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.
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.
