By Rachel Canter
Thursday, April 09, 2026
No story has caught the imagination of education
reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024,
fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose
from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic
factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.
Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi
did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science
of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics,
that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the
Wall Street Journal editorial board
marveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by
returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new
reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that
Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They
therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.
As I detail in a new
report for the Progressive Policy Institute, Mississippi’s transformation
depended on holding students, educators, and even policy makers accountable for
better student performance. Imposing real accountability in education is
politically onerous, which is why such policies have fallen out of favor over
the past decade. But reforms that try to copy only Mississippi’s commitment to
reading science without accountability will not deliver the intended results.
Fixing education is never that simple. If states really want to replicate our
success, they need to understand that what Mississippi did wasn’t a miracle at
all.
***
For decades, education policy in Mississippi was driven
mostly by a desperate desire to avoid ranking last in the country. Aiming
higher wasn’t on the agenda, because state and local leaders believed that
Mississippi kids were too poor to make real progress. In practice, this meant
that the state set abysmally low standards for what students should learn to
advance and graduate.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi was pulled
onto the path of reform by federal legislation, most notably George W. Bush’s
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required states to ensure that students
met challenging learning standards on standardized tests and established
consequences for schools that failed to do so. Our performance on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card,
improved substantially from 1998 to 2009. But because the whole country was
improving, too, Mississippi’s gains were not enough to move the state up in the
rankings. We needed to improve much, much faster than everyone else if we ever
hoped to catch the national average.
In the ensuing years, the country saw a broad backlash to
the ideas embodied in No Child Left Behind and its successor, Race to the Top.
Mississippi, however, took the lessons it had learned about higher expectations
and built on them. The process that would later be called a miracle began in
2008, when the state decided to confront the problem of chronically
underperforming schools. In 2009, the legislature passed a law giving the state
robust new powers to take over districts rated as “failing” for two consecutive
years. The law allowed the state to abolish these districts’ local school board
and remove the local superintendent in favor of a state appointee who would
report directly to the state board of education. A later amendment provided
that removed local-school-board members would be barred from serving in that
capacity again.
These remedies were intense—and yet the state set such a
low bar for academic success that it was unlikely to affect more than a handful
of Mississippi’s school districts. Only in 2012 did the legislature set about
toughening up the accountability regime. Schools and districts began earning a
letter grade from A to F, just as children did in school, based on the share of
students hitting outcomes including achieving grade-level learning, showing a
year’s worth of growth in a year’s time, passing career and technical courses,
and graduating with a standard diploma after four years of high school. By this
point, the state was nearly three years into implementing new, challenging
learning standards and had plans to administer a new assessment that was
designed to reflect a national bar for student performance, rather than the
measly Mississippi bar we had always set. The letter grades would reflect
whether schools had successfully made the transition to the higher
expectations, and do so in a way that the public would more easily understand.
This commitment to high standards was the context in
which Mississippi passed our now-famous literacy law in 2013. Under the
Literacy-Based Promotion Act, Mississippi students who cannot read sufficiently
by third grade are held back a year—“retained,” in education-policy parlance.
Importantly, the law allows only very narrow exemptions, such that the
overwhelming majority of children promoted to fourth grade must pass the state
reading assessment in their first three tries. It also requires schools to screen
students through state-approved assessments three times a year and send parents
a letter reporting their child’s progress. These two accountability
requirements made sure that everyone in the system would be in a hellfire hurry
to teach children to read. No one wanted children to fail.
The second reason for our success seems obvious now but
wasn’t at the time: The state’s bureaucracy worked hard to implement reforms
effectively. The shift to higher expectations, in other words, did not apply
only to children and schools; it required a new attitude at the Mississippi
Department of Education. Until 2012, the details of how an education law or
policy would be implemented, and its success measured, were mostly left to
individual school districts. The state education department focused primarily
on compliance with such black-and-white requirements as class size, air
conditioners, and funding restrictions.
This had clearly not worked, if the goal was student
achievement. So, in 2013, the legislature tried a new tack: articulating
clearer expectations in law and giving the state more involvement in
implementation. For example, the legislature created a special-purpose
oversight body called the Reading Panel to help the Department of Education
with literacy implementation and gave two of the panel’s six seats to its own
education-committee chairs, and a third to a governor’s appointee. Education
officials were immediately on notice that if they didn’t collaborate, there
would be consequences. The department, aided by the hiring of a new state
superintendent in November 2013, began to take a more active role than in the
past in marshaling resources, support, and administrative authority to make
sure the changes embodied in law actually filtered down to students in the
classroom.
***
As the founder of the education nonprofit Mississippi
First, I spent 17 years, alongside many other advocates, pushing for the
reforms whose results are now grabbing national attention. I’m ecstatic that
other states are recognizing and seeking to emulate our work. Unfortunately,
the policies they have rushed to adopt look less like pages from the
Mississippi playbook and more like elaborate paper snowflakes, with many of the
most important pieces snipped out. As Idrees Kahloon wrote for The Atlantic in
October, states across the country are considering and passing literacy reforms
at a time when they have otherwise abandoned the foundation of standards and
accountability. Few have committed to the sorts of accountability measures,
such as parental notification and strict performance-based retention, that
built the conditions for Mississippi’s reading initiative to succeed.
This mentality plays out in statehouses and departments
of education in quietly pernicious ways. In Michigan, for example, lawmakers
are considering their
second revamp of a 2016 literacy law that failed to raise student outcomes,
and they still seem torn on holding students to high standards. The original
law included a third-grade retention policy that granted several broad
exemptions, including allowing parents to opt their children out of being held
back. The policy proved both unpopular and ineffective and was repealed in
2023. Lawmakers are now thinking of resurrecting it without fixing its flaws.
Georgia adopted two big reading bills in 2023 that
attempted to copy many of Mississippi’s strategies. Almost immediately,
implementation went sideways, in part because the state failed to carefully
select the tests that screen children for reading skills and difficulties. The
original list adopted by the Georgia Department of Education contained 16
options of widely varying quality, prompting a 2024 bill to try to limit those
approved. Education advocates in Georgia have told me that although the law declares
that the science of reading shall become the standard in Georgia, the state
education department is reluctant to force school districts to change their
practices. The good news is that members of the Georgia legislature have caught
on. In March, in the final few days of the 2026 legislative session, they
passed cleanup legislation to try to more tightly control implementation.
And then there is California, which passed a “landmark”
bill in 2025, framed as the fruits of a yearslong
effort to help more children learn to read. The state budget also funds
science-of-reading training grants and some literacy coaches statewide.
But a lack of accountability presages failure for
California’s big reform. The law encourages school districts to select
science-of-reading curricula from a state-approved list—but it also allows them
to self-certify that their materials meet state standards. California has also
begun screening students in kindergarten through second grade for literacy
difficulties but generally does not require parental notification of student
scores. It has no statewide retention policy at all.
My fear is that poor implementation and, above all, a
failure to take accountability seriously will end up discrediting good ideas.
If these legislative reforms don’t work, some states might conclude that the
science of reading is ineffective and move on to the next education-policy fad.
For exactly this reason, a silent compact has emerged in Mississippi lately to
refrain from calling what happened a “miracle.” The word diminishes the very
real human effort required to change education for the children of our state.
We’ve instead started calling our success the “Mississippi marathon.” A
marathon is always 26.2 miles, no matter when or where it’s held. There are no
shortcuts. Finishing is a human marvel, but not miraculous. Mississippi took
every step, no matter how exhausting, to fix education. Other states will have
to do the same.
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