Adapted from Rachel Canter’s PPI report.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Mississippi’s education reforms has been its durability. Unlike the policy churn familiar to education advocates in most of the country, the state has steadily built on its reform agenda for around 15 years to create a coherent and comprehensive policy framework — one that includes not only strong learning standards and rules that hold schools accountable for their results, but also evidence-based instructional practices like the science of reading and real support for implementation down to the classroom level. As I’ve written, it was this marathon approach that helped propel us to the top of the national leader board in reading and math, when adjusting for demographics, in 2024.
What some may not realize is that our ability to keep going wasn’t simply dumb luck. It was grit. By the time Mississippi began making efforts to dramatically improve learning, the national mood had already begun to sour on ideas like accountability and rigorous standards. The bipartisan consensus for reform was pulling apart at the seams, and states across the country were already starting to turn back, or water down, measures they had enthusiastically adopted only a few years before.
From the left, longstanding complaints about standardized testing found new purchase with the public after several years of No Child Left Behind, which used grade-level scores on exams as the exclusive measure of whether schools could be designated as “in need of improvement” and face consequences. When reformers began to advocate that tests be used to evaluate teachers, their unions saw an opportunity not only to cast the effort as an attack on educators but to delegitimize all standardized testing and the broader concept of school accountability. A 2008 Time Magazine cover of the first mayorally-appointed Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Michelle Rhee, holding a broom became emblematic not of reformers’ desire to clean up overly bureaucratic and ineffective school districts but of the teachers union’s accusation that reformers sought to fire their way to success.
On the right, the Common Core State Standards, adopted by most states in 2010, became the subject of evolving and increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories online and in conservative media. Reasonable critiques — ranging from concerns the standards didn’t emphasize phonics enough in the early grades to philosophical disagreements about whether the federal government should incentivize the adoption of particular state learning standards — were completely blown away by allegations that the standards were a sinister plot to indoctrinate children in left-wing ideologies. Conservatives dubbed the standards “Obamacore,” despite the entire effort preceding Obama’s presidency and having its genesis in a wholly state-driven process, because many states had rushed their adoption to be competitive in the first round of Race to the Top, the president’s signature education grant initiative.
