Mississippi continues to outperform most of the nation in education, according to a new report, but health outcomes for children remain dismal. 

The , published annually by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, shows the state’s education ranking has held steady at 16th nationwide. Unchanged since last year, this ranking on education is �Ѿ���������������辱’s highest score ever, according to the foundation’s rubric.

In other measures, though, Mississippi still struggles.

The report puts Mississippi at 49th for economic well-being, 50th for health and 49th for family and community. 

“When we think about children and families where the household head lacks a diploma, that’s tied to a chance of children living in poverty in that house,” said Ashley Parker Sheils, executive director of Children’s Foundation of Mississippi. “Every one of these indicators is an opportunity for us to work together to do better for the children of our state.”

Despite progress in categories that measure economic well-being and outcomes for families and communities, those rankings fell this year for Mississippi. States are ranked relative to each other. Other states also saw improvements, so �Ѿ���������������辱’s rankings fell slightly in those categories. The results put Mississippi at 50th in the country for overall child well-being compared to 48th last year. 

For the first time since the foundation began maintaining these child-centric data rankings in 1990, states received a comprehensive score in the Data Book, tracking a number of indicators from 2019 to 2024. Across the country, state education scores were the lowest of the four categories — education, health, economic well-being and family and community.

Louisiana and Mississippi were the only states to make progress in education during the five-year period, according to the KIDS COUNT data. The Data Book attributes the state’s success to investing in teacher training, strengthening early education infrastructure and passing the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. Experts say that helped raise reading proficiency among the state’s youngest students. 

“�Ѿ���������������辱’s continued progress is the result of effective work by our educators, supportive families throughout the years and strong policies,” said Lance Evans, state superintendent of education, in a press release about the KIDS COUNT data. “We are proud of this milestone and remain committed to building on it for Mississippi students.”

Chronic absenteeism, however, remains an issue across the country and in Mississippi. The Data Book notes that chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% of the school year or 18 school days, among Mississippi students is 27.6% — more than double what was reported immediately prior to the pandemic.

State leaders have increasingly expressed concern about the chronic absenteeism rates in Mississippi. Absenteeism is directly tied to student achievement, and small schools in high-poverty districts are especially impacted.

Despite the state’s performance in education, Mississippi is still dead last in child health outcomes and had one of the sharpest drops in child health outcomes since 2019, according to the report.

Sheils said the findings were bittersweet. Her organization helps produce a  for the data each year, which provides county-specific information for local communities.

“You see the numbers and you have that moment of, ‘Should we just pack up and go home?’ ” she said. “There’s definitely disappointment … We must improve and do better for our children.”

I grew up hearing that line. However bad things were in Oklahoma — from teacher pay to life expectancy — our nation’s poorest state, Mississippi, was presumed to have it worse. It was a cruel quip, but also a comforting one. At least somebody was behind us.

In education, however, that old prayer of gratitude has become obsolete. Mississippi, for one, has posted impressive gains in student learning, especially in the early grades. Oklahoma has been moving in the opposite direction. According to I conducted of National Assessment of Educational Progress data, the Sooner State now ranks 48th in the nation when fourth and eighth grade math and reading results are combined. Among the dozen states in the region, Oklahoma ranks dead last.

That is bad news for Oklahoma, but it is also a warning to every state that assumes lasting decline can’t happen there. 

In the 1990s, Oklahoma was not a superstar, but neither was it an educational basketcase. The state generally hovered around the national average and occasionally beat the average. And for years, Oklahoma outperformed Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee on the Nation’s Report Card. What I found when examining the NAEP scores over time is not just that Oklahoma ranks near the bottom today, but that Oklahoma experienced a generational erosion of performance that unfolded over decades and accelerated after 2015. 

Oklahoma’s math scores were on the rise until around 2015, when math scores plateaued before steep declines during the COVID-19 era. Because most states’ math in the era following the passage of No Child Left Behind, Oklahoma’s score increases did not translate into rankings increases, and the state fell from 30th to 40th in the nation in math scores from 2000 to 2015. Since then, Oklahoma’s math scores have dropped sharply, with declines larger than many other states, even as the entire .

In reading, the story is simpler: Oklahoma has experienced both relative and absolute decline over the last decade. In 2024, Oklahoma posted its worst reading scores on record in both fourth grade and eighth grade. In the years since 2015, the state’s reading rank fell from 34th to 48th. 

These shifts are sobering, but they are also confounding. Oklahoma has not experienced a unique economic shock or demographic shift that obviously accounts for the scale of its educational decline. Indeed, all but one major student group in Oklahoma performs poorly relative to comparable students in other states. 

White students, Hispanic students, Black students, wealthier students and poorer students all significantly underperform the national average. Only Native American students stand out positively, ranking first nationally among the 14 states with sufficient data to report scores. It is common to explain away weak test scores with demographics. But when a state’s relatively advantaged students also post dismal results compared with their peers elsewhere, demographics are probably not the main story.

The regional picture looks even worse. Oklahoma now ranks last among the 12 states in the region in combined math and reading achievement. Oklahoma’s current regional ranking is attributable not only to Oklahoma’s decline, but also to experiencing noteworthy change. Tennessee was the first state in the region to pull ahead of Oklahoma, overtaking it in 2013. Mississippi surpassed Oklahoma in 2019, followed by Louisiana, which passed Oklahoma in 2022. 

It’s a depressing state of affairs for Oklahoma, but Oklahomans are unlikely to accept this story as final. Public frustration with the state’s education system is rising, according to . The state’s schools are , and policymakers are increasingly looking to for ideas. 

The larger lesson is not just for Oklahoma. Educational decline can happen slowly, almost invisibly, until it becomes impossible to ignore. Other states should take note before they find themselves becoming someone else’s punchline.

As of this year, say yes and impose some form of retention policy linked to a child’s reading scores, according to the advocacy group ExcelInEd. But the question of retention has been hotly debated as a tool to drive reading scores, with Ohio its version in 2023 and dropping its requirement in 2024.

On one side, research suggests that third grade reading scores are of a student’s likelihood of academic success through middle school and into high school. Children who behind in the early years to ever get back on track.

On the other hand, it feels harsh to hold students back and separate them from their peers based on the results of a test. Plus, there is good reason to suspect that the children who will actually be affected by such a policy will be Black and low-income.

But there’s one more argument that, in my opinion, tips the scales in favor of third grade reading laws. In threatening to hold students back if they haven’t been taught to read properly, states are warning the adults to make sure each child is on track in literacy.

When you start to see third grade retention policies as less of an intervention and more about how they change adult behavior, you can see it show up in the research literature. For example, from Michigan — a state where, thanks to various exemptions and remediation efforts, the number of kids who are actually retained is just — found positive effects of its third grade reading law even in districts that did not hold any students back. A Florida found that flagging a child for retention improved the academic outcomes of their younger siblings. One of the study’s authors that, “the high-stakes retention signal for the older siblings might inform parents and educators about the educational needs of the younger sibling and induce them to act.”

If the actual act of retention were the trick, these results should be impossible. As is, they imply that the laws are forcing adults to change their behaviors in ways that boost reading outcomes even for kids who were not retained. 

One of the most active champions of third grade reading laws is ExcelinEd’s Kymyona Burk, who implemented Mississippi’s third grade reading bill while serving as the state’s literacy director. Last year, she told , “Retention is not the goal of the retention policy. …The goal is for students to be identified early and receive the tutoring, the attention, the individualized reading plan to prevent a student from being retained.”

Notably, did not just threaten to hold kids back. It also required districts to administer a state-approved literacy exam to identify any children in grades K-3 who might have a reading deficiency. If a student is identified as being at risk, districts have to draft an individual reading plan outlining the child’s specific deficiencies and a plan to address them. Schools also have to notify parents if their son or daughter has a reading challenge and provide parents with “Read at Home” lessons including guided reading assignments.

Like other states, �Ѿ���������������辱’s law includes “good cause” exemptions, for students who are non-native English speakers who have been in the country for less than two years of instruction or who suffer from severe disabilities that prevent them from learning to read successfully.

For children who are held back, the requirements get even tighter. Schools are required to provide them with at least 90 minutes of research-based reading instruction per day, delivered through small-group lessons, tutors or summer or afterschool programs.

Some skeptics argue that �Ѿ���������������辱’s up the national fourth grade reading rankings was dubious, as some of the tested students were older because they had been held back in third grade (and thus given more instruction and time to mature). For example, three professional statisticians published in January noting that, “It is a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores.” It is true that Mississippi has more students than average who are for their grade (54% versus 39%). But �Ѿ���������������辱’s rate is the same as Oklahoma’s and South Dakota’s, and Mississippi has much better reading than those two states. Besides, Mississippi has held back more kids than other states — what changed was the formal tie to a child’s reading performance.

If anything, states with third grade reading retention policies like Mississippi’s are taking early reading challenges more seriously than states without one. After all, student literacy is not likely to magically improve without some rigorous intervention. What’s more likely is that doors of opportunity will slowly close to them over time as schools pass them along from grade to grade.

Third grade reading policies can certainly be harsh for the students who are subject to them. But they force schools to address each child’s reading problems before they have a chance to fester.

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman is a consultant with ExcelinEd on an unrelated project. 

Nancy Burnside has devoted three decades to caring for children. At age 46, she jokes that she tried to leave the industry several times to pursue careers in retail and event planning, but she always came back to early childhood education. 

In 2015, Burnside returned to her home state from Georgia and reopened her parents’ Kosciusko childcare center, now called 3 Steps Daycare. She knew running the family business would be more of a passion than a lucrative job, but she never imagined things would be so hard. 

“My mom worked 16-hour days,” Burnside said. “I grew up in this industry … But this is the worst I’ve seen it.”

Over the last year, 75 of the 200 children attending her daycare dropped out. Those kids were all on the state’s voucher program, which helps low-income families access childcare that makes working possible. Burnside is losing $28,000 a month, hasn’t taken a salary in two years and is providing free care for five children whose families cannot pay, as well as discounted care for an additional seven children. 

Burnside’s center is suffering like 89% of centers recently from the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. One year after the state ran out of pandemic-era funds that propped up a fragile system, hundreds of childcare providers across Mississippi struggle to stay open while thousands of parents remain on a waiting list for vouchers. Last year saw the greatest number of closures in nearly a decade, as .  

Out of 229 centers surveyed in the report, more than half reported having to terminate staff as a result of the pause, and nearly half reported caring for children whose parents weren’t paying. 

“When you walk through, everybody says, ‘Your building is full.’ I know it’s full – that’s because I’m not charging,” Burnside said. 

Despite and advocates, the Mississippi Legislature failed to allocate any money toward the state’s childcare voucher program. 

If the state doesn’t put up money for the program, centers will continue to close.

Burnside can’t fathom why Mississippi doesn’t prioritize early childhood education, especially in a crisis of this magnitude. She said there is a misconception that her work is babysitting. She said she has only ever thought of her center as a learning institution. It’s where children master life skills as simple as tying their shoes and as fundamental as making their first friends. 

“This is where they start,” Burnside said. “I don’t know anything else more important.”

Darren Brewer, a single father born and raised in Kosciusko, knows firsthand the importance of quality childcare. Brewer pays out of pocket for the care his 2-year-old daughter receives at Burnside’s center, but he believes he may qualify for vouchers now that his family is down to one income. He hopes to apply once the waiting list is resolved. Brewer applauds the center’s staff for recognizing early symptoms of ADHD and autism in his son, now 5, and for referring him to further testing. 

“It helped us with the doctors to know what to do and all that,” Brewer said. 

Brewer recognizes the importance of that early intervention, along with the countless birthday parties, graduations and everyday acts of love that have taken place at the center. 

“Ms. Nancy helps more people out than anybody in this town,” Brewer said. 

