RICH LOWRY: Mississippi, not California, is the education future

A miracle defies the laws of nature. This is why “the Mississippi Miracle,” the sobriquet for the extraordinary gains that students in the Gulf state have made in reading in recent years, is a misnomer.

There’s nothing miraculous about a state that adopts phonics and that sets high standards for its kids getting better results in reading instruction. This, to the contrary, is a predictable outcome, and a replicable one.

Mississippi went from 49th in fourth grade reading results on the National Assessment about a decade ago to ninth in 2024. Its low-income children are ranked first in the nation. Its Black kids are No. 3 in the nation and its Hispanic kids No. 1. Overall, when adjusted for socioeconomics and demographics, Mississippi has the best fourth grade results in the nation.

In 2011, about four out of five fourth-graders in Mississippi were not proficient in reading. In 2013, the state passed a reform to require teachers to understand the science of reading (basically, phonics), to deploy literacy coaches to schools, to identify students struggling to read early and to hold back students in third grade who weren’t ready to advance. Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana have now done much the same, and have also made gains.

The original source of all this was a 2002 reading law in Florida that boosted student achievement in the Sunshine State. In a piece headlined “Illiteracy is a policy choice” at the website The Argument, Kelsey Piper makes the case that it would be irresponsible and wrong to ignore the lesson of Mississippi and the Southern states. She notes that Mississippi outperforms her native California, even though the Golden State is richer and spends substantially more on education per pupil. More than half of Black fourth graders in Mississippi are at or above basic level, while only 28 percent of Black fourth graders in California are.

It may be galling for blue states that have prided themselves on their commitment to education and looked down on the South to have to acknowledge that Mississippi, of all places, has figured out a model for the nation, but it is imperative all the same.

“We have been spending lots of money on schools,” Piper writes of blue states, “but we have not been willing to muster the political will and effort necessary to hold those schools accountable for results and adopt teaching practices that actually work.”

The so-called reading wars between the whole-language approach and phonics was won, on the merits, by phonics long ago. Yet, ineffectual methods hung around even though they’d been discredited. This is why it’s so important to get teachers to embrace research-based reading instruction.

There also must be high expectations, rigorously enforced. This is what the Mississippi third grade retention policy is about. Research in Florida shows that getting held back not only helps the academic performance of the students who are retained, but their younger siblings as well.

Mississippi and the other Southern states offer a beacon of hope. Their example shows that, no, it’s not impossible to teach children, and no, it’s not very costly. It’s a good sign that even California just passed a phonics bill. It’s fully within our power, so long as we insist on the basics, to give kids a skill absolutely essential to their development and their futures. No miracles necessary.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.