The Mississippi Miracle Needs a Reality Check

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“In order to fix a problem, you first need to accept that you’ve got a problem,” wrote Douglas Carswell, President of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. But lately, Mississippi’s leaders seem more eager to celebrate a so-called “Mississippi Miracle” than to confront the state’s persistent educational challenges. The state’s leap from 49th to 21st in fourth-grade reading scores between 2013 and 2022, according to the the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card, has Governor Tate Reeves thumping his chest and Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd declaring a conservative slam dunk. Red-state fanboys in the press are all in too, touting Mississippi as proof that red states do education better—never mind that two of the top three states for reading scores are solidly blue: Massachusetts and Minnesota.

The linchpin of Mississippi’s narrative is the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA), which not only embraced phonics—or “science of reading”—but also required that third graders who failed the state’s third grade reading test be held back (also called “third-grade gate”). Retention is a tough but defensible move. While far-left critics argue that holding students back is too harsh, promoting children who can’t read just to spare their feelings is hardly a solution. There’s wisdom in setting standards, and Mississippi deserves credit for drawing a firm line.

But here’s the complication: retention reshapes the testing pool. In the 2022–2023 school year, 2,287 third graders were held back—2,078 of them for failing the reading test. That means these students didn’t advance to fourth grade and therefore don’t test for the Nation’s Report Card. With the lowest-performing students removed, the fourth-grade averages naturally look better. That’s not a miracle—it’s statistics.

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To be fair, some analysts argue that the retention effect may be overstated.

Kevin Drum, who first said that the Mississippi Miracle was all hoopla, later contended that Mississippi has long had high retention rates, even before the LBPA, and that this law didn’t radically change the composition of the fourth-grade testing pool. He points to Urban Institute data, which he says show that, by 2017, Mississippi’s fourth graders were only 0.01 years older on average than they were between 1998 and 2013—a negligible shift. If retention had surged, we’d expect the average age to be about 0.1 years older. In Drum’s view, the test-score gains can’t be chalked up to statistical sleight of hand. The phonics-driven reforms, he argues, genuinely worked.

So which is it? In both my conversations with educators, policymakers, and researchers in Mississippi and my readings of several reports, opinions remain split. However, a sizable number—perhaps even a majority—suspect that the dataset is skewed by the composition of the testing pool. Like with most “miracles,” the truth is more mysterious than the headlines let on.

Another piece of the puzzle is Mississippi’s pandemic-era decisions. The state reopened schools faster than most, avoiding the Zoom-class chaos that sank other states. It was a smart call—kids got in-person learning while others were stuck staring at screens or falling through the cracks. But, as some put it, Mississippi didn’t exactly shoot ahead; it just didn’t fall behind. Other states cratered, so Mississippi climbed the rankings more by default than by transformation.

And this is where all the “Mississippi Miracle” talk really starts to grate. The folks hyping it as some watershed policy win—or worse, a blueprint for the rest of the country—are skipping over some very real, very serious problems still baked into the state’s education system.

Start with attendance: In the 2023–2024 school year, over 107,000 students—24.44 percent of the entire public school population—were chronically absent. That’s nearly a quarter of kids missing from classrooms on a regular basis. And we’re calling this a miracle?

Then there’s academic performance. Reading improvements lose their luster fast when you realize that in 2022 the NAEP test revealed that 69 percent of fourth graders weren’t proficient in reading, and 82 percent of eighth graders flunked math. And if Mississippi ranks 21st with numbers that dismal, it’s less a sign of Mississippi’s success than a flashing warning about the depth of the national reading crisis.

Albeit, Mississippi’s phonics-based curriculum is a step in the right direction. But let’s not kid ourselves—a better reading plan doesn’t magically erase decades of neglect.

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Schools are falling apart. My brother, who came up through Petal Middle School—allegedly part of the state’s premier public school district—navigated bathrooms with missing stall doors. Try going number two when anyone can just walk in and bear witness. (But at least the district’s high school football field is a multimillion-dollar brag.) A 2015 report on Murrah High School in Jackson, showed that toilets there were filled with feces and sinks that don’t work. Images in the report also showed rust buildup on faucets. The school’s administration deflected responsibility, of course. Add to this the numerous reports that document crumbling schools with leaky roofs throughout the Mississippi Delta.

Discipline’s another mess. In 2013–2014, more than eight percent of students—42,100 kids—received out-of-school suspensions, topping the national six percent. Moreover, student-on-teacher violence is not unknown in many of Mississippi’s school districts. I know a Jackson Public Schools teacher who took a student’s fist to the face, and the kid faced zero consequences. And a few years back, teachers Joanna Perkin and Amy Gish sued the district, saying students at the Fourth Street Learning Center—an alternative school for at-risk middle schoolers—terrorized them with violence, profanity, and threats: smashing windows, hurling chairs, and brandishing glass shards. This isn’t a miracle—this is mayhem.

And you can’t ignore how Mississippi’s K–12 struggles trail kids into college. Professors across the country have long been sounding the alarm that students are arriving to college woefully unprepared for the demands of higher education. Minding the Campus contributor Liza Libes, for example, has discussed how students at elite colleges struggle to read full books. This problem is no different—and perhaps worse—in Mississippi. I spoke with a professor at one of Mississippi’s public universities, who says that students coming out of Mississippi’s K–12 system are generally less prepared for college than students from other states. My own time as a Learning Assistant at the University of Southern Mississippi confirmed this: Many students I worked with, who graduated from Hattiesburg school districts, couldn’t write complete sentences, much less essays, or comprehend readings assigned in World Civilization I or II. ACT data from 2014 also backs this up: only one in eight students in Mississippi meet college-readiness benchmarks, with an average composite score of 19—two points below the national average of 21.

Granted, the professor noted that the “miracle” stats focus on fourth graders, so the students from this allegedly improved system haven’t yet reached that classroom. But like me, the professor isn’t holding out much hope.

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Mississippi opened schools earlier than other states during the pandemic, revamped its reading curriculum, and ditched social promotion. Those are solid moves—and perhaps underappreciated. But they haven’t solved the state’s education crisis. The “Mississippi Miracle” is modest progress hyped as a triumph, sweeping systemic flaws under the rug. Beyond the reported gains in reading—and math—Mississippi is a poor model for conservatives to hold up as a national template. If conservatives want to be taken seriously as education reformers, touting this as a major success only undermines their credibility.

Walk into enough schools in the state and you’ll find crumbling walls, missing students, burned-out teachers, and unchecked chaos. Run for office there—as I did—and you’ll meet voters who often treat teachers as little more than credentialed babysitters. The political class, left and right, feeds that view with excuse after excuse to avoid investing real resources—especially in the districts that need them most.

And to be sure, it’s not just the politicians. The public, too, has abused the system, demanding everything from schools while giving nothing back. Parents, too, are quick to prioritize just about everything but education—ask a parent in Petal what matters most in their district, and chances are the sports program tops the list. I saw firsthand that too many families are missing in action when it comes to their children’s learning—when they should be front and center. No reform will work when parents give up the responsibility of citizenship—when they outsource discipline, values, and learning entirely to the state.

A miracle implies something extraordinary. Improving reading scores is extraordinary, but this one metric doesn’t fix an all-out broken system. Mississippians—and the conservatives touting the “miracle”—need to admit that Mississippi still has a serious problem.

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Image of the Mississippi Department of Education in Jackson by Michael Barera on Wikimedia Commons