A potential solution that could be ‘huge’

�Ѿ���������������辱’s parents and childcare providers have one last hope for restoring money to the voucher program – a funding model that advocates proposed last year. That model would put unused money from the federal program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families toward the childcare voucher program. 

The Mississippi Department of Human Services is the agency overseeing the voucher program. For months, officials there said it was not possible to use more TANF money than the state already devoted to childcare. Currently, Mississippi transfers the maximum 30% of TANF funds to the state-run voucher program. 

However, advocates have pointed to other states that have legitimately and successfully transferred additional money by creating a revenue stream that utilizes TANF funds separate from the 30% limit. 

In January, department officials and said they were “exploring” the funding model. 

Now, Mark Jones, chief communications officer at MDHS, says the agency is finalizing a plan to use advocates’ model. The department has not made an official announcement. Jones would not say how much money his department would allocate or how many families the additional money would serve. 

Jones estimates that $60 million is needed to resolve the waiting list. Before the Legislature decided against it, lawmakers to the voucher program. Advocates say that while any amount will help, families and educators will continue to suffer if the state doesn’t put up the full amount. 

“As long as we have that waiting list, we know that children, working parents and providers are going to continue to struggle,” said Matt Williams, director of research at the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. 

Still, Williams believes any allocation of money through this new TANF model would help establish the framework for the state to access more funds for the voucher program in the future. He said the implementation of this funding model would be a “huge, positive development.”

At the height of the crisis, the department reported a waiting list of 20,000 families. On April 22, Jones amended that number, saying it included duplicates and that there are currently 9,400 families waiting for vouchers. 

Even when the system is not in crisis, it is a far cry from reaching all the people for whom it was designed. Many families don’t know they qualify, or they may fall off the program due to red tape. 

Experts in Mississippi do not have solid estimates about how many eligible families go without care. But across the country, the voucher program eligible families, leaving far more without needed help in covering childcare costs. 

Meanwhile, Burnside doesn’t think she can make it past January if the families she works with don’t regain lost vouchers. She knows that closing would be an enormous loss for her community, where her center has been a lifeline for generations.  

Today, she serves many of the children of Kosciusko natives who attended the center when her parents owned it. She’s watched parents dropping off their kids become grandparents dropping off their grandkids. 

“I’m like, ‘I bet you didn’t think you would never come back on this road,’” Burnside laughed. “But they do.”

If her business is forced to shut down, she does not know where those caregivers will go to continue working and supporting their families.

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The 74 Contributor and Read Not Guess Founder Chad Aldeman will be speaking with Judge Gray Tollison, former chair of the state’s Senate Education Committee, and PPI’s Rachel Canter, who will walk through the findings of her recent report “Inside the Mississippi Marathon.”

RSVP or refresh this page at 11 a.m. ET Friday for a livestream.

Related coverage from The 74:

• There Really Was a ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in Reading. States Should Learn From It

• Trump Cuts Research Lab That Helped Nurture ‘Mississippi Miracle’

• Study: Holding Kids Back One Key Factor in �Ѿ���������������辱’s Reading Revolution

• An Overlooked Factor of the ‘Southern Surge’: Investments in Early Childhood

CLARKSDALE — Clarksdale had the second highest teacher shortage in Mississippi last year — 40 posted vacancies in July. 

For district administrators, that staffing challenge hits particularly hard each year in late summer when they try to fill vacancies before the new school year begins. The problem affects students, too, when they’re taught by substitute teachers for weeks at a time. 

Clarksdale schools leaders have also tried a solution that researchers and think tanks suggest: Identifying potential teachers early — before they even graduate high school. This approach also in local teacher workforces, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Nearly half of Mississippi public school students are Black, but about a quarter of their teachers are, according to . The gap has only shrunk by roughly one and a half points in the last 10 years.

“We cannot continue to work in the education arena like it’s a factory putting out the next product,” said Adrienne Hudson, who runs Clarksdale-based nonprofit organization , which assists aspiring educators with licensure requirements. “As we can see in the numbers, we don’t have enough products. The supply and demand are not matching.” 

“We have to do better at cultivating the educators in our schools and communities.”

Cultivating educators in the community would also address disparities between the demographics of teachers and their students. 

 A way ‘to change kids’ lives’

One way the district is trying to cultivate educators is through a vocational educator preparation class Candace Barron teaches at Clarksdale Municipal School District’s Carl Keen Career and Technical Education center. 

Triccia Hudson, the center’s director, had the goal of widening the pipeline for future educators in Clarksdale. She first recruited Barron to teach the course during the 2021-2022 school year.

“You don’t see as many families of educators any more,” Hudson said. “It was clear to me that aspiring teachers needed more mentorship.”

More than a dozen Clarksdale students are getting a feel for a career well known to them: teaching. In a classroom once devoted to a cosmetology course, students are learning how to plan lessons, manage classrooms and about the different roles in a school district.

In Barron’s course, students start their first semester learning about the origins of public education. The introductory lectures fascinate students.

It was interesting to learn that it’s always been about helping people by “spreading information,” Clarksdale High School sophomore Khloe Reed said.

Beyond having the opportunity to join a profession that predates the country’s founding, students in Barron’s class say they are drawn to education because of their lived experiences in their community. 

Barron has observed that high school-aged students understand the obstacles facing their fellow students and are in a good position to learn skills teachers employ to educate and inspire developing minds.

For sophomore Leah Myles, helping kids with learning disabilities inspired her to take the course. She saw how her brother struggled with his reading lessons, and she was moved “to learn how to help students like him.”

Sophomore Jamarick Davis said education has the power to “change kids’ lives.” He remembers his assistant teachers fondly and saw the impact a good teacher can have on a student who struggles in the classroom and at home — and might act out in class for attention.

Davis’ favorite teacher never seems to be in a bad mood despite challenges that educators face outside and inside the classroom.

Some students come from teacher families, while others admire alumni who entered the profession. All were aware that a teacher’s role involves more than what is in the textbook. 

As Reed put it, teachers are a positive role model in a young person’s life. Myles said teachers help students by challenging them, and demonstrating how they care.

“Teachers play a very important role in our community because without them, we wouldn’t really know anything,” said Reed. “It wouldn’t be a very lively life if you didn’t know anything at all. 

22 years in the classroom

Candace Barron has taught elementary school for 18 years and high school for four, but she still lights up with admiration when a student grasps a new concept or demonstrates eloquence. 

The Clarksdale native has taught hundreds of students and seen her corner of the world regress and progress from under the fluorescent bulbs in Clarksdale’s city classrooms.

When she graduated college, Barron followed in her parents’ steps when she became a teacher. She realized how important empathy was to a teacher whose classroom has students from various households and skill levels. 

“I do have bad days, but I try not to bring it to work,” Barron said. “I don’t know what (students) have been through at home and I don’t want to add to that by coming in and bringing my problems. So I come in, I have my game face on, I’m going to do what we have to do.”

That dedication matters as the teacher shortage has gotten worse in Clarksdale in the past year. 

“We really have lost a lot of the efforts that were put in place to combat the teacher storage crisis, ” Adrienne Hudson said. “Many of the scholarship incentives that used to be prevalent and professional development opportunities no longer exist.”

Barron said she believes the program can ignite students’ interest in an education career. The lessons give students the confidence and skillset to pursue careers where communication and project management are components — even those who don’t end up pursuing education, Barron said.

One student told Barron the class helped her with a speech impediment. The student felt more confident delivering presentations, and began to imagine careers that she felt discouraged from pursuing previously. 

“At this age, they’re still trying to decide what they want to do. So the more you expose them to every different area, it’ll help them decide,” Barron said.

Outside of the state-approved curriculum and textbook, students learn the art of crafting classroom bulletin boards. Fewer craft projects conjure as much nostalgia and appreciation. Some teachers spend hours with a ruler and yards of colored construction paper decorating their classroom in late July before school starts.

Creativity is the key to a successful poster board, Barron said. One student was inspired to construct a data wall with construction paper made to look like wood, while another put together a yellow bulletin board with crayons bearing the name of students. 

“I really hope that by the end of the program that they feel like they can make an impact on somebody’s life by becoming a teacher or getting into the education field,” said Barron. “That is my hope. So all of the negatives that they hear, I hope that I can dismiss some of them. 

“Students tell me at the end of (the course), they want to be successful like teachers.”

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Gov. Tate Reeves on Tuesday said he would consider calling a special session on school choice and a teacher pay increase if legislators can’t come to an agreement over the next four weeks. 

Republican House and Senate leaders have bickered over raising teacher pay and  — policies that often allocate state funds to families to pay for private schooling — since the start of the legislative session in January.

Despite the discord, Reeves told reporters at a press conference Tuesday that both issues remain a priority for the Republican governor. 

In fact, he said the two issues should be “tied together.” 

“We should give teachers a pay raise, and we should also give parents and kids more options to give every child in our state an opportunity for success,” Reeves said. 

But that’s a strategy House Speaker Jason White, who has led the school choice charge at the Capitol, has publicly opposed.

“No one in the legislature is tying school choice policy to a teacher pay raise,” White wrote on social media in December. 

A major issue for a special session is the fact that school choice expansion failed in the Senate and barely passed the House. Even with White deeming it his No. 1 issue, many of his GOP caucus members voted against his school choice bill and it’s unclear whether he could keep a majority vote together even in a special session.

Reeves has never called a special session, which would suspend legislative deadlines and put more pressure on lawmakers, over a policy issue. He has only called lawmakers into a special session to deal with economic development projects and to pass a budget when legislators last year failed to agree on one.

However, he hinted that could change if lawmakers don’t reach a compromise on school choice soon, in part because of his lame-duck status.

“I don’t have much time left,” said Reeves, who is in the penultimate year of his second four-year term as governor. “And so on items that are incredibly important to me like rewarding our teachers, like getting more options for our kids — those are the kind of things that I am very, very interested in the Legislature getting across the finish line.”

Reeves said that it would be premature to make a decision yet, given the mercurial nature of the session. Just last week, the House , after House and Senate measures died. 

“Nothing is dead in the Capitol until it is dead, dead, dead,” Reeves said. “We’re continuing to have good conversations with members from the House and the Senate, and we will continue to do so.”

This was originally published on .

Mississippi fourth graders’ average math scores on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress were higher than their peers in at least 18 other states and in 20 other states in reading — a dramatic rise from the state’s standing a decade ago.

Experts say the big gains in fourth grade reading were in large part due to the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, a state law that raised literacy standards and established a reading “gate,” a test that third graders have to pass to advance to fourth grade. The legislation focused on reading, but math scores started rising around the same time. 

However, despite the state’s national standing, the proficiency rates are middling. Just 38% of fourth-graders were proficient in math in 2024, and 32% in reading. 

By middle school, those rates falter even further: 22% of Mississippi eighth graders  on the 2024 math national assessment. It’s an improvement from 9% in 2000, but still lower than the national average. In reading, 23% of Mississippi eighth graders scored at or above NAEP Proficient in 2024, which is slightly lower than pre-pandemic averages. That average is also lower than in .

This year, state leaders are trying to prevent that drop-off and sharpen their focus on math.

 would expand the state’s existing literacy act into higher grades and establish a math framework that would involve interventions similar to those that contributed to the state’s celebrated gains in reading. That framework would be �Ѿ���������������辱’s first statewide math initiative. (The bill’s original language, which was entirely replaced by the House Education Committee, would have required computer science courses for high schools.)

A portion of the bill dubbed the “Mississippi Math Act” would establish Moving Mathematics in Mississippi (M3), a framework that would require supports such as math coaches in all schools, prioritizing grades 2-6, screeners and targeted interventions and establishing a cut-off score on the state’s fifth-grade math assessment to ensure students are ready to take algebra classes.

“I think our reading success is something people talk about because it’s been a national topic of conversation across the country,” said Grace Breazeale, a K-12 researcher at policy advocacy organization Mississippi First. “It’s not that math has necessarily been cast to the side over the past two decades — we have seen improvement — but there’s still a lot of room for improvement as well.”

