Mississippi Fixed Its Schools. Here’s How Other States Can Too.
At the Spritzler Institute for Remedial learning, children in the 3rd grade are held back unless than can spell Mississippi.
Mississippi Fixed Its Schools. Here’s How Other States Can Too.
Powerful teachers’ unions are an obstacle to reform. But Mississippi’s dramatic breakthrough proves that evidence-based literacy can succeed anywhere.
By Rachel Canter, WSJ
Sept. 9, 2026 8:00 pm ET
Rachel Canter is the Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute and the founder of Mississippi First, an advocate for education initiatives in Mississippi.
For the past year, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing from callers wanting to learn more about how Mississippi improved its public schools.
Frustrated by sagging reading and math scores, educators, advocates and lawmakers across the country are curious about reforms that transformed Mississippi from a national punchline into a leader in reading and math proficiency—policies I spent much of my career championing.
Democrats, however, don’t often ask me how to replicate Mississippi’s success; they ask if it’s possible at all, given the power of teachers’ unions in their home states. As one audience member skeptically asked me at a recent panel discussion: “You’ve done your work in a red state. Do you really think blue states can do this?”
My answer is unequivocally yes, even if blue-state politics may make Mississippi-style reforms harder to pass.
If helping kids to read and do math at grade level is the goal, the evidence shows that what we’ve been doing in schools across the country for the last 12 or so years hasn’t worked. Children have lost so much ground, they not only know less than their counterparts did a decade ago; older children know as little as they have this century.
Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show stagnation or decline in student achievement across all age groups. Reading scores for fourth-graders fell to 2000 levels, while math showed only partial recovery from 2022 lows—still below peaks achieved more than a decade ago. For middle and high-schoolers, reading and math scores in 2024 either matched or fell below their lowest levels in the 21st century. Data from the international PISA exam released this week echo this story: The nation’s 15-year-olds scored far below prepandemic highs in reading and math and tied their lowest scores ever.
This decline didn’t start with COVID. The pandemic was simply “the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” as Tom Kane of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research said in May.
For years now, the education world has been fascinated by the story of how Mississippi tackled our literacy problem by ensuring teachers applied the “science of reading”—a set of principles and practices brought to prominence by the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report that called on educators to teach phonics, to help children systematically match letters to sounds and to supplement that learning with background knowledge and vocabulary to aid comprehension.
After Mississippi passed its Literacy Based Promotion Act in 2013, which required children scoring in the lowest level of reading performance to be held back at the end of third grade, the state began offering teachers and school administrators training—and required training and coaching for the lowest-performing elementary schools.
The state also required all schools to administer state-approved screening for reading difficulties three times a year, from kindergarten to third grade, and to immediately notify parents when children fell below benchmarks.
These changes helped bring test scores from the bottom of national rankings to the top in fourth grade math and reading, and even eighth grade math, adjusting for demographics. Without adjustment, Mississippi moved from tied for last to the national average in fourth grade reading and math in 2019. By 2024, Mississippi fourth-graders weren’t just posting the nation’s biggest gains since 2013; they were also beating students in most states outright, tying for seventh in reading and 13th in math.
States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms. Of the 18 key early literacy policies tracked by ExcelinEd, a national, nonpartisan organization for education policy and advocacy, blue states have adopted 9, on average, compared with about 13.5 for purple and red states, as of February 2026. (At the Progressive Policy Institute we categorize states’ political leanings based on which party controls the legislature and governor’s mansion.)
Organized labor might explain some of this gap. In June, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute updated its state by state ranking of teachers union strength. Sure enough, blue states like California, Massachusetts and New Jersey top the list, with red states like Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arkansas at the bottom.
When my colleagues and I compared the Fordham teachers union strength ranking to ExcelinEd’s early literacy tracker, we found a strong, negative correlation between the two—the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted.
Even so, I have found that labels like “red” and “blue,” as well as measures of union power, can be too reductive to explain all the crosscurrents in state education politics.
For starters, some states with the lowest literacy policy scores from ExcelinEd are Republican-led and have weak unions—like Wyoming and South Dakota. About half the country is “red,” but only states in the Deep South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee—have adopted similarly comprehensive policies, or undertaken the work to implement them over a long period to achieve results.
There’s a reason education experts have taken to talking about “the Southern surge,” not the “red state rise.”
And sometimes, the unions can be won over—or beat. Consider recent victories in New Mexico, Maryland and Massachusetts, where advocates built the political will to adopt reforms despite pushback from their unions.
In New Mexico, lawmakers unanimously passed new legislation bringing the state’s literacy policies closer to Mississippi’s, including on issues like teacher licensure, coaching and curriculum. Amanda Aragon Bernabe of NewMexicoKidsCAN, a leading advocate for the reforms, said the biggest victories involve laws requiring schools to test young children for reading progress and to notify parents of the results. Parental notification is a key accountability component of Mississippi’s policy.
An elementary school in Albuquerque, N.M. The state enacted education reform after prolonged advocacy from supporters, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
An elementary school in Albuquerque, N.M. The state enacted education reform after prolonged advocacy from supporters, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Roberto E. Rosales/ZUMA Press
It took New Mexico years to pass these reforms, but state unions recently dropped their opposition to the bill after months of advocacy by supporters, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
In 2024, Maryland adopted a version of Mississippi’s most controversial literacy policy—requiring schools to hold back students if they can’t read adequately by third grade—as part of the state’s new comprehensive literacy policy. Facing stiff opposition from the state teachers’ association, the State Board compromised by allowing parents of retention-eligible students to opt out if their child takes a state-approved reading intervention course. Whether this alternative, which takes effect next year, will prove as effective as Mississippi’s policy remains an open question.
Most astonishing is the case of Massachusetts, which ranks third overall in union strength. In late June, Gov. Maura Healey signed new legislation aimed at ensuring that all Bay State public school children receive “evidence-based literacy instruction.” It also codifies and tightens requirements for teacher training, K-3 reading curricula, screening and parental notification, while granting the Massachusetts Department of Education robust powers to enforce transparency and accountability.
Education reformers see the law not only as a tremendous victory, but as the greatest legislative loss for the teachers union in a decade. As in New Mexico, the final bill passed both chambers unanimously and enjoyed strong support from the governor.
Mary Tamer, the executive director of Mass Potential and leader of the Mass Reads Coalition, attributes the legislative win to a number of factors: the support of a broad coalition of parents and researchers; persistently low reading proficiency rates on the state assessment, especially postpandemic; and a perception that the teachers union had largely staked its opposition on the flawed premise that teachers should be free to run classrooms however they please.
It also helped that many teachers, including three former Massachusetts teachers of the year, bucked their union by speaking in favor of the legislation. “They were incredibly brave to speak up against union leadership on this issue,” Tamer said.
While political headwinds remain a hindrance to education reform, these recent legislative developments show that policies supporting evidence-based literacy can gain traction across diverse constituencies.
The question is whether policymakers, regardless of party alignment, have the courage to risk taking heat on behalf of our children’s future.
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