Mississippi, once ranked near the bottom of the country for reading, redesigned its approach(opens in new tab) to literacy instruction a decade ago — putting phonics at the center of how its youngest students are taught — and saw fourth-grade proficiency surge from 49th in the nation in 2013 to ninth in 2024. San Francisco’s reformers had that example in mind.
To understand why SFUSD may be falling short, we spoke with Rachel Canter, who heads education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute and previously led Mississippi First, a nonprofit that advocated for changes to that state’s education policy.
She argues that Mississippi’s success went far beyond curriculum changes — accountability for schools and districts was key. That largely hasn’t been the case in California, where a strict statewide mandate(opens in new tab) on phonics instruction was watered down after opposition from teachers unions.
Canter, who recently published a study on why other states have yet to achieve Mississippi’s results, reviewed SFUSD’s progress report.
WASHINGTON (April 16, 2026) — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report urging America’s governors and mayors to dramatically expand their investments in advanced technology industries, citing China’s aggressive and surprisingly decentralized strategy of provincial and municipal tech spending as a competitive threat that federal policy alone cannot match.
The report, “What America’s Governors and Mayors Can Learn from China’s Local-Facing Investment Strategy,” by PPI Vice President and Chief Economist Michael Mandel, documents how Chinese provincial and municipal governments are outspending their U.S. counterparts in sectors ranging from semiconductors and electric vehicles to satellites, biotech and carbon fiber, while American state and local investment has stalled for two decades.
“State and local government investment spending has risen only 15% in real terms from 2005 to 2025, far slower than the overall economy,” said Mandel. “Meanwhile, China’s local governments are pouring enormous sums into the industries that will define the next generation of global economic leadership.”
The report finds that Chinese local governments accounted for 844 billion yuan in science and technology spending in 2024, roughly double the central government’s outlay. By contrast, U.S. state and local net investment has fallen from 1.0% of GDP in 2005 to just 0.7% in 2025, leaving an estimated $110 billion annual shortfall relative to historical norms.
Mandel draws on a May 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research paper finding that subnational Chinese governments account for 87% of the explicit industrial policies cited in public Chinese government documents. Cities including Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing are committing billions to chip design, EV manufacturing, satellite development, and biosciences, while smaller cities such as Weihai are making major investments to foster industries like the manufacture of high-quality carbon fiber, a critical material for aerospace and wind turbine blades.
The report does not advocate that U.S. states simply replicate China’s model. Chinese local governments have taken on enormous debts through direct borrowing and off-budget financing vehicles, with the International Monetary Fund estimating 16 trillion renminbi, or roughly $2 trillion, in additional debt in 2024 and 2025 alone. “Financially prudent risk-taking is the key to sustainable growth,” said Mandel. “U.S. states and cities should invest in their future while keeping their borrowing under control.”
The report identifies several high-priority areas for state and local action, including AI data centers and application development, worker training and AI extension programs for small businesses, space-related infrastructure funded through new financing tools such as space bonds, and support for advanced biosciences, manufacturing, and agriculture. It points to New York’s Empire AI Partnership and the Texas Space Commission as early models of the kind of proactive state-level investment that can drive innovation and economic competitiveness.
“Governors and mayors are looking for opportunities to exert technology leadership and increase competitiveness while maintaining fiscal prudence,” said Mandel. “It’s time for far-sighted state and local officials to take advantage of new technologies and new opportunities, rather than wait for Washington.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.
This policy paper illuminates China’s successful advanced technology investment strategy, with the goal of drawing lessons for U.S. policymakers. In particular, we show that China’s investment strategy is much more decentralized than is usually realized. The broad directions of science and technology investment policy are set in Beijing, but much of the execution and funding is undertaken by provincial and municipal officials. We explain the pluses and minuses of China’s “local-facing” investment strategy, and what it means for American governors and mayors.
First, to provide a starting point, we document the persistent weakness in state and local investment spending in the United States. In the United States, state and local government investment spending has stalled out over the past two decades, rising by only 15% in real terms from 2005 to 2025. Meanwhile, federal nondefense investment spending is up 87% over the same stretch, reflecting America’s top-down approach to tech investment policy.
Second, we explain how China’s local-facing investment strategy works, and why it has been successful. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, China’s provincial and municipal governments are pouring enormous sums of money into supporting advanced technology industries such as semiconductors, electric vehicles, satellites, biotech, humanoid robots, and the manufacture of key aerospace materials such as carbon fiber. One example: In 2025, the municipal government of Shenzhen, China’s third-largest city, backed a 5 billion yuan fund that would invest in chip design and other advanced technologies. That can be valued at somewhere between $700 million and $1.4 billion, depending on whether we use the official exchange rate of roughly 7 yuan to the dollar, or the purchasing power parity (PPP) rate of roughly 3.5 yuan to the dollar. In either case, it’s a substantial investment of resources for one city and one industry.
