louisiana and Tennessee, both of which have success-


fully replicated Mississippi’s efforts, do hold back students who don’t pass reading tests. New York, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and others do not. For two years, Oklahoma held back third graders who


failed reading tests. But the policy was too contentious, so they retracted it. Scores plummeted.


JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES


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