Mississippi’s reading revolution

Students at an elementary school in Jackson, Mississippi. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Today, only 35% of fourth graders in the United States can read at grade level. Studies show that nine out of 10 high school dropouts were struggling readers in third grade. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 70% of the country’s prison population can’t read above a fourth grade level.

In 2013, Mississippi was ranked 49th out of 50 states in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Known as the Nation’s Report Card, the NAEP was first given in 1969, and Mississippi routinely sat near or at the bottom of national rankings.  Most of Mississippi’s children were not reading at their grade level, but for social reasons they were nevertheless promoted to the next grade, falling further behind year after year.

It is no secret that Mississippi struggles with poverty and deeply rooted racial gaps in test scores, college degree attainment, and wages. More than a quarter of Mississippi’s children live in poverty, and 35% have parents who lack secure employment.

Despite these deficiencies, in the last decade, Mississippi’s school-age population has made remarkable progress in its reading skills. Thanks to a seminal law passed in 2013 and to the sustained commitment of state officials and educators ever since, Mississippi has climbed from 49th to 21st in the NAEP’s ranking. Students in the state are now scoring slightly above the national average in reading skills, and impoverished students there outperform similarly disadvantaged students in many other states.

The ability to read becomes the ability to learn, to solve problems, to work – and, ultimately, to vote.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of reading in a child’s development. The ability to read becomes the ability to learn, to solve problems, to work – and, ultimately, to vote. Literacy unlocks opportunity, prosperity, and freedom. Children who can read proficiently as third graders typically go on to graduate from high school, setting themselves up to access higher-wage jobs over their lifetime. Thanks to Mississippi’s progress in this area, its students are now vastly better prepared for the next steps in their schooling and in life.

As significant as Mississippi’s educational improvements are, the sustained effort of so many adults across the state is perhaps just as striking. Anyone who has attempted to change policy and practice in big, complex systems can appreciate the resistance and inertia that typically blocks or slows progress. The improvement in Mississippi’s reading scores proves two things: All children can learn and succeed when given the opportunity, and change is possible in big bureaucratic systems.

Those factors help explain why other states are now paying attention to Mississippi’s success, passing laws and changing policy as they seek similar improvements in student outcomes. While Mississippi’s accomplishment was grounded in smart policy, it required much more than just a legislative victory. Mississippi’s leaders insisted that all schools use a research-based approach to reading instruction. They built a policy that combined accountability and support in unprecedented ways. They built an infrastructure of support, designed for the long haul. They had a group of leaders committed to the effort who prioritized transparency and communication with their stakeholders.

What makes Mississippi’s progress all the more remarkable is that its demographics have not changed; too many of its children still live in poverty. The state has also not dramatically increased its spending on public education. Instead, what has changed is the way Mississippi teaches reading and supervises literacy education. Among the innovations, the state has developed better screening methods to diagnose reading problems at an earlier age, embraced research-based curricula and teaching methods, and begun intervening more swiftly to support struggling students. In the last decade, the state figured out how to combine accountability and support while building infrastructure designed for the long haul. Doing so wasn’t easy; it took an amalgamation of several key elements to work. Mississippi passed legislation focused on research and data-driven methodology, ensured its leaders were committed to reform, and built strong support infrastructure to implement the changes. Other states still struggling in this area would be wise to take note.

Phil Bryant, governor of Mississippi, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California in April 2019. (Photo by Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Support and accountability

Mississippi’s first step was passing strong, comprehensive legislation focused on improving student literacy levels. In 2013, then-Gov. Phil Bryant opened the state’s legislative session with a clear focus on education. Mississippi passed several education laws that year, but the cornerstone of the governor’s agenda was the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA), which included several intertwined elements designed to fundamentally transform how reading is taught in Mississippi.

The LBPA is a sophisticated and well-crafted law that creates layers of support and accountability by investing in educators’ understanding of the new teaching methods, improving instruction with educator coaching, and clearly measuring student progress.

The LBPA requires the use of research-based instruction and materials in classrooms, and it dictates that as part of their certification, teacher candidates must pass a foundational reading test grounded in the science of reading to ensure they have the knowledge and skill to teach all students to read. The LBPA also requires the use of better screeners deployed in the early grades to help teachers more quickly identify students with reading problems, paving the way for more effective intervention and support at a younger age.

In addition, the LBPA provides coaches for the state’s most struggling schools. These coaches supply ongoing support in classrooms to teachers and principals as they implement new approaches and track student progress.