This government decentralization is essential to explaining how China’s government-led science and technology investment policy is able to push ahead on multiple technological frontiers simultaneously. Key advanced technology industries are being subsidized and supported by local policymakers who can move much faster and more flexibly than central government bureaucrats could. The result is the economic equivalent of a stampede — a barely controlled rush to add technological capacity without immediately worrying about profitability or the rapid buildup of debt.
Third, following on that insight, we show the downside of China’s success: Provincial and municipal governments have taken on astronomical levels of debt, on a scale that exceeds the U.S. AI investment boom. International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates suggest that municipal and provincial Chinese governments, plus their affiliated “local government finance vehicles”(LGFVs), borrowed 16 trillion renminbi in 2024 and 2025, much of that from Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises. That’s the equivalent of adding more than $2 trillion in debt in two years.
Fourth, we identify what the U.S. can learn from China’s example. On the plus side, the success of the Chinese approach should encourage U.S. state and local governments to be more proactive in funding and supporting advanced technology industries. Key state and local investments should include AI data centers, AI application development, worker training, and AI extension programs; space-related infrastructure and manufacturing, funded by new financing tools such as “space bonds” and support for new ventures in advanced biosciences, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture.
However, financially prudent risk-taking is the key to sustainable growth. Chinese provincial and municipal governments have taken on massive debts that may impair long-term growth and perhaps even trigger a financial crisis. U.S. states and cities should invest in their future while keeping their borrowing under control.
WASHINGTON (April 15, 2026) — Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) Vice President and Director of Competition Policy Diana Moss released the following statement welcoming today’s jury verdict finding Live Nation-Ticketmaster liable for operating an illegal monopoly in the live events and ticketing industry:
“Justice has been served to one of the most powerful monopolies in the United States. Live Nation-Ticketmaster has stifled competition and ripped off music fans for decades.”
PPI has led the charge in analysis and advocacy on the competitive and consumer harms caused by the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly. When the U.S. Department of Justice filed its antitrust lawsuit in 2024, Moss called it long overdue and argued that only a structural breakup could fully restore competition. In a February 2026 report, she warned that any pre-trial settlement would be a failure of enforcement. When the Trump DOJ settled anyway, Moss called on the non-settling states to continue pursuing litigation and effective remedies, which is exactly what today’s verdict vindicates.
Only weeks ago, the DOJ cobbled together a premature settlement with the monopoly. Moss noted that the move disrupted due process and cut the states out of one of the most important antitrust actions of the century. “Kudos to the states for sticking it out, proceeding to trial and getting this terrific jury verdict,” she said.
“The court will now turn to the remedies phase of the case. The hope is that the states can get strong relief for consumers, relegating the Trump DOJ’s settlement to the waste bin,” Moss added.
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
FACT: Trump administration tariffs haven’t achieved their goals.
THE NUMBERS: Manufacturing share of U.S. GDP –
2025
9.40%
2024
9.80%
2016
10.80%
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Every March for the last half-century, per the Trade Act of 1974, the staff at the U.S. Trade Representative Office has written up a formal report on the administration’s trade goals for the coming year, entitled “The President’s Trade Agenda,” and sent it to Congress. A month later, the two Congressional Committees responsible for trade policy — Ways and Means in the House, Finance in the Senate — fetch them up for a public hearing to explain it. Last year’s hearings, a week after the Trump administration’s April 2 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariff decree, were a bit rocky. They did, though, extract an explanation of what the administration wanted the decree to do. Here’s Amb. Greer:
“The deficit [i.e., trade balance] needs to go in the right direction. Manufacturing as a share of GDP needs to go in the right direction.”
A year later, tariffs are deeply unpopular, and the Supreme Court has demolished the April 2 decree and its seven “IEEPA” companions. Nonetheless, the administration has kept a jury-rigged high-tariff system in place through claims of a “balance of payments crisis” and constantly shifting Commerce Department “national security” decrees. Yale BudgetLab calculations estimate that the average U.S. tariff rate is 11.8% this week — down from a 19% peak last summer, but still nearly five times the 2.5% average of January 2025. The administration’s pitch to the Committees last year was that even if tariff decrees imposed “some pain” on families — two-dolls-per-girl rations, broader price increases, etc. — and damaged the Constitutional separation of powers, the benefits of a lower U.S. goods-trade deficit and a relatively larger manufacturing industry would outweigh the harms.
