The Magnolia State has leapfrogged ahead in youth literacy. Can it be a national model?

How has Mississippi improved?
For years, Southern states with struggling education systems could console themselves: No matter how poorly they were doing, they weren’t as bad as Mississippi. Just 12 years ago, Mississippi ranked 48th in K-12 education, based on metrics like attendance, reading proficiency, and on-time graduation. Now the state is no longer a punch line. It’s up to 16th in K-12 rankings and has achieved particular success in fourth-grade reading comprehension, jumping all the way to the top 10 in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). When adjusting for poverty and other demographic factors, Mississippi actually tops the nation in that category. Crucially, improvements are seen among students at all reading levels, “rather than just among higher achieving or lower achieving students,” says Dan McGrath, a retired federal education official who oversaw the tests. “It’s as if Mississippi had moved a mountain.” And it did this despite spending just $12,000 per student, much less than the national average.

What did it change?
Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013, paving the way for implementing the “science of reading” in K-3 classrooms. This multifaceted approach—which involves teaching phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, and text comprehension—gets much of the credit for the state’s turnaround, but it’s just one tenet of the law. Accountability, from both students and schools, is another. Mississippi grades its schools A to F and sends coaches to train teachers in low-performing ones. Students get to see and track their own testing data. “I like it,” one pupil, Johnny, told The New York Times. “If I make a bad grade, but I’m going up, it’s like a staircase.” At the end of third grade, those who don’t pass a literacy exam after multiple attempts are automatically held back. That “third-grade gate” has drawn praise as a tough but beneficial rule that’s paying off: a record 77.3% of third graders passed the initial administration last year. Yet it also has its share of critics. 

What do they say?
They say Mississippi has stacked its deck. Of course all the fourth graders can read, they say—the kids who couldn’t were kept back in third grade. In 2023, fully 7% of Mississippi third graders, over 2,000 kids, were held back. One study in the statistics journal Significance said Mississippi’s approach amounts to “gaming the system.” Others point out that Mississippi scores didn’t even improve much, it’s just that other states got worse. Still, some research indicates that something real is happening. A Florida State University study found compulsory grade repetition alone can’t explain higher test scores. Mississippi’s literacy gains have also remained consistent across every decile on the NAEP exam. A 90th-percentile score, for instance, leaped from 249 in 2005 to 262 in 2024, and a 10th-percentile score from 157 to 170. Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard, told ChalkBeat that he doesn’t “see any smoking guns or red flags” around Mississippi’s success. That’s why other states are starting to copy it.

What are other states doing?
Across the South, states from Louisiana to Virginia have adopted at least some of Mississippi’s strategies, including teacher-training methods, curriculum reform, and high standards. Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have even copied the third-grade gate approach. Now Louisiana leads the country in recovery from pandemic-related losses in reading, while Alabama takes the crown for math recovery. These states particularly shine when NAEP scores are adjusted for demographics. After considering factors like poverty and race, the Urban Institute think tank determined, Mississippi tops the nation in fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade math, and eighth-grade math, and it’s fourth in eighth-grade reading. Still, not everyone is satisfied with Mississippi’s middle-school progress.

What happened in middle school?
If you don’t adjust for demographics, Mississippi eighth graders rank a dismal 41st in reading. Things are getting better—between 2013 and 2022, its eighth graders cut their gap with the national average in half—but the pace has been slower than in lower grades. That’s hardly a surprise, since the 2013 law focused specifically on improving early-education literacy. The state hasn’t invested the same time, money, and resources into middle-school reading, the time when literacy instruction shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Critics say Mississippi needs to ensure that older children can read—and that students’ math skills get the same attention as their reading skills.

Is the state planning to do that?
Mississippi is now looking to pass a bill that would expand the 2013 literacy reforms into higher grades. The teachers tend to appreciate the help from literacy coaches, Mississippi education official Tenette Smith says. “We hear from teachers and administrators who say, ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know.’” The state also seeks to adopt similar reforms for primary-school mathematics, mandating math coaches in all schools, prioritizing grades 2-6, and placing a cutoff gate for fifth grade so that only students who are ready will move on to sixth-grade algebra classes. Pilot programs are already underway to improve reading comprehension in upper grades. While it’s too soon to tell whether those efforts will pay off longterm, the early test results are promising. The Mississippi miracle is “proof positive that, yes, children in poverty can learn and can succeed,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi’s former superintendent of education. “As educators, our job is to do whatever it takes.”

