Mississippi leads the nation. That’s not a typographical error. And it’s not just a gotcha phrase, preparing the reader for learning that Mississippi leads the nation on all sorts of negative things.
Once upon a time, that was true, and in some respects it still is. Mississippi has the lowest or nearly the lowest income levels of any state.
It’s been lagging in population growth over the last decade and in the longer term. Mississippi topped the 2 million mark in 1930, and it got within 18,000 of the 3 million mark in 2018, 88 years later, but it has fallen by 55,000 since.
Mississippi has long been the state with the highest percentage of Black residents, and Black people have had, on average, lower incomes and educational achievement by various measures than others.
Thus, not much notice was taken in 2011, nearly a decade after passage of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, when Mississippi finished dead last in the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading and math taken by fourth and eighth grade students. Louisiana, with the second-highest Black population percentage, ranked 49th.
The 2024 NAEP tests produced some starkly different results. Mississippi jumped to No. 14 in fourth grade math and No. 9 in fourth grade reading. And when the Urban Institute adjusted the scores for various poverty measures, thus measuring students in one state with those in another of the same level of economic status, Mississippi ranked No. 1 in both fourth grade reading and fourth grade math.
Louisiana ranked No. 2 and Florida No. 3 in adjusted fourth grade reading, and Florida, Texas and Louisiana ranked just behind Mississippi in fourth grade math.
On the eighth grade tests, Mississippi fell in the lower half of states in unadjusted reading and math scores. However, in the Urban Institute’s adjusted scores, Mississippi ranked fourth in reading, behind Massachusetts – whose unadjusted NAEP scores typically lead the nation – Louisiana and Georgia. And on adjusted eighth grade math scores, Mississippi ranked first.
These astonishing numbers represent substantial and, so far as I know, entirely unpredicted progress in Mississippi, and just slightly less in Louisiana. They stand in vivid contrast to the national trend, as lengthy school shutdowns produced by powerful teacher unions in more “progressive” states resulted in sharply diminished learning and lower test scores.
The watering down of NCLB standards in the bipartisan 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act has also produced less proficiency in many states. “States like New York and Washington, with powerful teachers’ unions,” RealClearInvestigation’s Vince Bielski writes, have been “tamping down rigor, such as testing for graduation and accelerated programs, to achieve ‘equity’ for disadvantaged students.”
In contrast, “Southern states have seized on a political environment that allows them to do the things that matter,” Frederick Hess, American Enterprise Institute education policy studies director, writes. “To drive improvement, it’s easier if you have the politics of Mississippi than the politics of Massachusetts.”
As a result, Black and low-income pupils are getting a better education in Deep South states such as Mississippi and Louisiana than in the “progressive” big cities of the North.
What is Mississippi doing right? According to The 74’s Chad Aldeman, over the last decade, it has deployed literacy coaches to low-performing schools, prompted schools to screen pupils early for reading problems, and required holding back third graders not reaching reading proficiency.
Schools use “science of reading” phonics-based curricula, which require repetitive drills that education school professors and many teachers loathe but young children thrive on. Parents are notified when their children are lagging and mobilized to help.
One gets the sense of group mobilization to encourage constructive learning rather than fostering grievance – something like the culture of mutual reinforcement that has produced so many successful Black STEM graduates at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Meyerhoff program.
Three generations ago, from 1940 to 1965, millions of Black people moved from places such as the Mississippi Delta to “the promised land” of cities such as Chicago. Today, young Black people are receiving better educations in Mississippi than they are in Chicago, whose mayor, Brandon Johnson, is a former teachers union organizer.
Johnson has the city government borrowing to pay for current spending on a contract with raises for teachers and administrators for a school system that parents have fled, with enrollment down 20% over the past decade. His fellow Democrats seem little bothered by this doubling down on a failed system. Former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s 2024 platform talked about preschool and college loan forgiveness but said nothing about K-12 public schools.
Those interested in doing so, and improving the life chances of disadvantaged children, need to look to Mississippi and to other mostly Republican-run states in the South, which have shown the nation the way without substantial spending increases.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, “Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America’s Revolutionary Leaders,” is now available.
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