A Look at the Mississippi Reading Miracle

Teachers in states with poor reading scores once pointed to Mississippi, saying, “At least we’re not doing as bad as Mississippi.”  

But now, that mindset is outdated. Mississippi has shown the country how—with enough dedication, strategic planning, focused interventions, and financial support—a state with such historically poor reading scores could change its students’ futures for the better.  

In 2013 Mississippi ranked second-to-last in national tests of fourth graders’ reading abilities. By 2022, the state had soared up the charts to 21st place on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. What’s more, that year it was the only state in the nation to demonstrate a year-over-year increase in reading ability among fourth graders.  

For a state that has struggled with dismal rates of poverty and literacy since its inception, the turnaround is pretty spectacular.  

How did it do it? 

Going big 

As the state’s literacy director Kymyona Burk told the Associated Press: “We have decided to go big.” In particular, Mississippi expanded its scope, working to ensure that every struggling young reader would find useful support. Kelly Butler, who leads the Barksdale Institute, a major literacy policy organization, said that reading specialists already understand how to help young readers develop their skills. “We just have to do it everywhere,” she said.  

Modeling its reading education legislation on a highly successful 2002 law in Florida, Mississippi has succeeded due to its efforts on several fronts. Since a major restructuring of its reading instruction program in 2013, it has provided enhanced teacher training in the art and science of teaching reading, using the most up-to-date methods supported by extensive research. The state also paid for a cadre of literacy coaches to work closely with front-line teachers to put that training into action. It focused its most intensive efforts on the schools with the lowest test scores. 

Additionally, Mississippi is concentrating on detecting and remediating reading problems as early as possible. The state screens children for various types of reading difficulties or disabilities by kindergarten. If teachers find that a child has a reading deficiency, they alert the family and provide additional support. The state also offers interventions to keep students on the right trajectory for mastering reading skills. If schools don’t comply with the requirements, they face consequences.  

The art of decoding 

Much of the impressive gain in reading performance in Mississippi is due to proven instruction methods built from two complementary aspects of the science of reading: teaching kids to decode words by sounding them out, and teaching language comprehension, or the understanding of what those words mean. These two factors together result in successful reading comprehension. 

Phonics is a tried-and-true method of teaching children to sound out words, but it’s been de-emphasized in several teacher-training programs in recent years. Teachers who center their reading instruction for early grades more on the “look-say” method, or whole language approach, teach kids to recognize entire words as one unit, rather than breaking them down into individual phonemes, or sound units. But numerous experts have pointed out that a lack of focus on phonics is likely one of the biggest factors in children’s slow progress in reading.  

Remember those “Dick and Jane” readers from the mid-20th century? They were created at the height of the whole language movement, and they emphasized sight-reading of whole words that were repeated over and over. For many children, this approach delays reading acquisition because they’re not taught to decode the words by their sounds. Instead, they often haphazardly guess at words based on illustrations or other cues.  

The double-digit gains in Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores over the past decade correlate strongly with the implementation of the new phonics-centered methods. 

A model for the nation 

Other states have successfully worked to replicate Mississippi’s model. In 2022 states like Tennessee and North Carolina began drafting legislation to incorporate the same type of “science of reading” methods into their education plans. Nearly 20 states have worked to direct part of the federal aid they received during the COVID emergency toward teaching training programs that center these methods. 

Formerly low-performing states Alabama and Louisiana have joined Mississippi in achieving notable gains in reading scores. This held true even during the pandemic. While numerous other states posted record declines in reading scores, Alabama’s and Louisiana’s scores rose slightly.  

It took a lot of hard work and planning on the part of educators—and their students—to reach this level. The history of segregated and poorly funded schools in these Deep South states continues to slow progress, and they still have quite a long way to go. But looking at this “Mississippi miracle” should fill all of us with hope.