The math push, in particular, is in line with the Mississippi Department of Education’s shift toward economic development and workforce fortification. The department has recently reworked the standards by which schools are rated with a new focus on career and technical education. The state Board of Education approved the new accountability standards in November. 

Lawmakers say focusing on math will boost the state’s economy and pave the way for higher employment rates. 

“We’ve got to change the culture in our schools,” said Sen. Nicole Boyd, a Republican from Oxford. She authored a Math Act bill in her chamber, but the House killed it. “Instead of kids saying, ‘I’m bad at math,’ they should be saying, ‘I can do this.’ When we change that, we’re going to change the jobs our kids are able to go into and the careers they choose.”

Adapting the Alabama model for math gains

Boyd remembers what it was like to look down at a sheet of math problems, wrought with frustration. Decades later, Boyd said, that feeling returned when her daughter came home with math homework and asked her to help.

“ I don’t want a child to feel that way,” she said. “I don’t want any parent to feel that way.”

That’s why Boyd has championed the math act in her chamber. 

The bill was drafted with direction from the Mississippi Department of Education and with an eye toward other states that have implemented similar acts. Alabama, in particular, was a model, Boyd said. 

Alabama established a math act in 2022 aimed at improving K-5 math proficiency through intensive student interventions and teacher training, among other things. Subsequently, Alabama  where average fourth grade math NAEP scores were higher in 2024 than in 2019. There was no significant change in average NAEP scores for Mississippi fourth graders.

Latrenda Knighten, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, has been watching Alabama’s progress closely. 

“They were one of the first to make that commitment and stick to it, and you’ve seen that incremental change,” she said. “Slow and steady wins the race. That is because they thought about what the students needed and what the teachers needed.”

Mississippi Education Department officials say the act’s framework, Moving Mathematics in Mississippi, would build on work the department is already doing, and similarly to the 2013 literacy act, it’s centered around collecting data, identifying struggling students and coaching teachers.

The math efforts would be concentrated in grades 2-6, said Wendy Clemons, the agency’s chief academic officer. 

“Really focusing on those grades, we feel, will make a difference,” she said. “Obviously our state made a very focused, laser-like investment in K-3 literacy. My belief is that much of our tremendous success has to do with that commitment.”

The department already deploys coaches to the most vulnerable districts and schools and hosts a statewide math conference for educators, but teachers say they want and need more support, Clemons said. 

“We worked with the department really closely on this,” said House Education Committee Vice Chairman Kent McCarty, a Republican from Hattiesburg. “They’ve been implementing math coaches in districts throughout the state since 2023. We got a lot of data from them about where that’s worked, and we felt like the best thing we could do is expand on what they’re already doing.”

The act won’t establish a “gate” but it would put more focus on the fifth grade state math assessment. If students perform poorly on the test, parents would be notified, and an individualized plan would include specific steps to help that child improve their math proficiency. 

And there’s more to come. Lawmakers, including Boyd, say they’d like to see even more added to the bill, like more support for parents and more math training for education students.

On the right track for improving math instruction

Experts say there are some essential components to successfully teach math.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Knighten’s organization, identifies  that should be part of math education for teachers and students: conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning and productive disposition.

And the Mississippi Department of Education’s standards, which establish a roadmap for K-12 mathematics education, are based on the council’s standards. The agency allows districts to choose their own curriculum from seven selected “high-quality instructional materials.”

There are also four cornerstones to math education in Mississippi, Clemons said. It needs to be cohesive, on grade level, data-driven and include standards-aligned lessons. 

During �Ѿ���������������辱’s literacy push, lawmakers had the same goal of establishing consistency across districts. 

“We picked this one way that science said works, and we went with it,” Boyd said of literacy instruction. “Training and everything was done with literacy coaches to really make sure we were teaching in one way. So when children moved from district to district, there was a consistency.”

A big part of the math bill would be deploying more coaches to districts across the state to underscore the importance of the standards and applying them uniformly. 

“We haven’t had the investment in mathematics as we have in literacy,” Clemons said. “We just haven’t been able to say, ‘This is what’s gonna make the difference. This will provide a lot more capacity, both at the state level and in the district levels, to provide that support to teachers and to students.’”

Knighten said Mississippi officials are on the right track.

“Math has always been a stepchild, for want of a better explanation. You hear people say they want to focus on math and reading, but when you look at the numbers, we spend more on literacy … so I’m excited to hear about what your state is doing.”

Changing the culture around math

If state leaders want to see math gains, David Rock, dean of education at the University of Mississippi, recommends starting at the college level.

“Everyone seemed to come together on literacy and did the training for pre-service teachers, and the results are there,” he said. “I want to see the same focus and passion on the math side.”

After the 2013 literacy act, college education students were required to take more literacy education classes to graduate. The same needs to happen for math, Boyd said, to combat a culture of fear around math among students and teachers. 

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle: Students who aren’t confident in math don’t want to teach it. Fewer well-trained math teachers means fewer students who have a robust math education. 

“I realize there are people who have math anxiety,” Rock said. “To overcome that, we need to provide more training and opportunity to our pre-service teachers.”

In addition to ramping up math training for teachers, some lawmakers are also interested in enshrining specific math standards in state law, establishing a math “gate” and promoting a single curriculum for math instead of letting districts choose one.

“What I’ve heard from my body is they want more than what we’ve just put in the act,” Boyd said. “It’s a work in progress.”

It’s important to get the bill right, she said — not only for the success of the state’s education system, but Mississippi as a whole. 

“There are so many jobs that are just not available to somebody if they don’t have a solid math background,” Boyd said. “We’ve got to increase these math scores because it opens up a world of opportunity.”

It’s not widely acknowledged as such, but America is experiencing a surge in anti-tax politics.

You see this of course on the right, which has always been skeptical of taxation. But we’re also starting to see a version of this on the left.

The growing progressive interest in exotic new tax-policy ideas — like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna saying they can  — shows a left that has lost faith in the idea of asking Americans to pay higher taxes in exchange for more and better public services.

And whatever you think of the Sanders/Khanna proposal, it’s important to understand that this kind of plan doesn’t scale well to small states or to cities and counties since it can be relatively easy for people to leave to avoid the taxes.

So, especially when it comes to local services, you really have to ask questions like “Can we make people feel that it’s worth paying more for this?” and “Can we get more value for the money that we are already spending?” Unlike with the federal government, where  in part because it was based on , local governments actually spend a huge share of their budget on direct provision of labor-intensive public services.

The most expensive of these line items is public school systems.

Education spending presents us with something of a paradox. We know from small-scale studies that marginal increases in school spending . In particular, fairly boring things like  are effective at promoting student learning, especially in low-socioeconomic-status schools.

So it seems to be the case that for a lot of schools there’s low-hanging fruit that could be addressed at least somewhat effectively with an influx of money.

On the other hand, if you look at large-scale cross-sections of American schools, it’s just not the case that higher levels of spending are strongly related to student outcomes.

The Urban Institute’s  shows that the top-performing state for eighth grade reading is Massachusetts. That’s a relatively high-spending blue state, but not the highest-spending state. Number two is Louisiana. On eighth grade math, Massachusetts is number two and Louisiana is number three (Mississippi is number one).

The highest-spending system, New York, gets above-average results (I’ve seen a lot of people express excessive negativity about this), but they’re not dramatically above-average in the manner of either lower-spending Massachusetts or dramatically lower-spending Mississippi and Louisiana.

Which is all just to say that even though there do appear to be useful opportunities to spend more money on schooling —  — it seems like just looking at the average expenditure in high-spending systems is not very useful.

And those of us who think there are things the government should probably spend more money on ought to confront the reality that in many states the government is already spending a lot of money, some of it on things that are not very useful.

Teachers don’t move to higher-paying states

The question of how you design a high-functioning school system is complicated, and it’s clear that money isn’t the only thing that matters. For example, one factor that has gotten a lot of attention recently, and that I believe is a dominant factor in explaining why Mississippi and Louisiana in particular have started doing so well, is curriculum.

A restaurant can buy quality ingredients and hire decent cooks and have everyone work hard, and the food is still going to be bad if the chef’s recipes are no good.

But even when you get high-level agreement on something like curriculum, you can run into implementation problems. When I spoke recently with two people who worked in state government in Louisiana on setting up the current curriculum framework (which has had good results), they told me that a lot of their teachers had been taught in education school that the concept of centralized curriculum was bad. So, even with a strong curriculum in place at the state level, it still took work to get to a broad agreement to actually teach the curriculum.

So there’s obviously a lot happening that isn’t directly related to spending, but I do think it’s worth focusing on the more tedious technical question of how school systems are paying their staff, especially the teachers, who account for the lion’s share of the money and the work.

New York is number one in overall  and . So how come teaching talent isn’t fleeing Mississippi and Louisiana for New York, where average teacher salaries are 70 percent higher?

There are, of course, many reasons someone may not want to move across the country, but we’re also seeing the hidden cost of bad housing policy. Due to the much higher cost of living in New York, the real value of a middle-class salary is quite a bit lower there.

We know that there’s a lot of domestic migration out of the coastal states, and that it’s primarily not rich people fleeing taxes but . But this ends up inflating the cost of providing frontline public services, which leads to higher tax burdens, which itself further inflates the cost of living.

Another issue, though, is that teachers just don’t move state-to-state very much.

A  on Washington/Oregon border counties found that “teachers along the state border were almost three times more likely to make a within-state move of 75 miles or more than to make any cross-state move.”

They attribute the lack of interstate teacher mobility to two things: one is that mid-career teachers tend to lose a lot of pension value, and the other is that teacher licensing and certification is handled at the state level in a way that discourages mobility. Policy toward interstate transfers of teaching certifications differs from state-to-state. But New York in particular is a  — it’s one of only three states that has not  the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification interstate agreement.

So while you might think that one point of paying teachers unusually well would be to make your state an unusually attractive place for teachers to move, New York undercuts that with high cost of living and also has regulatory policies that specifically discourage out-of-state teachers from coming in.

Rewarding veterans, not attracting new talent

The issue behind the issue is that the highest-paying states are the ones with strong collective-bargaining frameworks for public sector workers: The National Education Association says  have salaries that are 24 percent higher on average. And when labor unions negotiate compensation packages, they prioritize the interests of their existing members. That’s different from the mindset of an employer who decides to unilaterally increase compensation specifically for the purposes of recruiting new talent. An employer who is eager to attract new talent would, for example, put money into hiring bonuses, but a union is never going to demand that around a bargaining table.

That’s how states end up raising compensation without reducing barriers to entry.

It’s also why compensation in the more generous states is heavily backloaded. So while New York pays 70 percent higher teacher salaries than Louisiana on average, its entry-level salaries are only . That doesn’t come close to compensating for the higher cost of living. If you ask where “teacher” counts as a decent-paying job for someone just starting out, Mississippi and Louisiana look good and New York looks terrible, despite there being much higher average salaries in New York.

I don’t want to overstate the significance of this. Massachusetts, as noted previously, has very good school performance despite a New York-esque compensation scheme.

My guess is that other things like curriculum are moving the needle on outcomes, so I think we should look at it the other way around: What is the case for spending a lot of money on teacher salaries if not to make it easier to hire teachers? Plowing tons of money into backloaded compensation systems while making it hard for people to laterally transfer in is not a good way of achieving any of our education goals.

Of course, if you assume that people are perfectly rational maximizers of income across the life cycle, it’s possible that people considering entry-level teaching jobs care a lot about the fact that a teacher with 23 years of experience will earn dramatically more in New York than in Mississippi.

But in the real world, people are imperfect in thinking that far ahead. And they are extremely imperfect about assessing the long-term value of things like unusually generous pension and health insurance plans. Veteran members who are closer to retirement and have more health care needs place a lot of value on these benefits, so unions can end up bargaining for things that cost the state a lot of money but have very little juice in terms of teacher recruitment.

