| 2024 | +4 |
| 2022 | +1 |
| 2017 | -6 |
| 2011 | -11 |
| 2007 | -12 |
| 2000 | -14 |
Next month, Mississippi’s 235 high schools will send 28,000 graduating seniors off carrying their diplomas to first jobs, military service, college dorms, gap years, etc, and adult life. The 28,000 figure represents a 90.8% graduation rate, the highest in Mississippi history and one of America’s 10 highest. By contrast, when this spring’s grads arrived in kindergarten in 2012, Mississippi’s graduation rate was 75%, tied with Alabama for the country’s 6th-lowest rate. What has happened? And what might school-watchers learn from it?
Offering lessons drawn from her two decades of hands-on experience with Mississippi school reform, PPI Education Director Rachel Canter argues in PPI’s newest research paper that to make American schools a lot better, reformers should avoid hoping for miracles. They should run marathons instead. Background, and then some conclusions:
Every three years since 2000, the U.S. has joined 37 other OECD members, and 57 other interested governments abroad, in the Programme for International Student Assessment (“PISA” for short). Every three years, PISA tests 5,000 15-year-olds in each participating country on reading, science, and math, and then publishes assessments of student achievement that governments, parents, and educators can compare both over time and among countries. The data span some big U.S. national education reform efforts — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core — and, a little dishearteningly, show American school performance staying about the same. The newest results are from the 2022 tests — 2026 figures arrive in September — and almost perfectly match the oldest:
| Year | Reading | Math | Science |
| 2022 | 504 | 465 | 499 |
| 2018 | 505 | 478 | 502 |
| 2012 | 498 | 481 | 497 |
| 2009 | 500 | 487 | 502 |
| 2000 | 504 | 493 | 499 |
PISA’s rankings of American students vis-à-vis foreign countries are a little more variable than their scores, but tell a similar story. Just as U.S. school performances typically show New England at the top, the Deep South and Southwest at the bottom, and the others in between, each PISA comparison has put East Asian schools — Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan – first, with Canada and some smaller northern European countries (Estonia, Switzerland, Ireland) a shade below. U.S. students usually score a bit above the world median and a tier below the best performers. Since 2000, they’ve placed in a range from 8th to 17th in reading, 25th to 30th in math, and 10th to 20th in science. The U.S.’ best-ever ranking was 6th in reading in 2022, not because that year’s American teens improved on their elders’ performance, but because foreigners’ pandemic scores fell more sharply than America’s. In essence, U.S. schools get a sort of “B-” average, sustained with little change throughout the 21st century.
This sort of result can lead to fatalism and passivity. If big national efforts don’t change outcomes much, and what matters instead are locality and family commitments (or even more dispiriting, amorphous cultural or historical factors), why bother? But Canter’s in-depth review of Mississippi’s reading progress shows that fatalism is wrong.
Outside stereotypes of Mississippi mix high culture and outsized historic impact – Faulkner and Welty, Delta blues, the civil rights movement — with low incomes, social stratification, outmigration, poor health, and white flight from public schools. School outcomes before 2010 didn’t do much to disprove this, generally placing Mississippi in the bottom five, if not 49th or 50th. But this spring’s graduates are leaving a school system very different from the one they joined in 2012. Mississippi’s reading ranking, for example, is up to 9th nationally — best in the south and at par with Connecticut and Utah — and Canter notes that “normalizing” data for family income would put Mississippi’s teenage readers first in the country.
How did this happen? Canter objects to the commonly used term “Mississippi miracle”. (A “miracle” implies divine intervention, or some unexpected flash of insight enabling rapid and easy change, and little actual work.) Instead, she attributes Mississippi’s schooling rise to a long “marathon” of stable and essentially non-partisan policy basics, dutifully implemented over a period of years. Her list of “policies” is shorter than the description of their steady implementation in practice:
A reading competency law in 2013 that required holding back students who don’t pass a reading exam, along with special help for struggling students
Support for teachers in understanding and using better practices, like scientifically based reading instruction
Annual “A to F” grades for schools based on student achievement, with state intervention in schools at the bottom.
In sum: Using the “marathon” metaphor, over the life of one school cohort — from their arrival as kindergarteners in the autumn 15 years ago, to the spring morning when they break the tape as graduates — Mississippi’s schools got much better.
So: As Mississippi’s May grads flip their tassels, tired school reformers should take heart from their story. Mediocre schools can, in fact, become very good, and good ones can become great.
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Mississippi Marathon:
PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project.
PPI’s Rachel Canter explains the “Mississippi Marathon” in the Atlantic (subs. req.).
… and provides the full picture at PPI.
Canter’s Mississippi First nonprofit advocates for education reform, reading programs, and public charter schools. (PPI note: The name dates to 2008, and has no relationship to current administration slogans.)
And the Mississippi Education Department.
U.S. data:
The Education Department’s “National Education Report Card” has maps with state-by-state rankings and scores for reading, math, and science.
… and from the same source, a look at Mississippi schools’ changing fortunes, 1992-2024.
Good examples abroad:
The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment has data and analysis of school performance in the 38 OECD member countries, plus 57 “partner” countries also joining the PISA assessments.
Singapore topped the last PISA rankings in 2022. The Education Ministry reviews the elementary school curriculum.
Estonia gets Europe’s highest scores. Education Estonia explains.
Japan places the highest among large-population countries. The U.S.-based National Center on Education and the Economy has an enthusiastic review.
Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment.
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.