The most well-known element of the law is a rule making it mandatory that any third grade student who is not reading at grade level at the end of the school year will have to repeat the grade. If these children were promoted to fourth grade, as is the custom in most states, they would likely struggle academically; holding them back allows for additional intervention and support. While the rule may sound harsh and stigmatizing, it establishes a clear and long process that must be followed before a child is retained. The diagnostic tests help flag struggling students earlier, allowing the schools to provide them targeted interventions to get them on track. Children are given several opportunities to pass the end-of-year exam, and in special cases, some are exempted from being held back.

Students held back are not forced to sit through another year of the same thing, which they obviously don’t need.

Retention in Mississippi is clearly labeled to educators and parents as an intervention tool, not a punishment. Students held back are not forced to sit through another year of the same thing, which they obviously don’t need. Instead, they are given specific support to address the gaps in their progress. Retained students are assigned specific reading plans required by the LBPA that address each child’s skill gaps. When it was first implemented, many parents fought against the so-called third grade gate, arguing that retention would hurt their kids’ mental health more than promotion would help their education. But Bryant and state leaders held firm, convinced that their new approach would benefit students. (Bryant is dyslexic himself, and he repeated third grade, thanks to a teacher who recognized his struggles and helped him get on track – an experience that fueled his commitment to helping students in similar positions.)

Mississippi’s faith in the new approach would soon be validated by data. A recent study from Boston University shows that the students held back in third grade ended up with higher reading scores in sixth grade than the students who passed the third grade test but were close to the cutoff score. Retained Black and Latino students in particular showed significant progress. Despite the concerns of the LBPA’s critics, retained students were not absent more often than their peers, and they were not identified as needing special education more often than their peers. As the study shows, the retention-as-intervention strategy helps struggling readers become successful readers.

Driven by research

Another key element of Mississippi’s success is ensuring that educators are teaching reading correctly. For decades now, it’s been clear that explicit, systemic reading instruction is the best way to teach children how to read. A critical aspect of this method is focusing at very early ages on letters and sounds, and how those sounds combine – such as “ch” or “st,” for example. A strong foundation in the relationships between sounds and letters allows students to develop other key skills – such as comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency – much more easily.

The “science of reading,” as this approach is called, is sometimes described as having a singular focus on phonics, but that is misleading. The science of reading actually includes five elements: phonics (the relationship between letters and sounds, described in the paragraph above), phonemic awareness (the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in words), fluency (the ability to read accurately and quickly), vocabulary (the meaning and context of words), and comprehension (a student’s ability to make meaning of what they read). Two significant reports serve as the foundation for the science of reading: a National Academy of Sciences report from 1998 called “Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children” and a National Reading Panel Report, released in 2000, that summarizes the five elements noted above.

Despite the long-standing existence of strong evidence supporting the science of learning, however, far too many American students are still subjected to reading instruction based on what’s called the “balanced literacy” approach. That’s despite the fact that, as the journalist Emily Hanford has documented, balanced literacy is not grounded in research – and is ineffective for many students.

President George W. Bush (R) holds the Nation's Report Card presented by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. in October 2005. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Balanced literacy emerged in the 1990s after many decades of debate about whether children learn to read by using memorization and context clues (whole language) or by learning phonics. As the limitations of the whole language approach emerged, more schools began moving toward balanced literacy – an approach that ostensibly combines both phonics and whole language. Balanced literacy is centered on the idea that children need more exposure to books and less explicit instruction. That means that teachers applying balanced literacy do not focus on how letters and sounds work together to create words. Instead, they guide their students to guess the meaning of words based on pictures, repetitive sentence structure, and context clues.

Balanced-literacy programs were beloved by many teachers – even though they meant many of them were trained incorrectly.

Two popular balanced literacy reading programs used in many districts around the country, Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell, were created by faculty at two research universities (Lucy Calkins at Columbia University and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell at Ohio State). That affiliation implied high quality and trustworthiness, despite the misalignment with current research.

Those programs also created robust training experiences that were beloved by many teachers. Yet the programs meant that many current teachers have been trained incorrectly – and that many educators are unaware of this shortcoming. Despite the mounting evidence highlighting problems with balanced literacy, it remains widely used in the United States today, thanks to the diffuse nature of education governance. The United States doesn’t have national educational standards. School districts typically enjoy great autonomy in determining curricula, instruction, and interventions for their students – even though that means that high-quality research can be slow to translate down to schools and classrooms.

That was the case in Mississippi, where, prior to 2013, many districts used variations of balanced literacy. The LBPA clarified that students must receive instruction grounded in the science of reading. Then the state Department of Education worked to ensure that teachers were given the needed support to strengthen classroom instruction. One of the most effective tools was the introduction of reading coaches, who were deployed by the state Department of Education across Mississippi to schools with the most struggling readers. These coaches, trained in and experienced with applying the science of reading, work hand in hand with principals and teachers. Each coach spends two to three days a week in a school for an entire school year, observing, training, and providing feedback. Teachers and principals typically get professional learning in one-off training sessions of varying quality and relevance. But research has shown that embedding professional development in the classroom, as Mississippi did, is among the most effective ways to support educator development. It was another instance of the state following the research, not conventional wisdom, to achieve the best results.