With Amb. Greer’s return engagements coming up — likely next week — how is it working out? Trade balance and GDP shares are secondary and tertiary stats, and not necessarily the right measurements of success. (As an example, very rapid growth in digital industries would mean the GDP shares of the other sectors shrink even if they’re all doing fine.) Many would prefer examining trade policy’s contributions to primary indicators like economic growth, job creation, stable prices, and low unemployment. But balance and GDP share are at least specific and measurable. Here’s a look at how the trade balance and the manufacturing share of GDP have changed, set against “pain” and Constitutional questions:
1. Trade balance: Not yet clear. The trade-balance stats for 2025 and 2024, with 2016 — the Obama administration’s final year, before the first Trump administration’s tariff increases in mid-2018 – added as a longer-term comparison, look like this:
2016
2024
2025
Goods and services
-$479 billion
-$904 billion
-$901 billion
Goods only
-$750 billion
-$1,215 billion
-$1,241 billion
Manufacturing only
-$647 billion
-$1,202 billion
-$1,236 billion
Trade balance/ GDP ratio
2.7%
3.1%
3.0%
Census for goods/services and goods balances; BEA’s GDP database for trade balance/GDP ratio; U.S. International Trade Commission Dataweb for manufacturing-only balance (NAICS basis).
So, not much change. The 2025 deficit was about the same as that of 2024, and larger than that of 2016. (PPI note: Comparing dollar-value trade balances over long periods of time is usually misleading, as the figures don’t account for inflation and GDP growth. For 2016, the GDP ratio is best.) On Amb. Greer’s side, though, Census’ monthly figures might be trending down: up sharply in early 2025 as businesses rushed to get low-tariff goods in before tariffs rose; back down by summer as inventories filled; and a few more downward than upward spikes since then.
2. Manufacturing share of GDP: Down. The manufacturing share of U.S. GDP fell from 9.8% of GDP in 2024 to 9.4% in 2025. Job figures concur — manufacturing hiring fell by about 400,000 in 2025, and factories shed 108,000 jobs on net. Conclusions after one turbulent year might be premature, but in 2016 the manufacturing share of U.S. GDP was a lot higher – 10.8% – so post-2017 tariff increases haven’t lifted it. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as U.S. manufacturers are some of the country’s largest importers – Census finds them buying $1.2 trillion of $2.9 trillion in known goods imports in 2024 (latest year available) – and are presumably now carrying some of the heaviest Trump tariff burdens.
Overall, last year’s GDP-share trend looks like the one you’d expect from a general tax on purchases of physical goods. BEA data show the shares of mining, construction, manufacturing, restaurants, and retail all down a bit, and that of agriculture flat, while the corresponding shares of financial services, legal services, information industry, and health grew. So as tariffs raised goods costs, manufacturers, along with other big goods-buyers, shrank relative to industries that spend relatively less of their money on physical goods, and more on services and investment.
3. How much pain? Mr. Trump’s 2024 platform promised to “defeat inflation and quickly bring down all prices.” Tariffs, by contrast, are meant to raise prices, and that’s happened. Harvard Business School’s tariff price tracker follows prices for a basket of tariffed goods and similar domestic goods. It finds that the tariffs have raised prices by about 7.0% above trend rise for the imported things, 4.6% for the domestic substitutes, and 0.8% across the entire goods-and-services economy. Federal Reserve economists concur. Spread across families, a Joint Economic Committee calculation finds this has cost families about $1,750 per household on average.
4. And the Constitution?Returning to USTR’s report, the 2026 version of the “President’s Trade Agenda” report has a startling second line: “[T]he Constitution is our most important trade agreement.” If so, the Trump administration has a big trade-agreement compliance problem. Article I’s first “enumerated power” – “Congress shall have power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises” – is pretty clear. So is the third sentence, assigning Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.” If a president can set new tariff rates at will by declaring emergencies, and can conclude ‘deals’ with foreign countries altering both U.S. tariff rates and U.S. regulations without Congressional approval or negotiating objectives, do these clauses mean anything?
The Committees have lots to ask about next week.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
Offer a positive alternative.
Documents:
The Constitution; see Article I, Section 8, for authority over tariffs and trade regulation.
USTR’s “President’s Trade Agenda” reports for 2026 and 2025.
The Supreme Court’s Feb. 20, 2026 Learning Resources v. Trump opinion striking it down, along with the IEEPA decrees related to India, fentanyl, Brazilian court cases, etc.
A February Trade Fact takes a deep dive into trade and tariff polling over 2025 and early 2026. Summary: As Amb. Greer spoke to the Committees last April, a broad average across polls suggests that the public opposed Mr. Trump’s tariff decrees by about 60% to 35%, and little has changed since.