Pensions in particular also intersect with housing and growth policy in a nasty way.

If your community is experiencing rapid population growth, then you can spread pension costs accrued in the past across a relatively large number of present-day taxpayers. But if your community has low population growth, then the retiree hangover is a much larger burden in per capita terms. The economic impact is even worse if those retirees take their pension incomes to Sunbelt states, leading to New Yorkers’ tax dollars supporting the economy in Florida.

Governing is hard

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how structural roles in the political system can be at least as important as factional affiliation.

When Zohran Mamdani was in the state legislature, he voted for a law that created an unfunded mandate for New York City to reduce class size in its public schools. The comptroller’s office thinks this  and more than $1 billion per year in subsequent years. Not coincidentally, now-Mayor Mamdani .

It’s easy for even relatively moderate state legislators to vote for policies that push up school costs, and it’s hard in practice for even very progressive mayors to raise taxes.

Matt Mahan is running in California’s crowded gubernatorial election, arguing that  before raising taxes to fund new initiatives.

I think that’s a courageous and correct moderate/reformist platform. But even a politician who has a totally different factional identity and set of priorities should consider this. If you have a new spending idea that you truly believe in on the merits — whether it’s free buses or child care subsidies — then it shouldn’t be all that hard to identify something the state is already spending money on that is not as good or important.

Not just as an exercise in sloganeering but as a way to actually get things done.

Even if you assume there are zero political or substantive problems with raising huge sums of revenue from new special taxes on billionaires, residents of high-tax places will reasonably ask “Why not use the money to cut my taxes?”

The explanation for increasing net revenue — as opposed to just making the base more progressive — has to be that the money already allocated is being well-spent.

Unfortunately, state budgets are quite complicated, so I can’t just write down three bullet points for cutting waste. But if you start looking under the hood of major budget categories like teacher compensation, you start seeing problems pretty quickly. I get why taking this on is nobody’s idea of a good time, but with the public increasingly cranky about taxes I don’t think there are any easy options available.

My own state, Arkansas, is preparing to implement a key piece of its 2024 , which is modeled after legislation in Mississippi. This summer will be the first in Arkansas when third-graders will be retained if they are not reading proficiently. As expected, parents and educators are on edge and questions abound. The prospect of thousands of students being held back is generating lots of attention and anxiety. 

But as Arkansas moves to implement its version of the Mississippi law and other states look to emulate it, policymakers would be wise to consider what the research says about retention. In short, like everything else in education, there is no panacea for increasing student learning. Retention in and of itself is not going to singlehandedly raise literacy rates. The key to success in Mississippi was the supports the state provided before and after students were retained. 

�Ѿ���������������辱’s , passed in 2013, was a comprehensive K-3 reform law designed to ensure that all third graders read on grade level. Core elements included intensive professional development aligned with the science of reading, early identification of struggling readers, targeted intervention beginning well before grade three, deployment of state-funded literacy coaches and the retention of a small share of third graders who did not meet the reading benchmark.

As science of reading reforms expand nationwide and districts work to address pandemic-related learning losses, third-grade retention policies have become more common. As of 2024, have laws requiring promotion based on reading proficiency, and 13 additional states allow districts to retain students for this reason. Importantly, these laws typically are more generous in allowing exemptions than previous versions.

But while exemptions are often well-intentioned, suggests that, when broadly used, they can undermine policy effectiveness. Exemptions tend to reduce participation among the students who may benefit most from intensive intervention, including English learners who could benefit from extra help. The primary benefit of promotion-linked literacy policies is early detection paired with substantial supports, such as additional instruction, tutoring and coaching, before students reach third grade. So when exemptions are granted, they must be coupled with the same level of structured intervention Mississippi requires through individualized reading plans and intensive instruction.

Evidence from Mississippi helps clarify why retention alone is not the driver of literacy gains. In the first year of implementation, roughly 15% of the state’s third graders who scored below the promotion cutoff in the 2014-15 school year were retained, and among students just below the threshold, were held back. Yet fourth-grade scores began improving almost immediately, from 2013 to 2024, making Mississippi those children for reading and math gains during that time — well before retention could plausibly affect outcomes at scale. This timing strongly suggests that the gains were driven primarily by early identification, targeted intervention and intensive instructional support rather than by retention itself.

Importantly, Mississippi paired promotion decisions — whether retention or exemption — with structured, mandatory resources. Even students promoted via exemptions were required to have individualized reading plans, summer literacy programs and ongoing intervention. Survey and administrative evidence suggest that these promoted-but-still-supported students made meaningful reading gains, underscoring that the policy’s effectiveness hinged on the , not simply on whether students were retained.

Evidence from other states reinforces this point. In Florida, where third-grade retention has been studied extensively, outperformed exempted peers who did not two years later. This suggests that exemptions, when not paired with intensive intervention, can dilute policy effectiveness by allowing struggling readers to advance.

Survey evidence suggests that in part by the supplemental assistance provided to low-achieving students who were promoted via exemptions. By contrast, evidence from Florida shows that in reading two years later, indicating that exemptions were not consistently granted to those who would benefit most from promotion.

As Arkansas moves toward implementation, it would do well to consider not just �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience, but also Indiana’s, which saw the rubber meet on the road on retention more recently. students are repeating third grade after failing the state test or qualifying for an exemption. State leaders had expected to retain more, but passing rates on the reading assessment jumped nearly 5 points last school year, to just over 87%. Officials said the progress stemmed in part from the expansion of a statewide program, the Indiana Literacy Cadre, that focuses educators’ attention on research-based instructional methods. Participation increased from 41 schools in 2022 to more than 550 in 2025, and schools in the Literacy Cadre saw a 7-point increase in passing rates, compared with gains of 3.6 points at other schools. 

Arkansas can hope for similar outcomes of this year’s state tests. There is cause for optimism – when it comes to not just retention but the resources that come before these critical decisions, is more expansive and students have access to more assistance both at school and home (through a $1,500 grant to families for literacy tutoring). Secretary Jacob Oliva, who leads the state Department of Education released in January to ensure families are aware of their students’ standing and students are receiving ample supports both before and after the testing window. 

Across studies, the evidence is consistent: retention mandates alone do not drive literacy gains in isolation. only when retention is part of a that intervenes early and intensively. �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience demonstrates that it is the comprehensive series of interventions—  — that produces lasting improvement.

Mississippi will soon be able to get a break on their taxes for contributing to private-school scholarships, thanks to a federal program.

Gov. Tate Reeves announced Monday that he had opted the state into the program. It’s a win for school-choice proponents, as Mississippi lawmakers continue to debate the policy on the state level.

School choice — policies aimed at giving families more educational options, often funding those choices with public money —  is the top issue of the current legislative session, led by House Speaker Jason White. Both chambers have passed school-choice bills, but Senate leaders have firmly taken a stance against programs that send public dollars to private schools, as the federal tax-credit program does.

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School-choice proponents say the policies give parents more control over their children’s education. Opponents argue that they siphon money away from the public education system, which is required to serve every child.

“Mississippi believes that parents – not government – know what’s best for their children’s education,” Reeves said in his announcement.

The federal tax-credit program, created by President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” allows Mississippians to contribute up to $1,700 to an organization that awards scholarships to private-school students, starting in federal tax year 2027. Donors will be given a break on their taxes equal to the amount they contribute — that’s called a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, and it’s about three times as much as people receive from donating to a children’s hospital or other causes.

To qualify for these scholarships, one can earn up to 300% of the area’s median income. That’s six-figures in Mississippi, or about $150,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Research shows a majority of private-school vouchers across the country go to students who could already afford and were attending private schools.

In the coming months, Reeves’ office will designate eligible scholarship-granting organizations — groups that will disburse these vouchers, whose sole purpose must be doing so — to participate in the program.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

But I don’t want a hotel that excels in only one area. I want every hotel I stay at to have clean sheets and towels, hot water and a quiet environment.

What about schools? Are they more like restaurants or hotels? At the high school level, they might be more like restaurants in that they can offer varieties of experiences that allow students to start to develop specialties. But elementary schools should probably be more like hotels and provide consistently strong services — and outcomes — for all kids.

When it comes to the basics of reading and math, how much within-school specialization is there at the elementary levels? That is, are there schools and districts that do a great job of teaching kids to read but maybe aren’t so good at teaching math?

To find out, I started by looking back at our projects last year identifying districts that did an exceptional job of teaching kids to read by third grade and be proficient in math by eighth grade. Among those positive outliers, I found 140 districts that appeared on both of our lists. That is, these districts were producing outstanding results across subjects and grade levels.

In contrast, we identified 14 districts that were exceptional in one subject but significantly underperformed expectations in the other. Among those, 12 of the 14 were strong in math but weak in reading.

To look at school-level results, I pulled up the 2025 test scores in the state of . Mississippi has some of the best schools in the country, so I figured it would be a good test to see whether they specialized or were consistently strong.

First, I looked to see whether reading scores were correlated with performance in math and science. A correlation of 1.0 would mean the two trends were moving in perfect lockstep, while a correlation of 0.0 would suggest that the two variables were not associated with each other at all. As you can see in the table below, there were very strong correlations across academic subject areas. For example, the correlation across school-level reading and math scores was 0.87, which suggests a very strong relationship. 

These results suggest that schools with high test scores in one content area are very likely to also have high test scores in another subject. (And the opposite.) But that doesn’t necessarily reflect how much the school contributes to a student’s scores. It could just be that the school happens to enroll higher- or lower-performing kids.

So, next, I looked at growth rates. In Mississippi, the state using a model called a value table. Essentially, the state created eight performance levels, and schools receive points if they help students advance to higher tiers from one year to the next.

Do schools with high student growth rates tend to see improvement across multiple subject areas? The answer in Mississippi is yes. In the graph below, each dot represents a school that is graphed according to its reading and math growth rates. The closer the dot is to the diagonal line, the closer the relationship between the school’s growth rates in reading and in math.

Although there are a few outliers on both sides, a “good school” tends to be good across subject areas. That is, there are no schools at either the bottom right or top left corners of the graph, where they would be if they were extremely strong in one subject but not the other. For example, among the 50 Mississippi elementary and middle schools that made the greatest gains in reading last year, none of them were below the statewide average in math growth. 

The opposite was also true: Among the 50 schools with the lowest reading score gains, only two reached the statewide average in math.

Florida operates a similar as Mississippi. When I ran their numbers in the same way, I found similar correlations across subject areas.

Both Mississippi and Florida showed strong relationships between a school’s proficiency and student growth scores. However, that could be a function of the specific way those states have chosen to measure student growth, and it’s not always the case that a school with high proficiency scores will also have high growth. In fact, because proficiency rates are highly correlated with socioeconomic status, prefer growth measures that attempt to truly isolate a school’s impact on student learning.

While questions about how best to measure school performance can be thorny and technical, it does seem to be the case that schools that are strong in one subject tend to be strong in others as well. In an increasingly specialized world,  it’s fortunately rare to find a school that’s doing a great job in one subject area and letting kids down in the other.

Jennifer Allen has wanted to be a teacher since high school. She admired her social studies and English teachers especially. After four years studying elementary education at Delta State University and a full-time teaching position in a local district her senior year, she felt she had cleared all the important hurdles to becoming a certified teacher in Mississippi.

But then came PRAXIS, a series of tests that nearly every teacher in Mississippi must take to become a certified teacher.

“It made me second guess a career that I fell in love with,” she said. “Much of what I learned over the four years of college is not in the practice material.”

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She’s not alone. In roughly half of public and private universities with education programs, do not pass at least one section of the PRAXIS exam on their first try.

Some students even opted for more classes at school to bypass having to take the test, which would mean an additional $1,200 for Allen.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,892 Mississippi test takers walked away after flunking on the first attempt of the most commonly taken PRAXIS Elementary Education exam , leaving fewer teachers to fill a growing list of teacher vacancies in critical shortage areas.

