Mississippi is no miracle — it’s the future of education

A miracle defies the laws of nature. 

This is why “the Mississippi Miracle,” the sobriquet for the extraordinary gains that students in the Magnolia State have made in reading in recent years, is a misnomer. 

There’s nothing miraculous about a state that adopts phonics and that sets high standards for its kids getting better results in reading instruction.

This, to the contrary, is a predictable outcome, and a replicable one, as other Southern states that have taken up similar polices have shown. 

Mississippi went from 49th in fourth-grade reading results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress about a decade ago to ninth in 2024.

Its low-income children are ranked first in the nation. Its black kids are No. 3 in the nation, and its Hispanic kids No. 1.

Overall, when adjusted for socio-economics and demographics, Mississippi has the best fourth-grade results in the nation. 

The derisive cliché was always, “Thank God for Mississippi,” since it could be trusted to save other states from coming in 50th in various metrics.

Now, the phrase can be used with sincerity and admiration, since the state recognized and did something about its literacy crisis. 

In 2011, only one in five fourth graders in Mississippi was proficient in reading.

In 2013, the state passed a reform to require teachers to understand the science of reading (basically, phonics), deploy literacy coaches to schools, identify students struggling to read early and hold back students in third grade who weren’t ready to advance. 

Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana have now done much the same, and have also made gains.

The original source of all this was a 2002 reading law in Florida that boosted student achievement in the Sunshine State. 

In a piece headlined “Illiteracy is a policy choice” at The Argument on Substack, Kelsey Piper makes the case that it would be irresponsible and wrong to ignore the lesson of Mississippi and the Southern states. 

She notes that Mississippi outperforms her native California, even though the Golden State is richer and spends substantially more on education per pupil.

More than half of black fourth graders in Mississippi read at or above basic level, while only 28% of black fourth graders in California do. 

It may be galling for blue states that have prided themselves on their commitment to education and looked down on the South to have to acknowledge that Mississippi, of all places, has figured out a model for the nation — but it is imperative all the same. 

“We have been spending lots of money on schools,” Piper writes of blue states, “but we have not been willing to muster the political will and effort necessary to hold those schools accountable for results and adopt teaching practices that actually work.”

The so-called reading wars between the whole-language approach and phonics was won, on the merits, by phonics long ago.

Yet ineffectual methods hung around even though they’d been discredited. This is why it’s so important to get teachers to embrace research-based reading instruction. 

There also must be high expectations, rigorously enforced. This is what the Mississippi third-grade retention policy is about.

If a teacher and a parent know that a child is going to be held back, they will do all that they can to get that child to basic proficiency.

Research in Florida shows that getting held back not only helps the academic performance of the students who are retained, but their younger siblings as well. 

With reading scores nationally sliding the wrong way, especially for the bottom 10% of students, Mississippi and the other Southern states offer a beacon of hope.

Their example shows that, no, it’s not impossible to teach children, and no, it’s not very costly. It’s a good sign that even California just passed a phonics bill. 

It’s fully within our power, so long as we insist on the basics, to give kids a skill absolutely essential to their development and their futures.

No miracles necessary. 

X: @RichLowry