Reading is the most fundamental thing in education. If you can read, you can do and learn everything else. If you can’t read, well, you’re screwed.

We know how to teach reading to children. Phonics. The weird thing is we often choose to not do that, and instead to use methods that are known not to work. Principles often want to not do phonics. Teachers often heavily resist phonics. But yes, you can absolutely overcome this, as Mississippi and other Southern states have done, by insisting upon it and actually enforcing that insistence. You see huge gains.

Not all those gains persist into later grades, but a lot of the gains do persist.

No, that won’t get the children invested in reading lots of books on their own time. But given their alternatives and what we inflict on them, can you blame ‘em?

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Mississippi Can Read Now

The surge in reading is bigger than it looks. Illiteracy has been proven a policy choice, and all the extra money we spend on other things has proven wasted.

It’s not that they’ve become a normal state, it’s that they’re wildly outperforming now.

First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements.
Second, many people who aren’t too focused on education policy seem to imagine Mississippi has simply stopped underperforming, that they’re now doing about as well as everyone else.
This is not true. They haven’t just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools.
Black students are as likely to be basic-or-above readers in Mississippi (where the median Black household income was $37,900 in 2023) as in national top performer Massachusetts (where the median Black household income was $67,000 in 2022.)

What Mississippi and Louisiana Did

Again, what did t...

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