And a last look back at the IEEPA decrees:
As a tax matter, in the end, the administration’s eight “IEEPA” tariff decrees raised “negative $4 billion” in revenue and arguably “negative $9 billion.” Though Customs and Border Patrol’s “Trade Statistics” page still mournfully says buyers paid $166 billion in the IEEPA tariffs, CBP now has to pay all it all back with interest By PPI Fiscal Policy Analyst Alex Kilander’s calculations, the decision to defend the IEEPA decrees all the way to the Supreme Court means at least $4 billion in extra liability for taxpayers. Here’s why:
The administration lost its IEEPA case at the Court of International Trade on May 28, 2025. The decision to appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court appeals stretched the litigation out until February 20, 2026. That would be 268 days. As the IRS explains, ordinary Treasury borrowing pays about 4% interest (a rough average; longer-term T-bills pay higher rates than shorter-term), but interest on mistakenly or illegally collected money costs 7%. Anyone who has contemplated buying a house feels intuitively uneasy seeing that sort of spread. Kilander has the formula:
T-bill borrowing rate proxy:
$166 billion * (1 + 0.04/2)2*0.75 =
$171 billion
Tariff refund with interest:
$166 billion * (1 + 0.07/365)365*0.75 =
$175 billion
In sum, the administration’s 268 days of litigation meant an extra 3% interest on its borrowing. Assuming spending patterns remained the same, that means they (more precisely, “we,” as taxpayers) are out $175 billion, an extra $4 billion. Or, had it decided to scale back the ‘reconciliation bill’ after the Court of International Trade loss and not borrow the $166 billion at all, we would have saved $9 billion.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
For decades, students transferring between colleges was a side road in American higher education. Today, it’s one of the system’s main highways.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports that nearly 1.2 million students, or roughly 13%, transferred to a new institution, an increase of nearly 8% since 2020, prompting Madi Turner of the Oakland Post to call these students “the transfer generation.”
Nearly half of these students move from two-year to four-year institutions, making community colleges a primary launch point for students seeking a bachelor’s degree.
But the transfer pathway is far less dependable than it should be. It’s confusing, inconsistent and costly for those who depend on it, wasting time, credits, money and momentum. What should be a bridge too often becomes a barrier.
A report from the LEARN Commission explains why. It’s a failure of learning mobility or the system colleges use to evaluate and apply learning across institutions. That system is fragmented, opaque and labor-intensive. Decisions are scattered across departments, with little attention to student outcomes.
“There’s different pricing models,” said Diana Moss, vice president and director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.
She believes ticket prices are out of reach for many because Ticketmaster and Live Nation have control over the live events ecosystem.
“The primary market is pretty dysfunctional. Tickets are underpriced, they hold back big chunks of tickets, the monopoly is sitting in the middle of that market — that creates huge shortages and jacks up prices, really hard for consumers to get a hold of those tickets,” Moss said.
WASHINGTON (April 14, 2026) — Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) Senior Fellow Paul Weinstein, Jr., released the following statement in response to a recent report by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) on stablecoin yield and its impact on bank lending:
“Despite the Trump Administration’s support for Crypto, a recent study by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) undermines the argument that yield-bearing stablecoins won’t reduce community lending, particularly to small businesses, farms, and underserved areas.
“When Congress passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act last summer, the law prohibited the payment of interest by stablecoin issuers. The intent was to prevent the draining of deposits from traditional banks and create a regulatory structure for using stablecoin as a payment processing tool. However, the GENIUS Act, while prohibiting yield payments from stablecoin issuers, did not explicitly bar intermediaries from offering yield-like rewards to holders of the coins.
“Most studies, including one by the Federal Reserve last year, have found that increased adoption of stablecoin would significantly impact the banking sector by draining deposits from banks and thereby reducing lending to communities. In a cynical attempt to cloud the results of these studies, the CEA has tried to make an inverse argument, claiming that a complete prohibition on stablecoin yield would only increase bank lending marginally. Even if correct, two things can be true: that a prohibition on yield would not significantly increase lending by banks, but allowing stablecoins to offer interest would significantly increase deposit outflows from banks
“By not directly addressing the impact of yield-bearing stablecoin on bank deposits and lending, the CEA has only further validated the argument that the yield loophole created by the GENIUS Act needs to be closed.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.
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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org
As Americans celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, they are expressing a declining belief in liberal democracy, a faltering faith in the country, rising antisemitism and reduced support for the state of Israel. Chillingly, these challenges show up most acutely among young Americans. How do these problems relate to one another, and what can be done to repair society?
In a 2023 YouGov poll, 31% of youth ages 18-29 agreed that “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and Americans should explore alternative forms of government” (compared to only 5% of those over 65). And a recent Democracy Fund poll found that while only 1 in 10 Baby Boomers described the Founders as closer to “villains” than “heroes,” 4 in 10 Gen Z respondents did.
