“And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam”
– Nina Simone
A massive surge in children’s literacy in my home state!
Perhaps more noticeable than how exciting that is is how grim the numbers look in other states: 41% of public school 4th graders in California cannot read at a basic level. Not good.
This good news doesn’t travel far and wide it seems:
I personally help run a microschool in my community, which means I talk with other people about education issues fairly often. And anecdotally, most parents I speak to have not heard of the Mississippi Miracle at all — or, if they’ve heard of Mississippi’s success, it’s as a one-off rather than the spearhead of a trend.
Why not?
“This is just a politically awkward story,” education policy expert Andy Rotherham told me. “It’s all these red states. This is a very ideological field. People struggle with calling balls and strikes.”
Vaites agreed. “I think the story is going untold for the same reason journalists ignored the successful school reopening stories in Florida and the rest of the Sun Belt in August 2020: The appetite to tell positive stories in red states is low.”
“We have been slow to learn the lessons of successful states when the politics don’t line up,” Weaver told me.