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.