On a parallel track, antisemitism is rising among the young. As far back as 1964, the Anti-Defamation League found that antisemitism was typically worse among older Americans than younger ones. In 2024, however, the ADL found for the first time that antisemitism was higher among younger adults. Another poll found that 11% of millennials and Gen Z Americans thought Jews caused the Holocaust; in New York State, the figure was 19%.
Having paused U.S. attacks on Iran, can President Trump be persuaded to suspend hostilities against Europe as well?
His reckless rhetorical overkill is making the transatlantic alliance collateral damage in operation Epic Fury.
Trump has called key European allies “cowards” for not coming to America’s aid — specifically to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. He has dismissed NATO as a “paper tiger” and threatened to pull the U.S. out of the collective security pact.
He upped the ante earlier this week, comparing United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer to his Hitler-appeasing predecessor, Neville Chamberlain.
Accusing our NATO partners of being faithless allies is chutzpah on stilts. Trump didn’t consult European leaders before impulsively joining Israel Feb. 28 in launching air strikes against Iran and its Middle East proxies. Nor could he produce evidence to back his claim of an “imminent” Iranian threat to the U.S.
When the pandemic disrupted American K-12 schooling, Washington responded with the largest one-time federal investment in public education in American history. Three rounds of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding sent $189.5 billion to K-12 schools. The goal was straightforward: help schools reopen, stabilize operations and give students a chance to recover from historic learning loss.
Now the evidence is clearer, and the conclusion is more nuanced than either side of the school-funding debate likely prefers. Pandemic aid did help — but not enough.
Research suggests that the funding produced measurable gains in achievement, especially in math. Yet those gains were modest relative to the losses students suffered. That makes the relief funds neither a clean failure nor a clear success. It was a stabilizing intervention that bought schools time and supported some recovery. It was not, by itself, a strategy capable of restoring pre-pandemic learning trajectories.
Workforce Pell is no longer a policy idea. It’s becoming a governing reality. Congress created the program, and the U.S. Department of Education has now proposed rules for how it will work. Students can begin using the new program this July.
What happens next depends less on the law than on whether states implement it in ways that deliver results that help students move from training into work and then into longer-term advancement.
Workforce Pell extends the nation’s main federal college grant program to shorter-term, job-focused education and training programs. Congress created it so that low-income students could use Pell Grants for programs that lead more quickly to employment, earnings gains and additional learning.
Under the department’s proposed rule, eligible programs would generally run from 150 to 599 clock hours and last at least eight weeks but less than 15 weeks. The department has also framed Workforce Pell as a stepping-stone to future postsecondary credentials, not just a stand-alone grant for quick training.
That change could open a meaningful new route to opportunity. For many students, especially working adults and those with limited financial means, a shorter and more affordable path to a recognized credential may be more realistic than a traditional degree-only route.
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.
WASHINGTON (April 9, 2026) — Throughout the country, Americans are talking about the “Mississippi Miracle” in which the Magnolia State jumped from the bottom of both math and reading NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) rankings in the United States to nearly the top. A new report by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) finds that the dramatic improvement is no miracle,as it took nearly two decades of work by education reformers alongside policymakers to ensure students in Mississippi get the education they deserve.
The report, “Inside the Mississippi Marathon,” authored by Rachel Canter, PPI’s Director of Education Policy, provides an insider’s account of the state’s rise in education rankings. Canter, the founder of education nonprofit Mississippi First, was instrumental in advocating and implementing policy reforms to improve public schools. Before earning a graduate degree in policy and founding Mississippi First, Canter graduated from Mississippi public schools and taught in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest areas in the country.
“Mississippi’s progress was not a miracle, and it didn’t happen overnight,” said Canter. “It was the product of nearly 20 years of policy changes and a relentless focus on higher expectations for students, schools, and the education system as a whole.”
While some claim that the reason for the state’s turnaround was simply an adherence to the “science of reading,” Canter credits four policy pillars for the education transformation in the state:
Standards, Testing, and Accountability: Committing to higher, clearer standards; a more rigorous assessment; and a transparent, outcomes-focused accountability system
Consequences for Poor Performance: Enforcing clear rules for state intervention in failing school districts
Evidence-Informed Instructional Policy: Adopting proven instructional approaches like the science of reading, pre-K, and high-quality curriculum, and embedding data-driven decision-making in schools
Support for Implementation: Providing teachers, schools, and districts with the support and resources to improve instruction, including increasing state-level capacity to help districts carry out reforms effectively
Results on par with Mississippi’s public education system require time, but Canter calls on states nationwide to invest in all of these pillars before expecting results.