The Supreme Court has authorized Republican-run states “to disenfranchise Black voters,” said Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. A 6-3 majority, split along ideological lines, ruled last week in Louisiana v. Callais that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The decision effectively gutted Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, “which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.” Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion was steeped in “reactionary color blindness”—pretending to be neutral about race in order to preserve an unjust racial hierarchy. Alito argued that states are only in violation of the VRA if they draw districts to intentionally disadvantage minority voters. If states seek partisan advantage in redistricting, Alito said, that’s constitutional under a 2019 Supreme Court ruling—as if disadvantaging Democrats doesn’t also disadvantage Blacks. In other words, according to Chief Justice John Roberts and his allies, “preventing Louisiana from disenfranchising Black voters is racist.” As a result of this “mind-boggling piece of judicial overreach,” said The New York Times in an editorial, red states like Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi can “slice minority voters into small and powerless slivers,” so long as they claim race isn’t the reason. Once again, the court obviously “acted more like partisan legislators than like impartial judges”: Its six conservative justices, all nominated by Republicans, “have most likely made it easier for the party that chose them to hold power in Congress.

“The Voting Rights Act was a landmark of American liberty that helped to break Jim Crow,” said The Wall Street Journal, but it’s not 1965 anymore. As Alito noted, “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.” This ruling will finally help end Democrats’ “partisan abuse of race to carve up congressional districts.” In the name of preventing the “dilution” of Black votes, Louisiana was compelled to draw up a preposterous majority-minority district that snakes 250 miles across the state. In their dissents, said Jason Willick in The Washington Post, the three liberal justices conflated the right to vote with the “right to have the satisfaction of voting for the winner.” Sometimes—say, for Republicans in San Francisco or Democrats in Wyoming—our preferred candidates lose, and we have to “accept the outcome of the legislative process anyway.” In a representative democracy, being “outnumbered” is not the same as being “disenfranchised.”

The reality is that Callais “will be devastating for communities of color,” said Ari Berman in Mother Jones. During the Jim Crow era, Black Americans had essentially no representation in Congress, even in Southern states with large Black populations. But with the forceful support of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, the VRA put an end to decades of “white supremacy and one-party rule” across the South. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in an anguished dissent, the law “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers.” She pointed out that the VRA has proved so essential in “bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality” that Congress has reauthorized it five times—including in 2006, when the Senate voted 98-0. By rendering the law toothless, the court will likely “trigger the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction.” And legal recourse will be all but impossible, said Erwin Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times. In theory, states can still be sued if they draw districts to discriminate by race. But as Kagan put it, without “smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive”—a prospect she deemed “almost fanciful”— the law is now moot. 

The court’s ruling will trigger an all-out redistricting war, said Ian Millhiser in Vox. “Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering” that states will have no fear of rigging districts to favor the party in power. Louisiana, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has already delayed its primaries so it can redraw its map, while Tennessee’s GOP governor called a special session to discuss doing the same. Republican-controlled Alabama may follow suit. Democrats will respond in kind, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. Many in the party are “pledging to continue the fight-fire-with-fire approach they’ve carried out successfully over the last year” in California and Virginia. By 2028, both red and blue states may eliminate most or all congressional seats held by the minority party. How is this absurd “gerrymandering tit-for-tat” good for democracy? Will anyone in Congress dare “to find some anti-gerrymandering measures on which there’s an appetite for bipartisan agreement”? If Americans are sick of this partisan race to the bottom, they should demand it. 

Jerry Seinfeld has only a few pleasures in life, said Jamie Kitman in Air Mail. “You know, I like watching baseball, I like driving cars, and I like comedy, that’s about it,” says the comedian, 72. “I think most of the rest of life has been a huge disappointment.” His love of cars—he has a multimillion-dollar collection but doesn’t know exactly how many autos he owns—started as a kid on New York’s Long Island. “I was always very offended by the large size and lack of quality of American cars. My parents only had used American cars. Ramblers, Chevrolets.” But there was a British sports car dealer in his hometown. “The whole place was on dirt. They didn’t even have a showroom. But the first time I saw an MGB and an MG Midget there, I completely collapsed. The MGB is one of the most elegantly designed cars.” At the beach club his family belonged to, one lifeguard drove a Triumph Spitfire and another an MG Midget. They “were the coolest people you could ever dream of at 10 or 11 years old, and they parked side by side. I swear to God, I’ve never gotten over the sight of these muscular guys. I don’t know if they were teenagers or in their early 20s, but that was it. I was completely branded at that point. I have a ’68 Midget in primrose yellow today, all original everything.”