The Truth About Mississippi's Education "Miracle"

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Last week, the world got its latest report card on education. It was pretty god-awful. The newest PISA results found that reading and math scores across rich countries have fallen to their lowest levels in the history of the test. In reading, the average student has lost about a year of learning since 2013 American scores are down too. Eighth grade reading scores have fallen 10 points since 2013, and roughly one-third of eighth graders now score below basic in reading the largest share in the history of that test.

Something has gone very wrong with education in America and around the world. What makes this especially frustrating is that we have spent decades trying desperately to fix our schools. There was, if you recall, no child left behind with its obsession with testing and accountability. There was Race to the Top under Obama. There was Common Core. There were charter schools and teacher evals and personalized learning and how about those laptops in every classroom? It's not as if all of these ideas failed everywhere. Some of them worked in some places, but none have become the national breakthroughs that its champions promised. American education reform sometimes feels like a scrap heap of ideas that reformers once claimed to be silver bullets.

But then, there's Mississippi. In 2000, Mississippi was one of the poorest states in America, with some of the worst schools in America. But in the last 25 years, Mississippi's reading and math scores have soared. Today, adjusted for demographics, Mississippi students are among the best performers in the country. This transformation is sometimes called the Mississippi miracle. I imagine that many of you have read about this in the news or heard about it in podcasts. But today's guest objects to that word, miracle. Rachel Canter is a long time Mississippi education reformer and the author of a fascinating new report called Inside the Mississippi Marathon. In it, she writes that our narrow understanding of Mississippi story is wrong. The state's success was neither sudden nor miraculous. It was the result of nearly two decades of policy changes, bureaucratic reforms, teacher training, accountability, and unusually relentless implementation. As other states now rush to copy the most famous parts of the Mississippi model, she thinks they are at risk of severely understanding why it worked in the first place.

So today, why is education getting worse just about everywhere? Well, one of America's poorest states just got dramatically better.

I'm Derek Thompson.

And reading scores have been declining for roughly a decade. The latest NAEP results show that eighth grade reading is at historic lows, and twelfth grade reading and math are at their lowest level in decades. What the hell is happening in American education?

Rachel Canter (4:38)

Yeah, so a lot of people have been talking about our decline in the last couple of years in the context of COVID, where we did see schools close, and we saw kids go home and not learn very much over the course of that year. And then we saw a decline afterwards. But really this decline started before COVID. We saw stagnation and then decline. And there's been a lot of speculation as to why our students are going in the wrong direction.

But it's a really worrisome trend, and it is across the United States, we see it in every different type of community, that students are learning less and no less now than they did a decade ago.

Derek Thompson (5:19)

And not just the United States, there were a new piece of results just last week that showed that reading and math scores across rich countries in the OECD have reached their lowest levels in the history of that test, the modern history of that test.