Below is an opinion column by Laurie Todd-Smith:
Moving up forty places in education rankings in a decade, in one of the poorest states in America, while most of the country was moving backward, meets the standard of a miracle. It was hard work. That is exactly why it qualifies.
In 2013, if you wanted to find the worst place in America to learn to read, you came here. Mississippi ranked 49th in the nation in fourth grade reading. Seventy-eight percent of our fourth graders could not read proficiently. We had stopped being embarrassed by it. It was just the weather.
Eleven years later, Mississippi’s fourth graders rank ninth in the country. When the Urban Institute adjusted the 2024 scores for poverty and demographics, so you are comparing children to children in similar circumstances, Mississippi came out first. Not first in the South. First in the United States, in fourth grade reading and math.
The education world calls it the Mississippi Miracle, and some people here object to the word, because what happened was the result of hard work. Look up the word. A miracle is an extraordinary event that defies expectations and cannot easily be explained by ordinary means. Moving up forty places in a decade, in one of the poorest states in America, while most of the country was moving backward, meets that standard. It was hard work. That is exactly why it qualifies. I was in the room, and I can tell you what the miracle was made of. It was a decision, and then the same decision made again every year for a decade, usually by people who could have made an easier one.
I had spent twenty years in and around classrooms, first as a public school teacher, before I ever walked into the Governor’s office. I taught in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mississippi. I ran child care centers. I ran Mississippi Building Blocks for the Barksdale Reading Institute and sat in Delta classrooms with six year olds who had been taught to read the way most of America taught reading for a generation. Get stuck on a word? Look at the picture. Guess. What makes sense? I had a second grader who could read every word in her book, as long as the pictures were there. Put the word ship on a card with no picture and she had nothing. We had taught her to perform reading. We had not taught her to read.
That child was not broken. Her teachers were not lazy. The method was the problem.
The science of how children learn to read has been settled for a long time. The brain is not wired for it. Every child has to be taught the code that turns sounds into letters and letters into words, and then taught the vocabulary and knowledge to understand what the words mean. The National Reading Panel said so in 2000. Most states nodded and kept doing what they were doing.
Mississippi stopped nodding. In 2013, Governor Phil Bryant, who had struggled to read as a boy in Mrs. Henley’s class and never forgot it, decided to spend his political capital on third graders. The Legislature passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. I was the Governor’s education advisor, and the bill was my assignment. My job was to bring him what the research said would work for children, not what would be easiest to pass. He took the hard version.
Most of what has been written about Mississippi tells you what the law did. It retrained 19,000 teachers in the science of reading, 160 hours each. It put literacy coaches in the schools that needed them most. It screened every child from the first weeks of kindergarten, so a struggling reader was found in September instead of April of third grade. And it said that a child who could not read would not be sent on to fourth grade to fail quietly. All of that mattered. What does not get said enough is what came after, because passing the law turned out to be the easy part.
The gate was the fight, and the fight did not end when the Governor signed the bill. That is the part other states get wrong. They think the hard day is the vote. The hard day is every day after it.
The headlines predicted disaster. Opponents said 28 percent of our third graders would be held back, that classrooms would fill with eight year olds labeled failures. No child was ever held back on one test on one day, and retention was always the last resort, after years of intervention and several chances to pass. The first year, the retention rate was about eight percent, not 28. And a Boston University study of that first group found that the children who were held back and caught by that system went on to outscore their peers in sixth grade by a margin three times larger than Florida’s version of the same law produced. Mississippi did not just hold children back. It held them back into a system built to catch them.
None of that would have survived without people willing to be unpopular on a schedule. Every legislative session brought a bill to delay the gate, soften it, or carve out exceptions, and every year Speaker Philip Gunn and Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves kept those bills from going anywhere. Senator Gray Tollison, who championed the law in the Senate, came back the very next year and asked for more coaches and a kindergarten readiness test, because passing a law and funding it are two different votes. The experts at the Department of Education who inherited the law ran it exactly as written, which is rarer than it sounds. The State Board of Education later raised the bar children had to clear rather than lowering it, when lowering it would have made everyone’s numbers look better. Our universities retrained the professors who teach future teachers, and required them to pass a reading test themselves to keep teaching the course. When Governor Bryant left office, Governor Reeves, who had carried the law through the Senate in 2013, kept the money flowing and the law intact.
And the credit for the results belongs most of all to the people who were never in the room when the law was written. Teachers who had been in the classroom twenty years sat in training on Saturdays and let someone tell them there was a better way, and then went back Monday and did it. Coaches drove two hours to sit beside them. Parents who had been told for years that their child was fine got a hard, honest phone call instead, and most of them did not get angry. They showed up. They read at the kitchen table. They asked what else they could do. A law can require a screener. It cannot require a mother to care, and in Mississippi it never had to. Put the governor, the legislature, the department, the teachers, and the parents together, each one refusing to quit, and that is the whole miracle. There is no other ingredient.
A reform that cannot survive a change of administration is not a reform. It is a press release.
The results are not a rounding error. In 2025, 85 percent of Mississippi third graders passed the reading gate. Mississippi posted the largest reading and math gains in the nation after 2013. Our KIDS COUNT education ranking climbed from 48th to 16th. More than 40 states have since passed science of reading laws, and governors from both parties now fly to Jackson to ask how we did it.
Some of them will get it right and some will not, and the difference is rarely the words in the statute. Oklahoma passed a third grade gate the same year we did, then loosened it, then removed it, then put it back. You cannot do this halfway. The states that are getting results trained every teacher, screened every child, funded the coaches year after year, and kept their nerve when the first hard year came and the second one and the fifth.
On Tuesday morning in Oxford, the Center for Excellence in Literacy Instruction at Ole Miss is bringing the people who actually did this into one room, and they will tell the story. The Governor. The senator who championed the bill and came back for more. The woman who built the training. A literacy coach. And a third grader from Lafayette County who is going to stand up and read to a room of 150 adults, because he can. It is free, and it is open to anyone who has a child, teaches a child, or votes.
I will be there in my personal capacity, as a teacher who got to watch her state do the hardest thing in education, which is to change what happens between a teacher and a child in a classroom, one word at a time, and then refuse to stop.
My favorite line about all of this hangs on a plaque. It is amazing what you can accomplish when nobody cares who gets the credit. Mississippi has a lot of people who deserve credit for this, most of them teachers, and almost none of them are asking for it. They would rather you did what they did.
Mississippi is ninth. It can be first. It started with a decision. It depends on making it again next year. Mississippi, keep going.
Laurie Todd-Smith
Laurie Todd-Smith, Ph.D., has spent 35 years as a classroom teacher, child care director, researcher, and education policy leader. She served as education and workforce advisor to Governor Phil Bryant when the 2013 reading law was passed, and later led the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor and the federal Head Start and child care programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. She and Governor Bryant are the authors of Unveiling the Mississippi Miracle, at TheMississippiMiracle.com. She writes in her personal capacity.
-- Article credit to Laurie Todd-Smith for the Magnolia Tribune --