The Board of Education implemented a waiver during the pandemic to allow students to be certified without taking the PRAXIS, but that waiver ended in December 2021. Students graduating as late as December 2023 took advantage of the waiver.

Now university education departments, school district officials and teachers are struggling to re-adjust to a more rigid path to teacher licensure.

“It’s outrageous that effective educators are dismissed by the profession for not passing PRAXIS,” said Clayton Barksdale, a former public school principal in Greenville and executive director of the West Mississippi Education Consortium. “Many prove their impact while on emergency licenses, only to be fired then immediately rehired as a long-term substitute – doing the same work for a fraction of the pay, with no benefits or retirement.”

“We must do better.”

Shortage areas

Didriquez Smith has taken the PRAXIS content test three times and spent nearly a thousand dollars. He coaches football at Clarksdale High School and teaches physical education on an emergency license.

He failed just one of the three tests in his past two attempts: Foundations of Reading, which covers reading comprehension and teaching reading.

The Praxis exam has several parts. The content knowledge test covers the subject aspiring teachers want to teach, like biology or elementary English. The Principles of Learning test covers how teachers should prepare lesson plans and approach classroom instruction for different subjects. Students who don’t have at least a 3.0 GPA must also take an Academic Skills for Educators test, which is also called PRAXIS Core.

Per try, the elementary education exam costs $209, and the PRAXIS core test $90. Some of the content tests such as art instruction cost $130.

Smith had to travel nearly 300 miles to Birmingham to take his third attempt at the test because the test wasn’t offered closer at the end of the school year. He is currently saving up enough money to take it again.

He loves his job, particularly informing his community about the importance of healthy habits.

He hopes he can continue to keep students healthy and active at school. In the Mississippi Delta, .

However, if he can’t pass each required PRAXIS test in the next year, he may be out of a job. As much as his boss in the principal’s office may want to keep him in his role, state regulations penalize schools in their annual accountability scores if they have faculty teaching without a license. Schools can also lose accreditation.

Since childhood, Skylar Ball had planned on becoming a kindergarten teacher. She followed her mother into education, even attending the same alma mater of Blue Mountain Christian University.

“Teaching elementary school is like Disney World,” she said. “Elementary students, you can do so much with them. You can make an early impact.”

However, one and a half years after graduation, she remains an assistant teacher, making several thousand less a month than she budgeted for while she saves enough money to take the PRAXIS exam for the third time.

She was two questions shy of passing on her latest attempt.

“I was so blessed to educate 20 amazing kindergartners last school year under an emergency license … I am currently a paraprofessional in an amazing district, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t upset about not being able to lead a classroom of my own,” Ball said.

She struggled with the Elementary Education exam, a PRAXIS test with in the state. Although she was aiming to become a kindergarten English teacher, her test covered kindergarten through sixth grade instruction as well as science, math, art, English, and social studies, among other subjects.

, the nonprofit found that �Ѿ���������������辱’s Elementary Education content test has a subpar job measuring whether would-be teachers have the knowledge and skills needed for a career in their classrooms.

“Does this test tell districts if they are prepared to lead an elementary school classroom in this content area? It does not,” said Hannah Putman, managing director of research at the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The university’s role

Universities in Mississippi play an important role in filling teacher vacancies with fresh talent. Pass rates on PRAXIS exams vary among universities with Alcorn State University posting the lowest first-time pass rates, according to the most recent data from 2022-2023 school year. Mississippi Valley State University posted that none of its students took two of the three main PRAXIS exams for the same year.

has a smaller sample size of teachers as a majority gained licensure under the  COVID waiver.

Mississippi College posted the best results with over 93% of students passing the pedagogy section test and 100% of students passing both the content test and the Foundations of Reading test. Over 90% of University of Southern Mississippi students passed their three PRAXIS exams.

Timolin Howard, a Mississippi Valley State graduate, doesn’t regret enrolling in the school’s masters in teaching program. She believes instructors have given her the tools to succeed in the classroom.

After finding out her test scores were insufficient for licensure, she had a stroke. She also says she received mixed messaging from the state licensure board regarding cut-off scores.

“I found that, while I was well-prepared for real-world teaching, I wasn’t fully prepared for the demands of the certification exams,” she said.

She said she can manage students, build lesson plans and come up with classroom activities that help students master common core competencies. But Howard realized she had gaps in her foundational knowledge when it came to studying for the PRAXIS exams. She reached out to her school for help.

The university cancelled a workshop taught on campus, which was preparing students for the Foundations of Reading exam. It wasn’t the first a PRAXIS preparation workshop was cancelled, Howard said.

“It left me feeling overwhelmed as I tried to catch up, and it significantly impacted my confidence, academic performance and health,” she said.

This year, her Delta school district released her from her contract because she lacked the right licensure.

Mississippi Valley State University’s education department did not respond to comment despite repeated attempts to reach representatives.

Grow Your Own

For eight years, Adrienne Hudson has led the nonprofit organization RISE, which helps recruit and retain new teachers in Mississippi Delta school districts.

Hudson had already been informally mentoring and tutoring teachers who struggled with the PRAXIS exam and other technical aspects of licensure in her Clarksdale school. She founded RISE to help more.

Hudson takes pride in the start of performance-based licensure in her district. Letting teachers become certified teachers through improving test scores in state-tested subjects will help schools retain talented teachers, said Hudson of the new path to teacher certification.

“Some of the responsibilities are on the university and some are the systems that require the test to be the measuring stick for becoming a teacher,” she said. “We have students getting dean’s list, who can’t pass the test.”

More would-be teachers are going back to school later in life than ever before. Fewer teachers are entering the traditional route, which involves majoring in education as an undergraduate as opposed to the alternate route through a masters. In the , 27% of students getting an education degree went the alternate route in , 45% did.

Tony Latiker, dean of Jackson State University’s school of education, saw a similar trend. He theorizes the reason so many students are going the alternative route is because of the many requirements that await undergraduates at the end of their four years. Alternative route students have fewer testing requirements to meet.

One solution he has found is to have traditional route students take exams closer to when they finish coursework that corresponds. For example, he encourages students to take the Foundations of Reading exam after they complete their early literacy courses, which are offered in some form at all Mississippi universities with an education program.

Jackson State also offers an elective that prepares students for the PRAXIS tests and other technical requirements of licensure. Professors and visiting instructors also host workshops on campus.

“We really should be questioning the exams,” Latiker told Mississippi Today. “I’m not against the exams and testing, but I’m against them being the high stakes tests they are. It should be a part of a more holistic process, incorporating district personnel and university faculty input in classrooms, assessing pre-service teachers and interns at the end of lessons, to see if they’re actually effective.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

The state’s third graders saw a nearly 5 percentage point jump in just one year, with 87.3% of students now reading proficiently. It’s the largest single‑year gain since the test launched, returning the state to pre-pandemic levels. 

To put those outcomes in context nationally, a 1 to 2 percentage point increase in any state would be considered strong. Indiana’s improvement is proof that well constructed policy combined with bold leadership nets tangible outcomes for students.

Two years ago, Indiana leaders recognized that too many children were falling behind. Instead of implementing modest reforms, they responded with urgency. Former Gov. Eric Holcomb, current Gov. Mike Braun, Secretary of Education Katie Jenner, legislative leaders and education stakeholders across the state partnered to design a strategy rooted in research and shared learning. 

They leaned on a time‑tested pioneered in Florida and adapted successfully in Mississippi that’s built on high expectations, professional learning for educators, early detection, targeted support and instruction aligned with the science of reading.

In Florida, the introduction of comprehensive literacy reform in 2002 marked a turning point. Over the following decade, the state saw NAEP fourth grade reading scores gain the equivalent of .

�Ѿ���������������辱’s , which was inspired by Florida’s success, integrated educator professional learning, added literacy coaches in the state’s lowest-performing schools to help transfer knowledge into practice and required early screening to catch students who struggled with reading. The state’s third-grade ensured students did not advance if they were not reading on grade level. Other included summer reading camps, monitoring student progress at least three times per year to catch students before they fell behind and allowing some students to advance to the next grade for on a case-by-case basis. These reforms helped elevate Mississippi from 49th in the nation in 2013 to .

Indiana’s version of the strategy is comprehensive and smart. It includes teacher training in how children learn to decode, build vocabulary and understand texts; tools for early identification of reading challenges; and clear expectations that no child will move forward without mastering critical reading skills. Strong curriculum, ongoing coaching and supports are all part of the mix — backed by a historic from the Lilly Endowment and the Indiana General Assembly.

But great plans succeed only in the hands of dedicated educators. Indiana’s teachers, coaches, principals and support staff have embraced this work with determination and care. Across classrooms, they’re putting the science of reading into daily practice. Families and caregivers are reinforcing literacy at home and contributing to a culture where reading is both essential and enjoyable.

The payoff is clear. Schools in Indiana’s , which develops and implements collaborative professional development for K-3 educators, saw an increase of in students passing the statewide reading exam. Progress at this scale in one year is rare and meaningful.

Indiana’s achievement is both uplifting and instructive. It demonstrates what happens when clear goals, proven methods and sustained support come together behind student success. It’s a reminder that literacy policies built on evidence and collaboration can shift trajectories quickly.

This is just the beginning — for Indiana and for other states aggressively tackling the literacy crisis. 

Reading successfully by third grade is foundational, but far from the finish line. Policymakers must maintain their focus on early literacy while expanding their approach to include adolescent literacy, ensuring students continue building reading strength through middle and high school so they can engage with complex materials, think critically and express themselves with clarity. Those skills are indispensable for success in the workforce, the military and higher education.

Indiana has set a goal that by 2027, 95% of third graders will be reading proficiently, and the state has charted a clear path, proving what’s possible when policymakers enact evidence-based strategies to support students. 

Success is never final. It’s a guiding principle. The work in Indiana and across the nation must continue until every child and young adult can read, thrive and embrace their future with confidence.

Take New York, for example. In its latest “, the Education Law Center adjusted school spending figures relative to their regional labor market costs. It gave New York’s school funding system an A for the total amount of money it sent to public schools, a B for the distribution of those funds among schools and an A for the amount of money it spent relative to the state’s overall gross domestic product per capita.

Overall, New York came out as one of the top-rated school funding systems, if not the highest-rated.

And yet, New York students perform slightly below national averages. While its schools $33,970 per student, $15,509 more per pupil than the rest of the country, in Fiscal Year 2022 its students overall student performance in fourth-grade math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — the “Nation’s Report Card.”

But it’s not just New York. The relationship between school spending and student outcomes is weaker than you might imagine. To make the fairest comparison possible, I used the Education Law Center’s spending figures, which are adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and the from the Urban Institute.

The graph below shows the results for 2022, the latest year for which comparable spending figures are available. As you can see, New York is an extreme outlier: It spent more than any other state, and its results were in the bottom half. Other high-spending states like Vermont, New Jersey and Connecticut also got pretty poor results given their investments.

Which states do well on this metric? Texas, Florida and Mississippi all stand out for getting strong student outcomes despite not spending that much.

What about staffing levels? Education is mostly a people business, and the bulk of school spending goes toward salaries and benefits. But staffing levels are also not well correlated with student outcomes.

The graph below shows the number of staffers for every 500 students — think of a typical elementary school — versus the same demographically adjusted fourth-grade math scores as above. Here, Vermont and Maine stand out as having exceptionally high staffing levels without positive student outcomes to show for them. Meanwhile, Mississippi, Texas and Florida all stand out as states showing strong student test scores without high levels of staffing.

These are merely correlations, and readers should not take these arguments too far. For example, Matt Ladner, a senior adviser for The Heritage Foundation, made the case in a that the states that increased spending the most over the last two decades did not see equivalently large achievement gains. But it would harm students in, say, New York or Vermont, if state policymakers decided that schools needed to cut back on spending or staffing.