“There is no quick fix for the declining student achievement we’ve seen nationwide for the last decade,” said Canter. “Just like we did in Mississippi, policymakers need to embrace a broad agenda rooted in what we know works — like serious standards, accountability, the science of reading, teacher feedback, and coaching — in order to build the public school systems that children deserve.”
The Reinventing America’s Schools Project seeks to refocus national leadership around proven strategies to improve public schools and educational achievement. We believe that American public schools must prepare children academically to be successful adults and citizens; families should have a voice in their child’s education, including a choice within the public system to find a school that best fits their child’s needs; and, though education is the province of the states, the federal government must protect the promise that every child will have access to a quality public education.
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.
It feels surreal to be a public education advocate from Mississippi these days. After decades of derision, my home state has lately become a cause célèbre for dramatically improving our students’ reading and math skills, which rocketed Mississippi from the bottom of national rankings to near the top. The resulting think pieces often border on wonder: Pundits have dubbed our story “the Mississippi miracle,” as if it must have taken divine intervention for us to do what so many others are failing to do — improve education for kids of all races, incomes, and achievement levels.
Much of that media coverage has focused solely on Mississippi’s “science of reading” reforms, which implemented structured literacy programs. Many policymakers seem to have taken away the message that the science of reading, and particularly phonics, is the one silver bullet that all states should implement. To date, 40 states have adopted policies aimed at changing classroom instruction to align with these proven practices.
But this narrow understanding of Mississippi’s story is wrong, or at least very incomplete. No one policy, and no one person, is responsible for our educational turnaround. It also didn’t happen overnight, or in a few years. Mississippi’s progress is neither a miracle nor a myth, as some skeptics have insisted; it’s been a two-decade marathon.
I personally spent 17 years helping state leaders run that race. As the head of Mississippi First, a nonprofit I founded in 2008, I played a hand in, and sometimes led, many of the state’s key education policy conversations with the legislature while also working with the Mississippi Department of Education to implement the reform agenda. This is my insider’s view of what policymakers, philanthropists, and pundits should know about what really happened.
NO SILVER BULLETS, NO SUPERHEROES
If fixing education were as easy as banning discredited reading practices, such as three-cueing,4 from the classroom, all of us could just go home now; after all, state legislatures nationwide have already embraced that cause. But real life is not that simple. Rather than a single policy or person, Mississippi’s successful transformation rested on four pillars, all of which were variations on a central theme: holding ourselves accountable for higher expectations. These policy pillars were 1) standards, testing, and accountability, 2) consequences for poor performance, 3) evidence-informed instructional policy, and 4) support for implementation.
At first glance, nothing about this agenda — or our unifying principle — seems new. Mississippi, and the rest of the nation, had been pursuing policies containing some form of these ideas for roughly thirty years by the time our work began ramping up in earnest in 2012. I have listened to 90s ed reform stalwarts, for example, lament that “we tried standards-based reform, and it didn’t work.”
But maybe more remarkable than what we did is what we didn’t do: Mississippi resisted chasing the latest fad. Education as a sector is obsessed with the new, careening from big idea to big idea in a matter of a few short years without much thoughtfulness about why the last one seemed to fail — a psychosis the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess wrote about in his 1999 book Spinning Wheels.
I came to believe this novelty obsession was part of Mississippi’s problem. It was certainly at play in the Mississippi Delta school I taught in after college, which was haphazardly implementing a “whole school reform” for a few years during the height of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind push, only to dump it before it bore any fruit.
But the reality statewide was actually far worse. Mississippi was only pretending to embrace reforms. We said we were adopting the same policies as everyone else, and we acted like we were implementing them. But the truth was that we rarely did either with any depth or degree of excellence. We had less of a spinning car wheel and more of a lazy Susan whose turns were as slow as our dollops of policy change were small.
This pattern changed most dramatically with the 2012 legislative term. The state not only began to adopt robust, data-driven policies but to do so without compromising on the elements — or their execution — that made those policies work, even if they were difficult or controversial. We also resisted the siren call of the new big idea that would single-handedly revolutionize our schools and focused on developing a coherent policy framework we could implement with excellence over time. This is, in part, why this moment feels so incongruous: other states are turning “literacy, “especially phonics, into the next big idea in exactly the same way they did failed reform ideas of the past.
The detritus of ed reform suggests that there’s no perfect antidote to this mode of thinking, but Mississippi’s story provides a dose of reality. Instead of the primacy of a single ingredient at any given time — like “literacy” or “choice” or “standards” — Mississippi combined what I have come to think of as the three Ps of reform: policy, people, and persistence. We adopted specific policies, in a specific sequence. We did not rely on a single superhero. We built a team of leaders across state government, in-state nonprofits, and local schools that agreed on a standard of excellence for what those policies should include and how they should be implemented, and we kept each other honest. Finally, we kept going long enough to see the effects of our efforts.
