The "Mississippi Miracle": How America's Poorest State Dramatically Improved Its Schools
A focus on early literacy paid off, according to this new study.
Mississippi is America’s poorest state. With its paucity of resources and chronic underdevelopment, it often ranks near the bottom of rankings of quality of life.
But a new study suggests that there’s something the Magnolia State may be able to teach the rest of the country how to dramatically improve our schools.
In 2013, the state legislature pushed through a package of educational reforms codified in the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) that boosted support for early childhood literacy. The LBPA did a range of things, including expanding access to full-day pre-K programs, focusing education phonics and the science of reading, investing more in professional development of teachers, increasing the use of reading screenings tests, and enforcing requirements for students to repeat grades if they don’t pass reading assessments.
In short, the LBPA was a battery of measures intended to improve reading skills for Mississippi children — and there’s little doubt that things started to improve in the state after it was passed.
In 2013, the year the LBPA passed the legislature, the state ranked 49th in fourth grade reading achievement (as measured by the National Assessment of Education Progress). In 2019, the state had achieved the rank of 29th in the country.
And according to new research published in Economics of Education Review, the LBPA was part of why the state saw this success.
Noah Spencer, an economics graduate student at the University of Toronto, looked at the causal impact of the LBPA, using available data to make his assessment.
“I’m estimating an increase of about eight and a half points on both the NAEP Reading and the NAEP math tests,” he said of the first cohort of students who were in school from kindergarten through 3rd grade after the LBPA had been implemented.
What’s remarkable is that Mississippi seems to have achieved these results with a relatively cheap price tag.
“The budget was about $15 million per year,” he noted (the state’s current overall budget is about $7.6 billion).
He did caution, however, that there were other policies being implemented in Mississippi at this time. Local school districts, for instance, were experimenting with their own school reforms (as one example, one district had introduced a one-week reading summer camp.) He said that we need more research on the policy (currently about a dozen states have policies similar to the LBPA in place.)
But his paper suggests that even a very poor state like Mississippi can do a lot with a little.
By focusing on the basics — making sure students have the support they need to learn the fundamentals though phonics instruction, comprehensive pre-K and similar policies — Mississippi may have a lesson to teach the rest of the country.
“In 2013, the year the LBPA passed the legislature, the state ranked 49th in fourth grade reading achievement (as measured by the National Assessment of Education Progress). In 2019, the state had achieved the rank of 29th in the country.
“And according to new research published in Economics of Education Review, the LBPA was part of why the state saw this success.”
In 2012, for the first time since its Redemption by Democrats circa 1876, the Mississippi state government was controlled entirely by Republicans.
And I have to suspect we can go even further. I have to believe that some schools and districts showed even more progress than the impressive average gains. For that matter, why not look at the data at the classroom level? "Best practices" are something that we can learn if we are willing to try.