That’s because the on school finances suggests that a $1,000 increase in annual per-student spending improves test scores by 0.008 standard deviations and boosts college-going rates by 2.8 percentage points. Infusions of federal ESSER funds produced similar, albeit smaller, effects. Perhaps no one was or is with the magnitude of the returns on increased spending for public schools, and the gains are small enough that you can’t just eyeball them on a chart, but they are statistically significant and academically meaningful. Moreover, this research shows that school spending does cause test scores to rise. It would be irresponsible for policymakers to ignore these general trends.

At the same time, it is fair to note that the gains from higher spending are small, and policy is not made in a vacuum. Some places, especially the Mountain West, probably could see real gains from higher spending. Meanwhile, other places, especially in the Northeast, could benefit from more time thinking about cost effectiveness and how to drive improvements without additional funds.

The best modern example of the latter is Mississippi. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country, and it would not have been a positive outlier on these types of charts 10 or 20 years ago. But since 2013, the state has put in place a number of policy changes, including new curricular materials, a muscular school accountability system focused on the students who are the furthest behind and a third grade reading requirement that brought greater attention to children who struggle with the basics. Some of these initiatives even cost money, but they didn’t add up to that much relative to the state’s overall education budget, and they helped students in Mississippi their peers in higher-spending states.

It’s hard to have these types of nuanced conversations when some advocates continue for more money, even in well-funded states and communities, while others have — and using — the modest gains from spending increases as evidence in favor of school choice or other reforms. For policymakers, the only way to correctly understand the nuances of school spending is to recognize that it matters while also understanding its limitations. 

Child care worries have been made worse this summer by federal cuts and depleting pandemic funds, and they aren’t expected to ease by the first day of school. While their kids might have gotten a rest, parents reported longer commutes and newfound stress.

A dozen parents from across the state told Mississippi Today about summer child care plans for their toddlers and elementary school-aged children. They shared a mix of anxiety about finding care and frustration with existing options.

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Parents have had more reasons to be anxious about those options this summer than in previous ones. A loss of federally funded summer programming for youth, added fees for day care tuition and the loss of vouchers to subsidize tuition costs have changed the landscape of child care.

For Shequite Johnson, a professor at Mississippi Valley State University, it has meant driving 45 minutes in the opposite direction of her job for day care.

“I’ve had to leave my 13-year-old with my 4-year-old,” she said. “And you’re put in a situation where you have to make these decisions. Some are even leaving their babies at home by themselves for five hours and checking on them during lunch hour.”

She had to pull her 4-year-old boy from a day care in her hometown because of excessive fees. She was charged a $20 late fee at pickup, a $100 registration fee for each of her two boys, and a $150 supplies fee that was announced in June on top of the $135 weekly fee.

The Mississippi Department of Human Services recently announced a cutback on vouchers that subsidize child care costs. Without Johnson’s child care voucher, her nearby options were limited to a city-run program in an unsafe neighborhood and three programs in aging facilities.

Delta Health Alliance runs free and reduced summer programming for elementary-aged children. But Johnson makes more than the income cut-off.

“It’s a crisis right now in Mississippi,” said Carol Burnett, executive director of Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. “The lack of affordable child care prevents employers from keeping their workforce. And yet the state of Mississippi wants people to go back to work.”

“Parents are having to make choices. And none of them are good,” she added.

The Child Care Initiative operates a program that connects single moms with higher-paying jobs and covers the costs of child care during the transition. The organization is also advocating for the Mississippi Department of Human Services to spend some of the $156 million in unspent Temporary Assistance for Needy Families on �Ѿ���������������辱’s Child Care Payment Program.

The Child Care Development Fund, which nationally supports these voucher state programs, relied on pandemic-era funding that ran out in September. The Department of Human Services to continue serving the same number of families – but .

In April, the department put a hold on renewals for child care vouchers except for deployed military parents, parents who are TANF recipients, foster children guardians, teen parents, parents of special needs children and homeless parents. As a result, .

The department will keep the hold until the number of enrollees drops to 27,000 or its budget goes in monthly costs. As of Friday, it had no further update but said it will have an announcement in the next couple of weeks.

Using TANF funds unspent from past years regardless of whether they were allocated for child care assistance is prohibited, . However, the TANF state office can use the leftover funds to form a direct payment program. and enacted this policy.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regional manager Eric Blanchette with Mississippi Department of Human Services Early Childhood Director Chad Allgood, according to an email obtained as part of a records request filed by Mississippi Today into communication regarding TANF funds. As of Friday, there were no plans to enact a similar policy in Mississippi.

A second rent

Monica Ford pays nearly $1,600 in monthly child care costs for three kids. She works as a Shipt delivery driver in addition to her day job as a Magnolia Guaranty Life Insurance Co. auditor. She, her husband and their children recently had to move in with his parents.

“It’s more than I’ve paid in rent,” she said. “It’s why I live with my family now.”

She uses a Jackson day care that charges $10 per minute for late pickup. The fees must be paid by the next morning.

Nearly all of the single mothers interviewed said they take on extra work to cover the rising costs of child care in their area. It’s extra work that sees them spending less time with their children.

Ashley Wilson’s child care voucher wasn’t renewed in the spring. She works 55 hours a week at a bingo hall and at Sonic Drive-In.

“We don’t get help. That’s what I don’t understand,” said Wilson, an Indianola parent.

Her preferred day care option in Indianola charged $185 per week and $20 late fees, which Wilson could not afford. Her sister was able to afford monthly costs because of an arrangement with an Angel – a benefactor who helps local families with tuition at day care providers.

Wilson tried other day cares in town. Several were in dangerous neighborhoods with staff that left milk bottles to spoil. Her toddler came home wet some afternoons and with cuts another. She gets help from family when she can.

Whitney Harper lost her child care voucher in April. She is lucky when a relative is willing to watch her 2-year old. Lately, she has considered hiring a sitter off , a website that connects parents with local babysitters. In Jackson, where she lives, the hourly rate is .

Most of the day cares in the Jackson metro area charge between $150 and $250 per week, which is more than she can afford as a sales associate at Home Depot.

“It has been harder this year. They won’t work around my schedule, but I need the job,” she said of her employer.

‘This is the worst I have seen it’

Day care centers are left on the brink when families lose child care vouchers. Making up the lost revenue has meant higher tuition and fees for some centers and reaching out to private donors for others.

“These are small businesses,” Burnette said. “The big story in child care is how much it costs to run it. It requires adequate public investment.”

This week, Level Up Learning Center owner and CEO Kaysie Burton visited Greenville’s Walmart, seeking to persuade the manager to sponsor his employees’ child care tuition. She submitted two grant applications and is working on at least three others. Burton’s business survived flooding and relocation. But the latest voucher cutback could shut her banner-adorned doors to the community

At Level Up Learning Center, 75% of parents rely on child care vouchers. In the last three months, 20 Learning Center parents have lost their child care vouchers yet most have stayed. Burton has a policy of not turning parents away if they are willing to contribute a portion of the weekly rate. She has not increased her tuition or instituted punishing fees.

But making up the lost revenue can be a challenge. Since the cutback, she has let seven teachers go, or roughly a third of her staff.

“We’re down to skin and bones right now,” Burton said. “I am willing to take anybody that is willing to come partner with us and help us help parents so that their kids can keep coming in.”

When Burton started her business during the COVID-19 pandemic, she saw the need in the Mississippi Delta for affordable, quality child care. She remains committed to helping prepare a future generation of Greenville leadership.

“We’re in the thick of it with our parents,” Burton said. “And we all just need help and we need prayer.”

SunShine Daycare owner Barbara Thompson has greeted each parent at the door since she started babysitting neighbors’ kids in her living room. The former banker has long had a passion for raising neighborhood children regardless of their parents’ status or income. She raised her seven siblings when her mother died when Thompson was 12.

But for the first time in 30 years of running a business in Greenville, Thompson is losing families by the dozen as well as longtime staff. She has leaned heavily on prayer and has reached out to state representatives for help. She fears more departures and the downsizing of her business.

In the last two months, 12 parents pulled their kids from SunShine. She will have to let three teachers go as a result.

“We won’t have any children if this continues,” Thompson said.

She regularly informs parents of the child care voucher waitlist and of the process for renewals. Besides caring for children, Thompson advises many young parents in her community. She noticed that state agencies communicate primarily through email, which a lot of her parents don’t check regularly.

Children who leave her stoop festooned with cartoon characters can face hours alone without parental supervision. Some children will sit and watch television with their grandparents. For Thompson, child care is about raising children to be “productive citizens.” The youngest years are some of the most important, she stressed.

“They didn’t take it from us,” Thompson said. “They took from the children. That’s the world’s future.”

Waitlisted

Vennesha Price is waitlisted at nearly every day care in Cleveland, where she lives. She’s been on some of the lists for eight months.

“If you haven’t been a resident for five years and you haven’t navigated the waiting list for five years, it’s harder to find a spot,” she said.

She found it difficult to both have a productive work day and watch her elementary-aged children. Eventually, she found a day care that was 40 minutes away. She wakes up an hour earlier to make the commute in time before work.

“I’m a single mother so it’s very difficult,” Price said. “After my grandmother went on to the Lord, it became a struggle trying to get to the day care in time.”

She started factoring late fees into her monthly budget. She’s also including the gas money needed for the extra legs of her commute. Her child care costs doubled for June and July.

“It’s almost like private school tuition now,” she said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

While the practice itself is troubling, I conducted reveals something even more troubling: Corporal punishment isn’t just disproportionately used on Black and gender-expansive students — those whose gender identity falls outside traditional norms — it’s also disproportionately condoned by the public when it’s used on these children.

I surveyed more than 600 Mississippi residents to understand their attitudes about school discipline. Most disapproved of corporal punishment in general, but that feeling weakened when the child being punished was Black or gender-nonconforming. In short: Who a child is imagined to be affects whether that child is believed to deserve protection — or punishment.

This finding echoes years of research and advocacy warning that corporal punishment is more than just an outdated disciplinary practice. It reveals deep-rooted inequities in America’s schools.

that physical punishment contributes to worse academic outcomes, higher dropout rates,and even increased involvement with the criminal justice system. The has linked it to long-term mental health impacts such as anxiety, depression and PTSD.

In Mississippi, Black students are far more likely to be physically punished than their white peers. A key reason is a well-documented bias called — the perception that Black children are older, less innocent and more culpable than white youngsters. This leads educators and even the public to support harsher punishments for similar behavior.

Research from has shown how adultification affects Black youth, especially girls. My study confirms that the problem doesn’t stop at how discipline is applied — it extends to how it’s justified.

Even though 61% of respondents in my study agreed that corporal punishment should be banned, support for the practice increased or decreased depending on the perceived identity of the child. For example, on a six-point scale where higher scores indicated stronger support for corporal punishment, participants rated it significantly more appropriate (“fitting the crime”) for a hypothetical Black gender-expansive student (2.73 on the scale) than for a white gender-expansive student (2.32) or a Black cisgender female student (2.26). That’s not just unfair — it’s dangerous.

The good news is that public opinion may be shifting. A 2023 revealed that 65% of U.S. adults agreed with a federal ban on physical punishment in schools, while only 18% were opposed. This growing consensus is reflected in recent legislative actions: and banned physical punishment in public schools in 2023, while and introduced legislation in 2024 to limit the practice. My findings also show that a majority of Mississippians oppose corporal punishment in school. Yet state and federal laws still permit it, revealing a stark disconnect between policy and public will.

That gap must be closed. Here’s how:

First, Mississippi lawmakers — and those in the 21 other states where corporal punishment is still allowed — should immediately ban the practice in all schools. No child should fear physical harm at the hands of a teacher or principal. Nationwide advocacy efforts by organizations like the emphasize the critical need for legislative reform.