Mississippi did this work in a national political atmosphere where policymakers were far too eager to abandon both learning standards and accountability just as we decided to embrace them. Both major federal education reform efforts of the past 25 years — No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top — faced bipartisan backlashes that made them political orphans. After 2015, national progress on the NAEP began to stall and has fallen off a cliff post-COVID. Neither political party seems up to the challenge of addressing the issue or is even paying very much attention at a national level.
Yet the playbook for better public education already exists. It is not a political free lunch: Anybody who believes they can fix their state’s reading scores by tweaking their literacy curriculum without embracing serious standards and accountability will be sorely disappointed. But progress is possible.
These pages explain each element of Mississippi’s reforms with great specificity so that other states can find their own roadmap to success. First, I briefly review Mississippi’s data to provide a common understanding of just how deep Mississippi’s transformation has been. Then, I turn to the policy agenda, how it came about, and what everyone gets wrong about our literacy work. Next, I describe the people who made this work possible and sustained it, while diving deeper into the political context of the reforms. Finally, I conclude with some consideration of this moment in educational history, both for Mississippi and the nation, and why I remain hopeful that America’s public schools can improve.
FACT: U.S. Customs blocks about $0.8 billion worth of goods a year on suspicion of ‘forced labor.’
THE NUMBERS: For 2021 –
World goods exports
$22.290 trillion
U.S. goods imports
$2.849 trillion
Illegal profit from industrial and agricultural forced labor*
$40 billion
US imports blocked by CBP for suspected forced labor content
<$1 billion
* International Labour Organization estimates, 2024. “Industry” includes manufacturing, mining, construction, and utilities.
** CBP statistics.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
The Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, explains the Trump administration’s plan to replace its 2025 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariff decrees with new ones using different laws:
“Six Justices … ruled that IEEPA authorities cannot be used to raise even one dollar of revenue. This administration will invoke alternative legal authorities to replace the IEEPA tariffs. We will be leveraging Section 232 [a “national security” law run by the Commerce Department] and Section 301 [see below] tariff authorities that have been validated through thousands of legal challenges. Treasury’s estimates show that the use of Section 122 authority, combined with potentially enhanced Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs, will result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026.”
Six weeks later, Bessent’s neighbors at the U.S. Representative Office have now duly launched two “Section 301” cases. The first, on “Structural Excess Capacity,” says manufacturing industries in 16 trading partners are too big. (Our view in short: it’s neither economically nor legally serious, and has an inappropriate acronym.) The second charges that the top 60 U.S. trading partners — from the European Union to the Bahamas — are hurting America’s economy by failing to sufficiently combat trade in goods produced by forced labor. This one also seems legally shaky, but at least identifies a real phenomenon and moral challenge. Some observations:
U.S. law has barred imports of goods made by prisoners since the “McKinley Tariff” of 1890. (Though at least one U.S. prison routinely exports goods made by inmates; see below.) The 1930 Tariff Act (“Smoot-Hawley”) then banned imports of goods made with forced labor, unless buyers could show there was no available U.S. substitute. Most recently, an Obama-era law passed in 2016 banned any imports of goods with a “reasonable suspicion” of forced labor content. In sum, for the past decade the U.S. has banned all forced labor imports.
“Section 301,” a trade law dating to 1974, allows U.S. administrations to identify “an act, policy, or practice” of a foreign government which is in some way “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts U.S. commerce,” and gives them a right to use tariffs as a negotiating tool to fix the problem. USTR’s argument for using it here runs as follows: (a) many foreign countries lack a law banning imports of goods made with forced labor like America’s, so (b) they may be incorporating forced labor goods as inputs to their manufacturing industries, which (c) might allow them to produce goods more cheaply than similar American stuff, and therefore (d) this would justify a U.S. tariff to offset this supposed advantage.
1. Law: As a legal matter, then, their argument is that the absence of a particular policy — a law similar to America’s — is the same as actually having the requisite unreasonable policy. This sounds like a stretch, but courts will decide.
2. Economics: USTR’s Federal Register Notice announcing the investigation doesn’t offer evidence that countries on its list are buying any forced labor goods, but says that “none of these countries has adopted and effectively enforced a forced labor import prohibition to date,” and this “may negatively affect U.S. commerce.” How much, then, can we really know? Reliable facts on forced labor are scarce — as is typical of criminal enterprises — but international research and U.S. data both suggest that the scale of forced-labor trade is probably small.
