How Mississippi turned around it's failing schools?

An education ‘miracle’?

By Sarah Mervosh, NY Times

Jan 11, 2025

As recently as 2013, Mississippi ranked 49th in the country for education. Its standing seemed predictable, even inevitable, for a state with low education spending and one of the nation’s highest child poverty rates.

Today, though, Mississippi is a top 10 state for fourth graders learning how to read, and one of the best places in the country for a poor child to get an education.

Mississippi’s turnaround has been the talk of the education world over the last few years. Its success has generated awe but also skepticism. After all, it is notoriously difficult to improve schools at scale. Could the “Mississippi miracle,” as some have called it, be real?

I traveled to Mississippi last month to see for myself.

What I found is that the most common explanation for Mississippi’s progress — changing the way it teaches reading to young children — is only part of the story. The state has also held schools accountable for student test scores, an approach that fell out of favor nationally after No Child Left Behind, the maligned Bush-era education law. And it has offered teachers more support.

In other words, in a country that prizes local control of education, Mississippi takes an unusually strong role in telling schools what to do.

What Mississippi did

In 2013, Mississippi changed the way reading is taught, embracing the “science of reading.” Teachers use sound-it-out instruction, known as phonics, and other direct methods, like the explicit teaching of vocabulary.

Around the same time, it also raised academic standards and started giving every school a letter grade.

But the state hasn’t simply demanded proficiency, as under No Child Left Behind, which set an unattainable goal of having every child in America be proficient in reading and math. Instead, Mississippi has emphasized student growth toward proficiency. Schools get credit when students improve — and double credit for the improvement of their lowest-scoring students. That means every school, rich or poor, has an incentive to help everyone.

The state also approves a list of curriculums, used by most districts. This is not always the case in other states, where decisions are often left up to individual school districts.

And the state doesn’t just punish schools that are struggling, another difference from No Child Left Behind. It also takes a proactive role in helping them.

Take the state’s literacy coaches: They are sent into the elementary schools that have the lowest reading scores each year, with a mission to teach teachers, not children. On my visit, I was surprised to find that teachers seemed to love it. That is probably because coaches are there to mentor, not to tattle on bad teachers.

Other states have tried to copy Mississippi, mostly by focusing on the science of reading. But people involved in Mississippi’s turnaround told me it was nearly impossible to cherry-pick strategies and expect results.

“You’ve got to do that and that and that,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi’s state superintendent from 2013 to 2022. “And you have also got to do it year in and year out.”

Inside one school

A one-story brick building with a white covered entryway is labeled with a sign that says Hazlehurst Elementary School and another that says “be engaged.”

Rory Doyle for The New York Times

One criticism of Mississippi’s approach is that it revolves around standardized testing.

I visited the elementary school in Hazlehurst, a rural area south of Jackson where more than half of children live in poverty. Students there take tests every two weeks, a greater frequency than even the state recommends.

There was also plenty of joy. I saw preschoolers sounding out letters into toy telephones, and second graders coaching one another on how to sound out words like “disappointment.” One 10-year-old named Johnny told me about the satisfaction he feels from learning: “If I make a bad grade but I’m going up, it’s like a staircase.”

A big question now is whether Mississippi can keep going in the face of declining test scores nationally. At Hazlehurst, scores have climbed to 35 percent of students reading on grade level, compared with 12 percent a decade ago.

No miracle, but real progress