The "Mississippi Miracle" Continues

Mississippi is the only state to raise the floor in 4th grade reading

When The 74 asked me to look into performance gaps in reading, the results just about made me want to throw up. Here’s a summary of what I found:

At the national level, in fourth grade reading, the scores of the top 10% of students fell 0.5 points from 2013-24. Meanwhile, the scores of the bottom 10% fell 15 points.

….For this group, 40 states saw a decline of 10 points or more, 16 saw declines of 20 points or more and two states — Delaware and Maryland — had declines of more than 30 (!) points.

But there was one state that bucked this trend: Mississippi. Their results are so remarkable that it’s worth diving in a bit more. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country, and it spends less on its schools than all but three states. Yet, its Black students rank third nationally, and its low-income kids outperform those in every other state.

But Mississippi is also the only state that has managed to raise both the floor and the ceiling in 4th grade reading. The chart below is my attempt to show this visually. From left to right it shows the change in each state’s scores from 2013 to 2024 among high-performing students (the 90th percentile in each state). And from top to bottom it shows the change in scores at the other end, the 10th percentile in each state.

As you can see, there are 25 states on the right side of the graph, meaning about half the states improved the scores for their higher-performing students.

But there was only one state that improved reading scores for low-performing students: Mississippi. It’s the clear outlier. Not only was it the only state to raise the scores of its lowest-performers, and it was also the only state to see improvements across all performance levels.

You can also see somewhat of a pattern among the results. There’s a moderately strong correlation (of 0.67) between the gains among low- and high-performing students.

But the bottom of the graph is just disgustingly bad. Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, Delaware, and Maryland all saw declines of 25 points or more among their low-performing students. Education leaders in those states should all be taking a hard look at what exactly has gone wrong over the last decade for students to fall so far so fast.

Meanwhile, everyone else should be looking at what Mississippi has done. In my piece for The 74, I broke down some of those changes in more depth.