Second, schools should adopt , which focus on accountability, dialogue and healing. These methods reduce conflict and improve school climate without resorting to violence. Resources from offer practical guidelines to help educators to implement these approaches.

Finally, transparency is essential. School districts should be required to report disciplinary data by race and gender identity so communities can see what’s happening and push for changes when needed. Right now, the U.S. Department of Education’s offers a national framework for doing just that — including statistics on the demographic breakdown of students exposed to corporal punishment. However, with the ongoing uncertainty around federal policy, there’s a risk that this resource could be cut, which would make it harder to track how corporal punishment is being used in schools nationwide. We need to speak up to make sure this data collection continues and even gets stronger.

in schools takes a multi-pronged approach. It means changing laws, updating policies and working with communities to push for positive discipline methods that help children thrive without fear of physical punishment. 

It’s time to end this antiquated practice. Not just for some students, but for all of them.

That’s because ESSA is proving to be a weak law. Although it was hailed at the time for its bipartisan nature and “the largest devolution of federal control to the states in a quarter-century,” student achievement has fallen dramatically, especially for the lowest-performing youngsters.

Part of the problem is that ESSA doesn’t have the same muscular elements as its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act. It’s a pretty damning comparison: NCLB required states to hold districts accountable for their results; it paid close attention to low-performing student subgroups; and it included other improvement efforts like school choice, tutoring and a $1 billion reading program. ESSA has none of those things. This lack of ambition probably helped it win bipartisan support when it passed, and also why it has led to student achievement declines.  

Admittedly, this is an awkward point to be making at the current moment. At the national level, the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to kill the U.S. Department of Education and hand full control of education back to the states. Meanwhile, Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren are responding by the status quo with chants like “Save our Schools.”

But history suggests neither deregulation nor blind support for the current federal-state relationship is the right approach. And with state leaders seeking waivers for even less oversight over their use of federal funds, now is the time to start thinking about what a better accountability framework might look like. Here are five places to start:  

1. Trust states, but verify

The Trump administration wants to send even more control back to the states with “no-strings-attached formula block grants.” But that seems unwise, given the achievement declines most states have experienced over the last decade (many of which preceded COVID). More importantly, it wouldn’t make sense to offer the same flexibilities to, say, Maine or Oregon, where scores have rapidly over the last decade, as to Mississippi, which has dramatically improved outcomes for kids. Different states deserve different levels of earned autonomy.

Andy Smarick, Kelly Robson and I outlined this approach in a 2015 report we called “.” We envisioned a set of federal-state compacts where each state established ambitious student performance goals and developed a comprehensive plan for reaching them. In exchange, states would be freed from strict federal rules on how to identify low-performing schools and the specific steps for improvement those schools must take, and the government would monitor the results. The feds could then extend the length of compacts with states that make progress and ask those where performance has stalled to revisit their plans.

ESSA has some elements of this framework. Nominally, states are in charge of writing their own plans and the feds are responsible for oversight. But the states would tell you the feds are too strict on what’s allowable and what’s not. More importantly, that process ignores student results, and performance can — and has — stalled without any impetus for change.

2. Focus on districts, not schools

Whereas NCLB had both school and district accountability components, ESSA focuses solely on schools. That turned out to be a huge mistake.

The school-level emphasis was fundamentally flawed. After all, district leaders control the budget, adopt the school calendar, negotiate major contracts and determine pay schedules. In other words, district leaders should be blamed if a school doesn’t have the resources it needs to succeed.

The nation saw this play out during COVID. It wasn’t teachers or principals who set COVID policies, yet the national education law ignored the district role and instead required states to focus on individual schools.

That made no sense — and it was borne out in the data. The latest Education Recovery Scorecard found achievement gaps within the same districts stayed about the same during the course of the pandemic. Meanwhile, achievement gaps between districts grew substantially.

Why? Because the districts were making different decisions. As a research team led by Dan Goldhaber , “In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in person, there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools.”

That is, district decisions over how to handle COVID, not COVID itself, were what caused gaps to grow. Going forward, districts, not schools should be the primary unit of accountability.

3. Hold states and districts accountable for the performance of low-performing students

American society is becoming more diverse, and old categories of race and ethnicity are becoming to neatly measure and define. It’s not that the U.S. has suddenly become colorblind or that race doesn’t matter, but policies haven’t caught up to the fact that people who identify as multiracial are the group in the country. Moreover, there’s wide in which children are identified as having disabilities.

These categories are also less salient in education than they once were. While there’s been in the gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, who those students are has changed. Yes, the bottom has fallen out for children in traditionally low-performing subgroups, but for native English speakers, students without disabilities and those who do not live in poverty.

As such, policymakers should follow the lead of states like and , which specifically look at how the bottom 25% of students are doing, regardless of their race, ethnicity or disability status. Those kids rely on public schools the most, they’re struggling right now and it’s where the policy focus should be going forward.

4. Give parents information

ESSA states to share results with families “as soon as is practicable” after standardized tests are administered. But reporting has actually over time. Even with the shift to digital exams, states take longer to process the scores than they did two decades ago.

That’s inexcusable. States could speed this up on their own, or the feds could step in and define “as soon as practicable” to be no more than, say, two weeks after the test. That’s the standard in the private sector, and there’s no reason it can’t be met in public education.

5. Give parents options

Did you know that all students in low-performing public schools once had access to free after-school tutoring? Or that all families in low-performing schools once had the right to transfer to another public school of their choice?

Both these programs existed under NCLB. They had flaws, for sure, and school districts tended to hate them, but they pressured schools to improve, and of families took advantage of them each year. Congress should consider bringing back these other forms of accountability too.

This is far from a comprehensive list of all the things that need to improve with current accountability systems, but it’s not enough to shout “local control” or defend the status quo.Policymakers from both sides of the aisle need to reckon with the current state of public education and articulate a vision for the future that matches that reality.

The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results delivered a familiar gut punch: Just 30% of eighth graders read at or above the proficient level, a number that’s barely budged in decades. Even in states like Mississippi and Louisiana, which have earned national attention thanks to literacy reforms that have smartly lifted fourth-grade scores in recent NAEP cycles, early gains tend to plateau or evaporate by eighth grade. A substantial number of U.S. students simply seem to run out of gas as readers as they move from upper elementary to middle school and beyond. 

A compelling explanation may lie in something called the decoding threshold. Teachers often assume that once students master decoding in early elementary school, they’re set to shift from learning to read to reading to learn. However, in 2019, researchers at the Educational Testing Service published a that measured foundational literacy skills — like decoding — in students from upper elementary through high school. Most reading tests in the older grades focus solely on comprehension; they don’t offer much insight into whether students have mastered the basic skills necessary to read fluently. The findings showed evidence of a troubling phenomenon: Students with weak decoding skills consistently performed poorly on comprehension tasks, while those who surpassed a certain level of decoding ability tended to understand texts much more effectively. In other words, although decoding isn’t the only skill older students need to succeed in reading, those who haven’t yet mastered it are likely to struggle with understanding complex material.

A follow-up study three years later confirmed it: Those below the decoding threshold stagnated, while those above the line advanced — offering tantalizing evidence to explain why eighth-grade NAEP scores plateau even as fourth-grade numbers rise. A put the matter succinctly and starkly: “If children do not have adequate word-recognition skills, their reading comprehension often won’t get better no matter how much direct support for comprehension they receive.” 

The tripwire that appears to be holding kids back is multisyllabic decoding. Students who can decode simple words like “cat” and “bed” with relative ease may still struggle to break down longer, more complex words into smaller, manageable parts to read them correctly. Imagine two eighth graders reading a science passage that includes the word “photosynthesis.” The student above the decoding threshold effortlessly breaks it into “photo” and “synthesis,” adjusts the sounds in her head — like “syn” to “sin” — and reads it smoothly, quickly grasping it as a plant process she’s studying. Meanwhile, the student below the threshold freezes at the unfamiliar term and mangles it as “photo-sith-esis” or “photo-sy-thee-sis.” Struggling to decode the big word, he loses the thread of the sentence, missing the whole idea of plants making energy. 

It’s another manifestation of cognitive load theory: Brainpower spent decoding multisyllabic words is not available to attend to the meaning of the text. Worse, the decoding threshold fuels a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer phenomenon often referred to as the : Students who are below the decoding threshold stop growing in vocabulary, reading comprehension and knowledge acquisition, while those who are above have what it takes to keep learning and growing, leaving the struggling readers in their wake. 

Worse still, evidence of the decoding threshold reveals a blind spot in common approaches to teaching reading. “We basically don’t teach [multisyllabic decoding] anywhere in the system because it’s too advanced for second graders. And after second grade, we stop decoding instruction and flip into comprehension and fluency,” observes Rebecca Kockler, a former Louisiana state education leader who now heads , a $40 million initiative of the . “If I had a magic wand, I would pull decoding fluency work up almost into seventh or eighth grade,” she says, while pushing down to early elementary grades the building blocks of multisyllabic decoding, such as morphology and etymology. If you teach kids to break words into their smallest meaningful pieces, like “un-” for “not” or “-ness” for a state of being, they’re more likely to be able to handle “unhappiness” by spotting its parts, for example. And by showing them where words come from — like how “photo” in “photosynthesis” means “light” from Greek — they will be better able to infer what words mean.

As persuasive as the decoding threshold thesis might be, the wish for a magic wand to wave at curriculum and standards hints at a serious problem: There is no immediate or obvious solution at hand to address the issue. Nor is there simply a lack of appropriate curriculum or materials. A recent RAND of teachers in grades 3 to 8 found that 44% of their students “always or nearly always experience difficulty” reading the content of their instructional materials. The report also found many of those same teachers hold misconceptions about how students develop word recognition skills.

A new nonprofit venture called , a collaborative effort with the fund led by Kockler, has been piloting a set of tech-enabled instructional tools aimed at addressing these issues directly. In a 12-week pilot in grades K-2 across 11 schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, early results were promising, with evidence of impact in only 8 to 12 weeks of use. Student growth was most pronounced, according to Kockler’s colleagues, among students starting at the lowest levels of proficiency. K-2 may sound early to address a problem that shows up starkly in eighth grade, but it reflects a growing conviction: unless students start building sophisticated decoding skills young, and those skills are reinforced often, too many will continue to hit the wall in middle school and never get back up to speed. “We’ve had this belief that we teach kids to read and then they read to learn,” Kockler explains, “and we just fundamentally do not believe that’s true anymore.” 

If you had asked her years ago, when she was assistant superintendent of academics with the Louisiana Department of Education, to estimate the percentage of middle schoolers who struggled with decoding to the point that it interfered with their reading comprehension, Kockler would have guessed 7% to 10%. “We think that number is more like 30% to 40%,” she now says, “which really mirrors this group of middle schoolers who never ever show growth on state tests or NAEP.” 

There are two ways for a gap to grow. The top can pull away, or the bottom can fall out. Here in the United States, the key problem is that the bottom is falling, and the changes are not small. At the national level, in fourth grade reading, the scores of the top 10% of students fell 0.5 points from 2013-24. Meanwhile, the scores of the bottom 10% fell 15 points. 

The state-level results are even more jarring. To put those in perspective, consider that the average student gains about 8 points per year on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading tests. The chart below shows the change from 2013 to 2024 in the scores for the bottom 10% of students in each state. For this group, 40 states saw a decline of 10 points or more, 16 saw declines of 20 points or more and two states — Delaware and Maryland — had declines of more than 30 (!) points.

But one state is bucking this trend: Mississippi. Indeed, there’s been a fair amount of coverage of �Ѿ���������������辱’s reading progress in recent years, but its gains are so impressive that they merit another look.  

First, it’s worth remembering that Mississippi is the state in the country. Its per-capita income is below $50,000, and it spends less on its public schools than all but three states. But when the Urban Institute NAEP scores based on each state’s demographics, �Ѿ���������������辱’s fourth-grade reading scores came out on top. 

