A year or so ago, I met my friend’s mother for the first time at a wedding. She told me that she was Mississippi born and raised, but that after her kids were born she and her husband decided to move to North Carolina. Turns out the whole extended family was from Mississippi, still lives there, still loves it there.

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“Because we had little kids, and the schools were terrible.”

Her answer didn’t surprise me – I’d heard about Mississippi’s bad schools before. But while its schools were terrible enough to induce a cross-country move when her kids (now in their mid-twenties) were young, that’s no longer the case. 

Mississippi has become an educational role model, a shining example of what’s possible inside public schools. It’s a turnaround story no one expected.

Mississippi is, on average, a state that people leave. It has the fourth-lowest in-migration rate in the country (only Louisiana, Michigan, and Ohio have fewer transplants from other states), while 36 percent of its young people move out-of-state. On net, its population is shrinking. Between 2020 and 2024, 16,000 more Mississippi residents died than were born.

Mississippi is a state known for its poverty, its unreliable infrastructure, and its substandard health care system – as well as its poor overall public health. It leads the nation in pregnancy-related deaths and high infant mortality rates. Its capital city, Jackson, has contamination issues with its water supply (with an annual average of 55 breaks per 100 miles of water line, nearly four times the national safety limit of 15). Mississippi consistently comes in as the poorest state in the country, with one in four Mississippi children living below the poverty line.

It’s not a state most Americans look to as a role model.

But over the past fifteen years, this unassuming Deep South state has been quietly pulling off one of the most impressive feats in American public education: while literacy rates around the nation have been falling, Mississippi’s have been steadily rising.

Historically, Mississippi’s school system performed about as well as its health care system and its economy: that is, near the bottom in the national rankings. For years, Mississippi ranked 50 out of 50 in the country for K-12 education. But all that changed in 2013, when Mississippi implemented the Literacy-Based Promotion and embraced the science of reading, overhauling its K-3 literacy curriculum and its teacher training.

Since 2013, Mississippi’s overall K-12 achievement scores have improved significantly. 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.

All these challenges make Mississippi’s achievements more impressive, and the conclusion more irrefutable: reading science works. A measured, methodical, science-driven approach to teaching literacy results in – you guessed it – unprecedented levels of literacy.

That should not be a headline. And yet it is, printed and reprinted all over the country, colloquially referred to as “the Mississippi Miracle” – because the comeback story is so impressive, so unprecedented, so unexpected.

And yet, the strange thing isn’t that one of the poorest and most under-resourced states in the country implemented this – the strange thing is that it’s so rare as to be noteworthy.

Mississippi’s turnaround story is, as most things in life, a story of cause and effect – and in this case, the causes are quite few: a scientific approach to reading, a teacher education program consistent with that scientific approach, early identification and intensive intervention for students who are struggling, and a commitment to honoring the integrity of grade level standards (if a child isn’t reading on grade level, they don’t get advanced to third grade).

The “scientific approach to reading” in question is – no surprise – teaching via phonics, the time-tested approach to literacy that has worked for centuries, but which modern public schools seem strangely allergic to.

The simplest headline summary of the Mississippi Miracle is that Mississippi started teaching its kids to read using phonics – and stopped advancing kids who hadn’t learned the material. Their literacy scores turned around seemingly overnight. But of course, the story is more complicated than that.

Mississippi’s comeback started all the way back in 2000, in the private sector, when corporate executive and philanthropist Jim Barksdale donated $100m to launch the Barksdale Reading Institute, a nonprofit intended to turn around Mississippi’s poor literacy rates. Barksdale, whose résumé included serving as the COO of FedEx, the CEO of AT&T, and the CEO of Netscape, was deeply committed to his home state of Mississippi and deeply concerned about the literacy rates in its schools.

He saw the literacy crisis for what it is: the deficit of a fundamental life skill, with lasting implications for the entire life trajectory of children robbed of the chance to learn to read.

As sociology professor Beth Hess wrote to The New York Times after Barksdale’s donation was announced (after praising Barksdale himself): “It is disturbing that the state of Mississippi will be rewarded for its continuing failure to tax its citizens fairly and to allocate enough money to educate students, especially in predominantly black districts. This should have been a public rather than private responsibility.”

Yet as is so often the case, it was private sector efforts that led to change, unfettered by bureaucracy and untethered from the slow-moving weight of the public sector machine.

The Barksdale Reading Institute tackled the reading crisis at every level: teaching reading instruction inside Mississippi’s teachers’ colleges, engaging with parents and early childhood programs (like Head Start), and educating teachers on teaching phonics.

In 2013, Mississippi’s public sector followed suit, implementing two critical steps: passing a law that required all third graders to pass a “reading gate” assessment to advance to fourth grade, and appointing Casey Wright as Mississippi’s superintendent of education, who in the words of journalist Holly Korbey, “reorganized the entire education department to focus on literacy and more rigorous standards.”

Under the stewardship of Wright, Mississippi trained over 19,000 of its teachers in teaching phonics using the science-backed instructional program LETRS. In the early days of the literacy push, the state focused more on teacher training than on curriculum, but in 2016 it expanded its efforts to promote the use of curricula it felt best supported literacy training.

Compared with a full curriculum overhaul, the third-grade reading gate might sound like a small change, but it’s a critically important piece of the puzzle. Across the country, grade advancement is largely treated as a product of age, not of academic ability. Students with “failing grades” can be held back (and often are), but a passing grade is a low bar: a “D,” often considered a passing grade, usually means proficiency of 60 percent, meaning a child can miss 40 percent of the third-grade material and still advance to fourth grade.

The third-grade reading assessment ensures that children aren’t advancing to harder material with large gaps in their knowledge, that they’re set up with the skills they need to succeed, rather than being thrown in the deep end to fail. It’s also an important milestone: third-grade reading proficiency is a leading indicator of long-term academic success, with poor third-grade readers far more likely to drop out of high school. And as evidenced by Mississippi’s rising math scores (even though most of its energy is being directed toward literacy), the ability to read correlates with better performance across all subjects.

All this effort, unsurprisingly, led to swift and measurable results. Not only did Mississippi come in ninth in the nation in fourth-grade reading in 2025, but it scores even higher when weighted for demographic factors like poverty.

None of this should be scientifically surprising (because obviously teaching kids to read using the scientifically backed approach was going to work). But it’s politically shocking because, despite ample research, schools across the country resist teaching students to read using phonics, and their literacy rates flounder as a result.

Other states across the South (coined by Karen Vaites as the “Southern Surge states”) have followed Mississippi’s lead. 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.

In the words of writer Kelsey Piper, “illiteracy is a policy choice.” We know that teaching reading via phonics works. We know how to do it. And, thanks to Mississippi, we know it can be effective even with a limited budget and limited staff. 

Thanks to Jim Barksdale, we know that private sector pushes toward better policy can be effective. And thanks to states using non-phonics literacy approaches (and whose test scores are falling while Mississippi’s are rising), we know what not to do, too. 

The challenge now is to stop doing what doesn’t work, and start moving toward what does – not just in Mississippi and the Southern Surge states, but all across the country.