This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation’s Report Card:
Nationwide, reading scores for fourth graders peaked back in 2015, and while the especially ugly 2022 outcomes were dismissed at first as COVID-19 outliers, scores have fallen further since. The decline is the worst for the kids who were already struggling; the test scores of the bottom 10% of students have dropped catastrophically.
But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVIDand has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.
The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”
Consider this the latest chapter of the “Mississippi Miracle,” which has seen the state climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally.
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Mississippi’s success is exciting. But perhaps even more exciting is that other states have achieved strong results with the same basic playbook. Louisiana clawed its way from 49th in the 2019 state rankings to 32nd (in fourth grade, where reforms are often visible the soonest, it went from 42nd in 2022 to 16th). Tennessee made it into the top 25 states for the first time.
John White spent nine years in the Louisiana Department of Education, working on a suite of reforms that made Louisiana the fastest-improving state in the country across a wide range of categories — reading, math, science, high school graduation rates. The first thing he did when we spoke, though, was to caution that we don’t actually know which of Louisiana’s reforms played a causal role.
Nonetheless, there are some obvious commonalities among the Southern Surge states. White names three, the first of which sounds obvious in retrospect but was in fact novel: The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.1 This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound.
This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention — teach phonics!
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The second pillar, White told me, is “a scaled system of training those teachers on that curriculum — most teaching you get as a teacher is not training on the curriculum.”
Teachers, of course, already undergo a lot of training — and it’s mostly a waste of their time. That’s not because teacher training is unimportant but because we’re training them in the wrong things.
Billions of dollars are spent — and largely wasted — every year on professional development for teachers that is curriculum-agnostic, i.e., aimed at generic, disembodied teaching skills without reference to any specific curriculum.
“A huge industry is invested in these workshops and trainings,” argued a scathing 2020 article by David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.
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The third pillar is everyone’s least favorite, but it’s equally crucial. “Number three is clear accountability at the district level, at the school level, at the educator level, and at the student and parent level,” White said.
Accountability, of course, means standardized tests, requirements that students master reading before they are advanced to the fourth grade, and rankings of schools on performance. Accountability is no fun; when there aren’t active political currents pushing for it, it tends to erode. But it’s badly needed.
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In Mississippi, a child who isn’t capable of reading at the end of third grade has to repeat the grade — a policy called third grade retention.2 Alabama and Tennessee have implemented it too. Research has found that third grade retention doesn’t harm students in non-academic ways and tends to help them academically — but, of course, it’s upsetting for kids, frustrating for families, and unpleasant for educators. Unfortunately, that’s probably part of why it works.
“What matters most is not the students who are retained, but what the policy does to adult behavior,” education reporter Chad Aldeman argued. “Mississippi required schools to notify parents when their child was off track and to craft individual reading plans for those with reading deficiencies. In other words, the threat of retention may have shifted behavior in important ways.”
Vaites agreed: “It means that educators pull out all the stops to make sure that they get every child reading by the end of third grade. And every possible stop includes having really strong assessment protocols to know which kids need support. Making sure that you’re targeting tutoring.”
What is most surprising about the third grade retention is that it happens a lot less than you would think, Vaites added: “It makes the adults just get every kid that they possibly can get across the line.”
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The most successful literacy-focused charter schools serving poor, historically low-performing populations hit 90% to 95% literacy rates. Even many students with significant intellectual disabilities can become proficient readers with the right instruction. No state has figured out how to do that statewide, but it’s a useful reminder of what is achievable: with good instruction, almost every single student can learn to read. Until we are reaching rates like those nationwide, we are condemning hundreds of thousands of children to a life of limited opportunities completely avoidably.