Even without those adjustments, though, Mississippi looks pretty great. Its Black students third nationally, and its low-income kids outperform those in every other state. Mississippi is also the only state to see gains across all performance levels over the last decade. Its average went up, but so did the scores of its highest and lowest performers. Mississippi raised the bar and the floor at the same time. 

So how did they do it? How did Mississippi go from 49^th in the country a decade ago to near the top today? And what can other states learn from it? 

According to a recent piece by Grace Brazeale, a policy associate with the advocacy group Mississippi First, the state implemented of changes starting with the 2013 . That law funded the state department of education to hire, train and 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 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 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 have even tried to cast doubt on �Ѿ���������������辱’s NAEP gains by arguing they’re merely a function of testing older kids. But this has been : Mississippi does hold back more kids than other states, but it , and the average age of �Ѿ���������������辱’s NAEP test-takers has barely budged over time. 

on third-grade retention policies has that students who are retained tend to have better 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 . 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. 

Other states have literacy policies too, but they are often weaker than what Mississippi implemented. For example, a 2023 paper from Michigan State University researchers John Westall and Amy Cummings that 41 states and the District of Columbia had early literacy policies, but only 12 could be considered . Many states had the superficial elements of a literacy plan, but they lacked requirements that all districts adopt high-quality instructional materials, screen all students for dyslexia and take dramatic action for kids who continue to struggle to read. Critically, Westall and Cummings found that only states with truly comprehensive policies saw student learning gains. 

This is perhaps the key lesson for state policymakers: The only literacy policies that are likely to lead to significant student learning gains are ones that meaningfully change schools and classrooms. With reading scores continuing to fall in many parts of the country, policymakers should look to replicate the lessons from Mississippi. 

A dozen state leaders, all from Republican-led states, wrote to Linda McMahon, President Donald Trump’s education secretary nominee, last week asking her to push for greater state control over federal education funds and to avoid issuing guidance they say is “not anchored in law.”

In the Jan. 28 letter, shared exclusively with The 74, they also want McMahon, former head of World Wrestling Entertainment, to send large buckets of funding for schools, like Title I money for low-income students, as a block grant. But they stopped short of stating support for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education — President Donald Trump’s top education policy goal. 

“By prioritizing state leadership and flexibility, the Trump administration can unleash the full potential of America’s schools and students,” they wrote. “Please defer to state and local decision-making as much as possible.”

The letter outlines conservative chiefs’ priorities as Trump takes aggressive steps to reshape the federal role in education. He frequently to “send education back to the states” and is expected to issue an executive order before the end of the month that would call on Congress to close the department.

The memo offers specifics that have been lacking in many discussions over how the relationship between the federal government and the states might change. But some experts wonder if the freedom GOP leaders seek will leave high-need students without services currently provided under law. Madi Biedermann, a department spokeswoman, confirmed they’d received the letter, but said officials wouldn’t share it with McMahon until she’s confirmed. 

The 12 leaders who penned the letter, both elected and appointed, are from Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming. 

Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters was not among them, despite the fact that he has been the most vocal about and at one point, threatened to . 

The proposals should provide additional talking points for committee members during McMahon’s confirmation hearing Feb. 13. While it would require congressional approval, the chiefs want to see the of funding under the Every Student Succeeds Act — like Title I and Title III for English learners — consolidated into a single block grant for “maximum flexibility.” 

They want to design their own formulas for distributing the money to districts so they can address the needs of rural areas, for example, and state-specific learning initiatives. In the meantime, they want the new secretary to grant as many waivers as possible from the accountability requirements of the law so they can “present new ideas” for how to spend the money.

‘Dilute the protections’

Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a research and policy organization, said she wasn’t surprised that the chiefs didn’t advocate eliminating the education department outright. Many of their states on federal funds and spend less state money on schools. The department, she said, is doing those states “a great service.”

While some state leaders might view the federal requirements as “overly burdensome,” she said their push for more control could come at the expense of students who require extra help, like those in poverty, English learners and homeless students. 

“Once you start blending all of those titles together you start to really dilute the protections that are going to individual students,” she said. 

The letter doesn’t mention the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which under , would move to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“IDEA oversight is giving some people pause,” she said. “That piece of legislation is very specific to education.”

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, say they have “serious concerns” about any attempts to shutter the department. On Thursday, they to Acting Education Secretary Denise Carter asking for more transparency on how the department plans to continue running programs it oversees, like financial aid and afterschool programs.

“We will not stand by and allow the impact that dismantling the Department of Education would have on the nation’s students, parents, borrowers, educators and communities,” they wrote.

In their letter, the state chiefs pushed back on the department’s practice of using “dear colleague” letters to enforce its priorities, which they said have often been “treated as legally binding policy.” Guidance from the department, they said, should merely be a suggestion “so as not to force behavior change.”  

During the Obama administration, for example, Republicans fought guidance that said students should be able to use bathrooms that match their and another that said districts could risk civil rights investigations if Black and Hispanic students were . 

On Wednesday, the Education Department issued stating that it would no longer enforce the Biden administration’s Title IX rule, which extended protections to LGBTQ students, and that any investigations based on the 2024 rule would be “reevaluated.” 

Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he hopes Trump honors the chiefs’ request, but noted the “chaos” that has marked Trump’s first few weeks in office. Trump’s efforts to freeze federal funding have been . And even some have questioned Elon Musk’s authority to gain access to government payment systems and disable an agency that provides foreign aid.

“The ‘pen and phone’ approach, to quote Obama, whipsaws state leaders across administrations and is lousy federal governance,” he said. “My worry is less about the secretary nominee and more about the ‘move fast and break things’ approach we’ve seen so far in many other dimensions of this young administration.”

Few of them would think of Neshoba County in Mississippi.

But Neshoba County schools are doing something that those other places are not: They serve a high-poverty community, yet their students’ math scores are competitive with those in wealthier areas.

Back in September, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, to find districts around the country that were doing the best job of helping kids learn to read proficiently by third grade. Today, we’re taking the same approach to eighth-grade math. We calculated each district’s expected math proficiency rate, based on its local poverty level, and compared that to its actual scores. This methodology helped us identify districts that are beating the odds in math. 

Select from the menu below to find the high fliers in your state.

INTERACTIVE

Eighth Grade Math Proficiency

At the national level, eighth-grade math scores peaked in 2013, were slipping leading up to the pandemic and then fell dramatically. The declines were particularly large for students who were already among the lowest-performing.

Mississippi weathered these declines better than most states. As a result, the found that Mississippi climbed the state rankings in both math and reading over the last decade. After controlling for student demographics, Mississippi was ahead of 40 other states by 2019, and its scores quicker than other states’ after COVID.

Neshoba County helped lead that rise. According to data from the at Stanford University, Neshoba’s students went from scoring more than half of a grade level below the national average in 2016 to nearly 1.5 grade levels above the national average last year. Their students made gains even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When we started looking for districts that were beating the odds, we aimed to find and celebrate districts like Neshoba. We ultimately identified nearly 600 districts that are getting exceptional results in math, which we defined as significantly outscoring their expected eighth-grade proficiency rate.

Some districts are showing strong performance in both third-grade reading and eighth-grade math. For example, in the reading project we highlighted Steubenville City, Ohio, at the top of our rankings. Despite its relatively high poverty, 81% of its eighth graders score as proficient in math, which puts it on par with districts that have many fewer disadvantaged students. 

States set their proficiency cut points at different levels, and Maryland has one of the highest bars. And yet, students in Worcester, a community that is neither high- nor low-poverty, stands out for having eighth-grade math proficiency rates 20 points higher than kids in any other district in the state.

In Michigan, Dearborn City is getting the same results as other districts with much lower poverty rates.

Other strong outliers include places like Genoa Central in Arkansas, Lake Washington in Washington state, the Fossil School District in Oregon and the Murray Independent district in Kentucky. 

In northern Virginia, where I live, people often say they move here for the schools. But if they were really looking for the best school system in the state, they would move to Wise County, on the Kentucky border. Wise County has much higher poverty rates than the more well-known D.C. suburbs, yet it topped our Virginia rankings in both reading and math.

Looking at the scores this way helps identify the places with great school systems, where learning gains are driven by what students learn in the classroom. This is especially true in math, because unlike reading proficiency — which is closely tied to language skills and background knowledge that children acquire at home — math scores are more directly linked to school-based instruction.

This gets at the heart of the issue at hand. Parents and policymakers should not be content with answering the simple question of, “Where do students do the best?” Wealthy communities are likely to look good by that standard, just by the nature of the students they serve.

Instead, policymakers should be trying to find schools and districts that help all students learn, regardless of their income levels. Poverty is certainly predictive of school performance, but it need not be determinative.

Note: For more details about the data sources and methodology for this project, see our earlier reading analysis. 

Mississippians who are dead set on enacting private school vouchers could do like their counterparts in Kentucky and attempt to change the state constitution to allow public funds to be spent on private schools.

The courts have ruled in Kentucky that the state constitution prevents private schools from receiving public funds, commonly known as vouchers. In response to that court ruling, an issue was placed on the ballot to change the Kentucky Constitution and allow private schools to receive public funds.

But voters threw a monkey wrench into the voucher supporters’ plans to bypass the courts. The amendment was overwhelmingly defeated this month, with 65% of Kentuckians voting against the proposal.

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Kentucky, generally speaking, is at least as conservative or more conservative than Mississippi. In unofficial returns, 65% of Kentuckians voted for Republican Donald Trump on Nov. 5 compared to 62% of Mississippians.

In Mississippi, like Kentucky, there has been a hue and cry to enact a widespread voucher program.

Mississippi House Speaker Jason White, R-West, has voiced support for vouchers, though he has conceded he does not believe there are the votes to get such a proposal through the House Republican caucus that claims a two-thirds supermajority.

And, like in Kentucky, there is the question of whether a voucher proposal could withstand legal muster under a plain reading of the Mississippi Constitution.

In Mississippi, like Kentucky, the state constitution appears to explicitly prohibit the spending of public funds on private schools. The Mississippi Constitution states that public funds should not be spent on a school that “is not conducted as a free school.”

The Mississippi Supreme Court has never rendered a specific ruling on the issue. The Legislature did provide $10 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds to private schools. That expenditure was challenged and appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court. But in a ruling earlier this year, the state’s high court did not directly address the issue of public funds being spent on private schools. It instead ruled that the group challenging the expenditure did not have standing to file the lawsuit.

In addition, a majority of the court ruled that the case was not directly applicable to the Mississippi Constitution’s language since the money directed to private schools was not state funds but one-time federal funds earmarked for COVID-19 relief efforts.

To clear up the issue in Mississippi, those supporting vouchers could do like their counterparts did in Kentucky and try to change the constitution.

Since �Ѿ���������������辱’s ballot initiative process was struck down in an unrelated Supreme Court ruling, the only way to change the state constitution is to pass a proposal by a two-thirds majority of the Mississippi House and Senate and then by a majority of the those voting in a November general election.

Those touting public funds for private schools point to a poll commissioned by House Speaker White that shows 72% support for “policies that enable parents to take a more active role in deciding the best path for their children’s education.” But what does that actually mean? Many have critiqued the phrasing of the question, wondering why the pollster did not ask specifically about spending public funds on private schools.

Regardless, Mississippi voucher supporters have made no attempt to change the constitution. Instead, they argue that for some vague reason the language in the Mississippi Constitution should be ignored.

Nationwide efforts to put vouchers before the voters have not been too successful. In addition to voters in Kentucky rejecting vouchers, so did voters in ruby-red Nebraska and true-blue Colorado in this year’s election.

With those election setbacks, voucher supporters in Mississippi might believe their best bet is to get the courts to ignore the plain reading of the state constitution instead of getting voters to change that language themselves.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.