How Mississippi beats the odds on childhood literacy

There’s a running joke among those working in U.S. state bureaucracy that goes something like this. “No matter how bad things are, at least Mississippi will always make us look good.” 

The joke draws on a stereotype of the Magnolia State as poor, unhealthy and near the bottom of almost every national ranking that matters. Mississippi ranks 48th in public health, with high rates of childhood mortality and obesity, and 49th in poverty. More than 23 percent of children grow up in poverty, and one in four face hunger. 

But there is one ranking where Mississippi has managed to defy the expectations that have followed it for generations. 

Since 2009, the state has moved from near the bottom of national childhood literacy rankings and into the top ten. In 2024, its fourth graders were among the country’s strongest readers. When performance is adjusted for poverty, Mississippi comes in first. 

The numbers are startling partly because they contradict the conventional assumptions about what it takes to produce high-performing public schools. Mississippi ranks dead last in teacher salaries and 45th in educational spending per pupil. It does not have the resources of the wealthier states that routinely dominate education rankings. For example, it does not have Massachusetts’ spending power or its reputation for academic excellence. Yet Black fourth grade students in Mississippi, on average, read better than Black fourth grade students in Massachusetts, even though Massachusetts spends roughly twice as much per student. 

The achievement has become one of the most closely watched education stories in the country, particularly at a moment when American students’ reading and math scores have fallen to their lowest levels in two decades. 

Mississippi’s success is often described as a triumph of the “science of reading,” a phrase that has become something of a political and educational shorthand. The term refers to teaching strategies informed by cognitive research into how children learn to read, with a particular emphasis on phonics, vocabulary, and the mechanics of decoding words. 

For much of the past two decades, many school districts had pursued another philosophy, generally known as “balanced literacy.” It emphasised surrounding children with books and exposing them to language while introducing letter sound relationships through texts. When pupils encountered unfamiliar words, they might be encouraged to guess from pictures or context rather than systematically sounding out the letters. When they couldn’t figure out the word, children were encouraged to skip it altogether.  

The emphasis on phonics is perhaps the easiest part of the Mississippi model to export. It is also, according to some of the people who have studied the state’s progress, the part most likely to be misunderstood. The Mississippi education system changed not only what teachers taught but, crucially, how the system responded when children failed to learn. 

In 2012, the Mississippi school board began directing additional help to districts that needed it most. But the assistance did not primarily take the form of sending tutors into classrooms to work directly with struggling children. Instead, coaches worked with teachers, helping them improve instruction in literacy and mathematics. 

Schools were also judged by more than the percentage of pupils who had reached proficiency. Officials paid attention to whether students were improving. That distinction matters in Mississippi because proficiency alone can obscure the circumstances in which children are learning. A state in which nearly a quarter of children live in poverty and is still overcoming a long history of segregation cannot expect every school to begin from the same starting line. 

Still, Mississippi’s transformation has attracted scepticism. Some critics have argued that the gains diminish as students move into higher grades. Others have questioned whether the state’s statistics tell the whole story. Those objections matter because the Mississippi example is now being used to make a broader argument about education policy. If the state’s success is reduced to a single instructional technique, other states may adopt the language of the science of reading without reproducing the conditions that made the change consequential. 

The most important piece of the Mississippi strategy may have had less to do with phonics and more to do with accountability. 

In 2013, Mississippi passed the Literacy Based Promotion Act which stipulated that children who did not attain a high enough level of literacy would be held back one year. Crucially, the state limited the exceptions, making it difficult for parents to simply override a retention decision. Schools were also required to assess students three times a year and inform parents about their children’s progress. 

The combination created a system in which reading difficulties were harder to ignore. Writing in The Atlantic, Rachel Canter has argued that this element of Mississippi’s reforms is essential, and that states attempting to reproduce the Mississippi experience by concentrating exclusively on phonics are likely to miss the point. 

“These two accountability requirements made sure that everyone in the system would be in a hellfire hurry to teach children to read. No one wanted children to fail,” Canter wrote. 

It is an uncomfortable argument because accountability is among the most fiercely contested ideas in American education. Few policies illustrate that tension more clearly than holding children back. Supporters argue that promoting children who cannot read leaves them increasingly far behind, making later intervention harder and more expensive. Critics worry about the academic and social consequences of retention, particularly for children already disadvantaged by poverty. 

Michigan provides one example of the difficulty of answering that question. The state has considered revisiting a 2016 law that, according to Canter, did little to improve literacy. The law included retention policies for underperforming third graders, but exceptions were so numerous that most children were ultimately promoted anyway. California has taken a different approach. In 2025, it passed what was described as landmark legislation that included grants for science of reading training. The law reflects the growing national movement toward evidence-based reading instruction and gives schools resources to change how they teach literacy. 

But according to Canter, it lacks the accountability mechanisms that made Mississippi’s reforms so consequential. Schools and students are not held to the same degree of responsibility, and children are screened for learning difficulties only once a year until second grade. 

The difference may seem bureaucratic, but it targets the problem of what happens when children are left behind with little chance to catch up. In Washington DC, a city also known for high childhood poverty rates, nearly 40% of high school students are not reading at grade level. If children receive the help they need when they are still in foundation years, they are much more likely to excel in upper grades.  

For all its recent success, Mississippi has not completely resolved all of its education problems. The state remains near the bottom of many measures of health and economic wellbeing. Its teachers remain among the nation’s lowest paid, and like many school districts, the state is suffering from high levels of student absenteeism post COVID. 

What Mississippi has demonstrated is that a poor state with few resources can substantially improve children’s reading without first becoming rich. That is what makes the example both encouraging and dangerous. The state’s rise from near the bottom of the literacy tables was not simply a story about discovering the right way to teach reading but about making reading failure impossible to overlook. 

For other states, the temptation will be to take the most visible part of Mississippi’s success, phonics, and leave the rest behind. Legislating accountability is harder. It requires assessments, consequences, teacher support, communication with parents and a willingness to confront the politically fraught question of what should happen when children do not meet expectations.