* International evidence: International Labour Organization reports in 2022 and 2024 (which USTR uses as points of reference for its “301” investigation), say that 27.6 million of the world’s 3.22 billion workers were in various forms of forced labor as of 2021 — most commonly, people trapped in jobs when executives withhold pay or confiscate passports. This includes 8.4 million in “industry” (by which the ILO means manufacturing, mining, utilities, and construction), out of an 800-million worldwide total, and 2.1 million of 916 million farm and agriculture workers. They say forced labor is “highest in severity and scale” in “informal micro- and small enterprises operating at the lower links of supply chains in high-risk sectors and locations,” and that with respect to trade destined for wealthier countries, forced labor is likely most common in “raw materials production in the lower tiers of supply chains of consumer goods.”
“Illegal profits” from forced labor, the ILO researchers believe, totaled $236 billion in 2021. About three-quarters of this – $172 billion – came from sex trafficking. Forced-labor profits “industry” totaled $35 billion, and from agriculture $5 billion. The ILO doesn’t speculate on how much of the combined $40 billion came from purely domestic sales and construction contracts, and how much from exports of goods. But in an extreme case, if all of the $40 billion came from goods exports, about 0.2% of the world’s $22.3 trillion in 2021 goods exports would contain some forced labor content. As to effects on trade flows, if forced-labor businesses sold at market prices and pocketed the full $40 billion in profits at the expense of exploited workers, there wouldn’t be a price effect or a “burden on commerce,” but it seems likely that they would sell somewhat cheaper, losing some profit but gaining illicit market share.
* American data: Since passage of the 2016 law, CBP has imposed 55 “Work Release Orders” to block imports of goods worth $3.08 billion, or about $400 million a year. Seizures under a second law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, were about the same. Annual U.S. goods imports during this time averaged a bit above $3 trillion, so the combined $0.8 billion in seizures would be about 0.03% of U.S. import value. Meanwhile, as former U.S. trade/labor negotiator Desiree LeClercq notes, neither the 1930 nor the 2016 law actually bans export of U.S.-made goods produced with forced labor. DHS reporting, for example, shows that 5% of forced labor prosecutions in the United States show up in agriculture, and an unstated but non-zero number in manufacturing, so some U.S. exports to other countries may also contain forced-labor content.
In sum, international research and U.S. data do suggest that some products flowing between countries are made by coerced workers. But the total is likely small relative to trade flows or U.S. industry — and to the $166 billion IEEPA tariffs Bessent wants to restore. And again, the USTR hasn’t provided evidence that countries on its 60-partner list are knowing (or even unwitting) buyers. Nor for that matter is the U.S. law necessarily the world’s best: LeClercq argues that the European Union’s forced labor policy, set to enter into force next year, is better than America’s, since its program does ban exports of European goods made with forced labor, and has stronger due process rules on import cases.
3. Conclusion: International trade isn’t the core forced labor problem, and forced labor likely has only a modest influence on trade flows. But a systematic program to reduce the amount of forced labor worldwide — including keeping forced-labor goods out of the U.S. and forced-labor U.S. goods out of world markets, as will as improving laws and compliance elsewhere — would be admirable regardless of the problem’s scale. And if the administration wants ideas for such a program, it needn’t look far: the Biden administration actually ran one, combining USAID and Labor Department project support with CBP enforcement programs, diplomacy, and trade negotiations.
Bessent’s comments, though, indicate that the Trump administration simply plans to use forced labor as a pretext to recreate the IEEPA tariffs, just as its first IEEPA decrees in 2025 used fentanyl deaths as a pretext for tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods. This isn’t admirable. And if courts take Bessent at his word, they may conclude that the investigation is an illegal use of Section 301, meant not to address a “burden on U.S. commerce” but to bypass Congress and create a new tariff system by decree. As we’ve said before, the Constitution gives Congress, not presidents, the power to set tax rates, including tariffs. If the administration wants a higher tariff rate, it should simply follow the Constitution and ask Congress to pass a bill.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
And LeClercq’s critique of U.S. law notes a lack of due process and spotty enforcement. Her close:
“Like its other Section 301 investigations, USTR is inviting public comments before making its determination. I hope the CBP’s lax evidentiary standards, weak procedures, and questionable commitment to enforcement, along with U.S. forced labor practices, come to light. The U.S. administration must fully reckon with these deficiencies before imposing U.S. models on the world.”
And two U.S. stories:
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution report (2022) on an agricultural forced labor case involving onion and blueberry farming in Georgia. It’s not clear whether the produce was for strictly domestic sale or involved exports as well.
And in regard to prison labor: Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution inmates make denim jeans and shirts — “Prison Blues” — and market them in Europe and Asia via distributors in Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. PPI editorial note: This isn’t necessarily bad — voluntary, paid, and regulated prison work can help inmates develop work habits that ease reintegration to society — but an embarrassing contrast to U.S. import policy.
