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For decades, Mississippi ranked as one of the lowest states in overall quality of life. That included education until recent reforms led to gains in literacy rates, taking the state from 49th in 2013 to 21st in 2022.
The dramatic improvement in student literacy rates in the state of Mississippi has been dubbed the ‘Mississippi Miracle.’ Many say the educational wins should be highlighted and shared with other states as models they can follow.
“I certainly use the term the Mississippi Miracle every chance I get because it catches people off guard,” Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) said during an interview with CBN News.
In our interview at the Governor’s mansion in Jackson, Reeves credited educational wins in his state to years of hard work in a state once ranked at the bottom.
“It is the direct result of passing conservative reforms in our legislature in 2012 and 2013, followed up by a very strong implementation by our Department of Education and a lot of hard work by teachers and students, and parents all over the state,” explained Tate. “And what you’re seeing now is just the fruits of that labor.”
Tate specifically pointed to getting back to basics.
“We went back to teaching reading, utilizing phonics,” he said. “It was the right thing to do for our kids.”
In 2013, Mississippi lawmakers implemented the “Literacy-based Promotion Act” which focused on early literacy and teacher development.
“We invested in our teachers,” said Tate. “We invested in hiring reading coaches; $15 million a year we spent on reading coaches at the state level, state employees that went into school and school districts helped kids that were struggling to read.”
The state also mandated holding back students who were not meeting certain reading standards by third grade, an unpopular move at the time.
“Many folks said, ‘Look, you can’t do that. If you do that, fifty percent of our kids are going to be held back or sixty percent of our kids are going to be held back.’ But we had the exact opposite experience. What actually happened is we raised the level of expectations, and Mississippians did what Mississippians do. They rose up and they met those increased expectations,” said Tate.
The state surpassed those expectations with the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report card showing Mississippi fourth graders moving to the top in reading and math gains over the last 12 years.
The report showed that the state scored number one in the country for achieving the highest score increases in fourth-grade reading and math. It scored number nine overall in fourth-grade reading and 16th in math scores. African American fourth graders in the state rank number three among their peers nationally in those areas, while Hispanic fourth graders rank number one in reading and number two in math.
At a time when one in five Americans is struggling with reading, according to the Policy Circle, other states are taking notice.
In 2019, Louisiana implemented similar reforms, choosing to focus on phonics and invest in training programs for principals and teachers. Reading coaches have also been put in place.
While red states like Mississippi and Louisiana are seeing great strides, blue states like California are seeing an education decline since the pandemic. According to Cal Matters, 60 percent of third graders did not read at grade level in 2024.
Reeves sees charter schools also making a difference.
“We believe in school choice,” said Reeves. “We have public charter schools and various districts around the state now, which has given a lot of kids opportunities.”
And when asked about President Trump’s plan to close the U.S. Department of Education, Reeves doesn’t think it will have any negative impact on Mississippi’s continuing improvement.
“I think what you’re going to see is as the U.S. Department of Education is slowly reduced in size, that’s actually potentially going to free up money long-term for states to be able to take those resources and invest them in things that work. I’m going to tell you, there are going to be some states that invest in some woke ideology. We’re going to invest in the basics, reading, math and those of things.”
Those are the kinds of investments he hopes will pay off in the lives of students now and in the future.
“Back in 2013, our high school graduation rate in Mississippi was 72.5%. Last year it was 89.9%. So, we have between 3-and-4,000 kids in Mississippi today that are graduating high school every year that 15 years ago would not have graduated high school. We see this as a huge boom, not only for those individual kids, but it’s a huge boom for our economy, and it gives us an opportunity to compete in the future.”
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