I had joked once before about making this thread, but now the time has come.
Mississippi and other Southern states seeing improvement in literacy.
In 2013, Mississippi came in 49 out of 50 states on the NAEP (Nation’s Report Card) for fourth grade reading. In 2021, that number jumped to 21 – and in 2024, it rose all the way to ninth in the nation.
All of this was achieved while Mississippi faced a slew of challenges: teacher shortages, low teacher pay, and under-resourced special education programs, to name a few – the things critics so often point to as the culprits for poor educational outcomes. And all of this was achieved too in a state where 26-28 percent of its students are living below the poverty line – the children who are historically the most underserved (and therefore the lowest performing) students in the country.
Louisiana implemented a similar reading program in tandem with Mississippi, beginning in 2012 and seeing similar results. Tennessee implemented approaches borrowing from Mississippi and Louisiana in the school year of 2018-19, and Alabama followed suit in the 2019 legislative session. Each state is seeing success in its amended reading education approach.
None of these states have ample funding; each is in the bottom half nationally for per-pupil spending. All of these states have large numbers of students below the poverty line. Some have teacher and resource shortages. And yet, by implementing a pure phonics approach to reading instruction, they’re blowing past states that have more funding and more resources but are using a less rigorous approach.
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Positive news for those regions, which if I’m not mistaken, have traditionally been at the bottom of the barrel in the United States. But it’s not good news for the nation as a whole when the overall educational attainment is dropping.
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It’s great news for teachers because now they just have to monitor the kids’ computer time to make sure they aren’t sneaking onto video games. Makes the job a whole lot easier when computers do half the work.
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It’s great news as long as educating the American populace isn’t the goal, which I guess it isn’t
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You left out the part where they are now ranked 9th nationally.
Wow, those drops in the other states must’ve been pretty incredible
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There’s no denying Mississippi has done an amazing job and deserves plenty of kudos, but you’re not wrong - the decline of a majority of the other states definitely contributed heavily to their new position.
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