Illiteracy is a policy choice: why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner?

From the article:

In my home state of California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad.

These numbers have been tumbling downhill in California and more widely across the U.S. for years now, and not just because of school closures during the pandemic. Nationwide, reading scores for fourth graders peaked back in 2015, and while the especially ugly 2022 outcomes were dismissed at first as COVID-19 outliers, scores have fallen further since. The decline is the worst for the kids who were already struggling; the test scores of the bottom 10% of students have dropped catastrophically.

But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVIDand has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.

The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”

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[M]any people who aren’t too focused on education policy seem to imagine Mississippi has simply stopped underperforming, that they’re now doing about as well as everyone else.

This is not true. They haven’t just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools. Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)

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Mississippi’s success is exciting. But perhaps even more exciting is that other states have achieved strong results with the same basic playbook. Louisiana clawed its way from 49th in the 2019 state rankings to 32nd (in fourth grade, where reforms are often visible the soonest, it went from 42nd in 2022 to 16th). Tennessee made it into the top 25 states for the first time.

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This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention — teach phonics! And you should, indeed, teach phonics. But making schools adopt the approach took more than a mere nudge. The Southern Surge states have tried earmarked funding, guidance to districts, and outright mandates to accomplish universal adoption.

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The second pillar, White told me, is “a scaled system of training those teachers on that curriculum — most teaching you get as a teacher is not training on the curriculum.”

Teachers, of course, already undergo a lot of training — and it’s mostly a waste of their time. That’s not because teacher training is unimportant but because we’re training them in the wrong things.

Billions of dollars are spent — and largely wasted — every year on professional development for teachers that is curriculum-agnostic, i.e., aimed at generic, disembodied teaching skills without reference to any specific curriculum.

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Mississippi improved its training through a 2013 law mandating that elementary school teachers receive instruction in the science of reading. It also sent coaches directly into low-performing classrooms to guide teachers on how to use material. “Mississippi started with teacher training. Tennessee and Louisiana added teacher training in different years,” Karen Vaites, founder of the Curriculum Insight Project, told me. Without the training, the effort to find and buy high-quality curricula can go to waste.

The third pillar is everyone’s least favorite, but it’s equally crucial. “Number three is clear accountability at the district level, at the school level, at the educator level, and at the student and parent level,” White said.

Accountability, of course, means standardized tests, requirements that students master reading before they are advanced to the fourth grade, and rankings of schools on performance. Accountability is no fun; when there aren’t active political currents pushing for it, it tends to erode. But it’s badly needed.

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In Mississippi, a child who isn’t capable of reading at the end of third grade has to repeat the grade — a policy called third grade retention. Alabama and Tennessee have implemented it too. Research has found that third grade retention doesn’t harm students in non-academic ways and tends to help them academically — but, of course, it’s upsetting for kids, frustrating for families, and unpleasant for educators. Unfortunately, that’s probably part of why it works.

“What matters most is not the students who are retained, but what the policy does to adult behavior,” education reporter Chad Aldeman argued. “Mississippi required schools to notify parents when their child was off track and to craft individual reading plans for those with reading deficiencies. In other words, the threat of retention may have shifted behavior in important ways.”