The Mississippi Miracle in education is real and it’s based on community

Photo attributed to Creative Commons

By R.J. Morgan

If you’re an educator in Mississippi, take a bow. An overhaul in the way the state approaches early childhood learning has become a model for the rest of the country and the envy of our neighbors.

For now. 

In 2013, fourth-grade students in Mississippi finished 49th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is given to every fourth- and eighth-grade public school student in the country as a way of measuring progress in reading and math. (Private schools are encouraged to participate, but their scores are not included in state-level data.)

It was an embarrassingly poor showing for a state trying to capitalize on a new wave of industry and population growth across the South. If Mississippi didn’t fix its education system in a hurry, it was going to be left lagging behind its peers for yet another generation. 

To address the issue, the Republican-led state legislature, at the behest of former Gov. Phil Bryant (also a Republican), passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which finally gave teachers the resources they needed to help the kids who needed helping. 

Elementary teachers were given additional training on how to center literacy in their curriculum. State-funded reading coaches and interventionists were hired to help struggling learners catch up to their peers. If students still couldn’t reach proficiency by the end of their third-grade year, i.e. the grade before the NAEP test is administered, they were held back for even more targeted help. 

It was a controversial plan. Holding kids back meant separating them from their peer group. The prevailing wisdom at the time said doing so would make struggling learners feel even more isolated and almost certainly make them more likely candidates to drop out in middle or high school. 

Well, the results are in and they are staggering. 

Not only did those students who were held back go on to achieve greater success in middle school, but in 2024 Mississippi ranked No. 1 nationally (again, for emphasis, No. 1 nationally) in fourth-grade reading scores after adjusting for demographics like poverty and race. Even unadjusted, the state still cracks the Top 20, and minority learners in Mississippi fare better than those in almost any other state. 

Mississippi! 

Long the butt of the joke, Mississippi is now being praised by education researchers and national political figures on both sides of the aisle. No less than former Chicago mayor and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel penned a love letter to the state’s progress last month for The Wall Street Journal. 

You’ve probably heard this phenomenon referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle.”

Teachers perform miracles every day. That didn’t start in 2013. I believe the moniker is better suited to the politicians who listened and acted. For a state that spends less per pupil than most of the country, we’re getting an amazing return on our investment.

This is real, substantial progress, not funny math. It is a success Mississippi can hang its hat on and use to attract even more businesses and citizens into our economy. It is a solid foundation upon which to build even further gains. 

 As an educator and a taxpayer, I am grateful. 

You may be asking yourself, what’s next?

How will our leaders in Jackson build on this exciting momentum? 

Answer: Attempt to gut the whole damn thing. 

In January the Mississippi House of Representatives narrowly passed a universal school choice bill that would have allowed families the option to pull their local tax dollars out of the public school system and put them toward private, charter or homeschool school tuition instead. 

None of those are bad things. I regularly work with good people and great students in all three settings. The question is whether they should be funded by public tax dollars. 

The resulting competition, the theory goes, would create a more dynamic educational marketplace, where schools either have to please their students’ parents or risk losing their funding when mom and dad “move their letter” across town. 

It’s the K-12 equivalent of college football’s transfer portal. If adopted, the same turmoil would ensue. The Senate Education Committee unanimously killed the bill last week, but debate will persist. 

What if we applied the same logic to fire departments?

Sure, we could pool our resources in the traditional way and fund a team of professionals with professional equipment, waiting on-call to address any crisis at a moment’s notice. Or, the city could just cut you a $100 check each January and wish you all the best. 

My point is that pooled resources do not equal socialism. They equal a society. Our obsession with fully customizable individuality is ripping us apart at the seams, and one of those seams is public education. 

I grew up in Pearl, Miss., a community in every sense of the word. What makes that town a community, more than any other factor, is the unflagging unity of its support for its public schools. So what happens to communities like Pearl when we begin auctioning off our children’s education to the lowest bidder? Or the highest? What will unite us then?

I love capitalism, truly, but I love my country more. 

Public schools embody the promise of shared opportunity upon which this country was founded. It is a sentiment expressed in the famous Emma Lazarus poem enshrined at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

That is the attitude the Republican statehouse adopted in 2013 when they passed the legislation that got us here. Bring us the kids you have, all of ‘em. Whatever their issues, we will take them and love them and pour ourselves into their success. We will do the research, we will fund the positions. Whatever it takes. Because we know that their success is our success. 

We won’t always get it right. It is an imperfect system. It needs more help.

But right now, Mississippi is doing a better job at educating its kids than any other state in the union. That is a really, really good thing for all of us. 

I hope we don’t throw the children out with the bathwater. 

-––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

R.J. Morgan is instructional associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi, director of the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.