Mississippi's Amazing Gains in Reading

Across most of the US, poor children are lagging farther and farther behind in school. The biggest exception is in Mississippi, where poor kids are improving at reading (see the chart above). Mississippi remains the poorest state, and its per capita spending on education is the third lowest. So how did they do this?

Basically, by making it their priority:

According to a recent piece by Grace Brazeale, a policy associate with the advocacy group Mississippi First, the state implemented a series of changes starting with the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. That law funded the state department of education to hire, train and deploy literacy coaches to the 50 lowest-performing schools. It also required schools to administer universal screenings to identify students with reading deficiencies early and to communicate those results to parents, and it required schools to hold back students who were not reaching a certain threshold by third grade.

These changes were not all that expensive, but they had big effects. EdWeek’s Elizabeth Huebeck reported in 2023 that the state spent $15 million per year to support its literacy work, and 60% of that went to coaching and intervention staff. A research paper last fall from Noah Spencer from the University of Toronto found that the law helped drive the state’s gains.

Spencer estimated that the third-grade retention policy alone could be responsible for about one-quarter of the gains, and it was surely the most controversial element. Some people have even tried to cast doubt on Mississippi’s NAEP gains by arguing they’re merely a function of testing older kids. But this has been debunked: Mississippi does hold back more kids than other states, but it always has, and the average age of Mississippi’s NAEP test-takers has barely budged over time.

Research on third-grade retention policies has found that students who are retained tend to have better long-term outcomes than those who are not, but that the process for identifying those children can be biased against Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

However, I think what matters most is not the students who are retained, but what the policy does to adult behavior. 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. As evidence for that theory, consider that a study out of Florida also found positive effects on younger siblings of students who are retained.

Some of you may recall that this is what happened in my house. When word came from the school that my eldest son was not meeting the reading benchmarks for nine-year-olds (he is a pretty severe ADHD case) I made him sit with me every night and we took turns reading paragraphs from story books out loud to each other. My elder daughter, two years younger, insisted on joining us. Within three months my son was back on track and my daughter was vaulting ahead.

But here's the thing: it is often easy for a system to improve in one area if that is made the priority. So far as I can tell, nobody thinks Mississippi's schools are very good at anything other than teaching reading to poor kids. Their success in this area may be purchased by stinting on all sorts of other stuff, like teaching calculus to advanced high school students, or theater, or band, or art.

One of the key things about teaching reading is that the programs that work best for slow learners (very structured phonics) bore smart kids and waste a lot of their time. So we see school systems oscillating back and forth between back-to-basics phonics programs and "whole language" programs that excite smarter kids but leave many kids struggling. What you think ought to be done about this depends on what you think should be the basic goals of education. Is it more important to incorproate slow learners into a community of learning where all rise together, or pull them apart and offer each individual child the most challenging material he or she can handle?