Infrastructure and champions matter

As the examples above imply, Mississippi’s leaders recognized that it’s not enough to pass good reform legislation; if you want the changes to stick, you also need to create supportive infrastructure. To that end, after the LBPA was passed, Carey Wright – then the newly appointed State Superintendent of Education – created a group within the Mississippi Department of Education to help schools make the big shifts that the legislation required. State agencies typically focus on compliance, not direct support. Wright and her literacy team, led by Kymyona Burk, changed that, shifting the emphasis of their work to helping educators understand the law and how to implement it day to day.

Wright focused on infusing clear communications into all their programmatic efforts to ensure that all the stakeholders understood the expectations and support available. Key messages and progress over time were repeated in presentations, press releases, and interviews. One example is the LBPA Implementation Guide, created by the literacy team, which details in accessible language precisely what the law dictates, including charts of the roles and responsibilities for putting it into practice, breaking down what needs to happen at the state, district, school, and individual teacher level.

The state also gave its teachers and principals access to a training program called LETRS. The program is designed to help educators learn the science of reading in both theory and practice so they can effectively follow it with their students. The state also included teacher-prep faculty in its training, in order to ensure that newly minted teachers arrived in classrooms with the right background.

Even with these measures in place, Mississippi’s success would not have been possible without strong community leaders.

Even with all these measures in place, Mississippi’s success would still not have been possible without the help of strong community leaders. In 2000, Jim Barksdale, a Mississippi native who went on to become CEO of Netscape, made a $100 million gift to launch the Barksdale Reading Institute. The institute laid the important groundwork that Bryant built on with the LBPA with its efforts in expanding faculties’ knowledge of the science of reading and building partnerships with teacher training programs in the state.

Burk described to me the important role that the “big three” – the governor, the legislature, and the state superintendent – played in moving from policy to the effect on students. The legislature got on board with the initial law and has provided follow-up funding in the decade since. Wright, who recently retired as the State Superintendent, reorganized her state agency to create the capacity and resources to support the state’s educators. When requesting follow-up funding from the legislature, she regularly reported on the return on investment of the public money allocated to the initiative.

The literacy coaches, meanwhile, worked shoulder to shoulder with teachers and principals around the state, helping them buy into the effort. The state Board of Education also supported the work and consulted with the Department of Education to structure the law in ways that the department could effectively implement. It took a strong ecosystem of leaders from the state capital to school campuses to allow Mississippi to meaningfully improve its reading outcomes for its children.

Former Netscape CEO James Barksdale and his wife, Sally, at Lee Elementary, a school benefiting from couple's $100 million endowment to advance literacy in their home state. (Photo by Steve Liss/Getty Images)

Follow the leader

More than 20 states now have a law or policy in place designed to improve reading outcomes, and others are debating creating the same. Some states have banned poor practices or required the use of high-quality curricula, but they haven’t included the kind of robust commitment to educator capacity that Mississippi did with its investments in coaching and training. Other states have considered adopting Mississippi’s policy on third grade retention but have not established that the repeated year will be structured in a way that ensures kids get what they need.

Mississippi’s example shows that piecemeal approaches may look good on the surface but are unlikely to meaningfully move the needle on student outcomes. Instead, those seeking to build strong state polices should consider the capacity necessary to support the changes their new laws require by investing in educator knowledge and better curricula, accountability measures to ensure that changes occur, and the commitment to keep implementing the changes over time.

Burk, now a Senior Policy Fellow at ExcelinEd, a national education policy organization, frequently speaks and writes about the work she led in Mississippi. In a recent presentation to other policymakers, she highlighted three elements she thought were essential for her state’s success. First, close the gap between what people know and what they do. Second, don’t expect results overnight, but focus instead on implementing changes consistently and comprehensively over time. And third, make room for what matters and subtract what does not.

A few years back, no one expected much from Mississippi. Yet today, it is hailed as proof that a state really can substantially improve the education of its children. Mississippi’s leaders did not wait until they had solutions to big, systemic challenges like poverty or racism; instead, they focused on what they could change – children’s ability to read – knowing that doing so would go a long way to addressing these other ills. And in the process, Mississippi’s leaders showed the rest of the country that all children can learn and succeed – regardless of their circumstances – when adults commit to following the research, implementing good policy, supporting educators, and measuring progress in a meaningful way. Every child everywhere deserves that.