How Mississippi Fixed Its Failing Schools

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1:0215 years ago, Mississippi ranked 49th in the country for student literacy. Today, they rank in the top 10 and first in the nation for low income students. And they accomplished this without increasing education spending. In this episode, we speak to two education policy experts about the changes Mississippi made to achieve what's being called the Mississippi miracle. I'm Georgia Howe with daily wire executive editor John Bickley. And this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Freedom is given to us by God not government, but its ability to endure rest with the people. We're seeing our God-given rights tested, threatened, and violated right now, and we must stop it before it's too late. Our friends at Alliance defending freedom are fighting some of the most critical legal battles of our generation, upholding biological truth, defending free speech, preserving religious liberty. But they depend on friends like you to keep up this work. Your gift today powers the very legal battles that are defining freedom's future. Every dollar you give today will be matched by a special grant while funds last.

2:07Visit joinadf.com slash wire or text wire to 838-488 to make twice the impact for freedom today. That's joinadf.com slash wire or text wire to 838-488. Joining us first to discuss the Mississippi miracle is Cory DeAngeles, research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Cory, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So the state of Mississippi's education system for many years did not have much to brag about. They were placing around 48, 49th, 50th in the rankings in reading and math, certainly on reading. But something changed about 15 years ago. And people in the education field are calling it now the Mississippi miracle. So what does the data show us and why is it being called the Mississippi miracle? Yeah, Mississippi jumped in the rankings from basically the bottom of the pack to one of the top states when it comes to reading. And they did some very basic reforms and guess what they did they didn't throw more money at the problem. What they did was they stopped passing kids through

3:09the system when they weren't even able to read. So they passed a reform in 2013 to not pass people through the system to say you got to read by the end of third grade in order to continue. And so basically they got back to basics and they also included the science of reading in their reforms as well to get towards phonics based instruction as opposed to whole word learning that's pushed by the teacher's unions and lefties. So they've really just focused on the mechanics of how to teach kids how to read. And they didn't need a lot of money to do so. And the teacher's unions basically got out of the way and families now can celebrate in Mississippi because of the Mississippi miracle. The Urban Institute actually did an analysis on all the states looking at what after you control for demographic characteristics across states like income and race. They found that Mississippi is at the at the very top of the list when it comes to reading outcomes for primary

4:14education students. And so if you look at places like California and comparison, Governor Tate Reeves has pointed out that black students in Mississippi are about two and a half times as likely relative to black kids in Gavin Newsom's California to be able to read proficiently. And so California's spending a lot more than what they're spending in Mississippi. And yet the outcomes for disadvantaged youth are doing much better in Mississippi than in California. Now I have a little background on this. I was a public school teacher in Memphis in the early 2010s. So I remember a lot of discussion about this. Some people had concerns that if you were to hold kids back, they would never end up passing. But that didn't seem to happen in Mississippi. So can you tell us what actually ended up happening when they held a firm standard and didn't allow kids to just pass if they didn't meet the standards? Yeah, you raise expectations and the students meet those expectations and then they

5:20go on through the system after they've actually met the standards. So you know, the kind of failure mentality of, oh, these kids are never going to be able to make it. That's just an excuse by the status quo to make their job as easy as possible. And it's a way to not hold the teacher and the system accountable. So when you hold the students accountable to a particular standard, now all of a sudden you're putting a spotlight on the public school system and requiring them to do a better job. So all kids have the ability to pass certain metrics. They all have the ability to read and write and do math. But the problem is when you lower expectations like we've seen in deep blue cities, you have places in Chicago where they have like 55 public schools with not a single kid proficient in math or reading. And they spend so much money. But all that does is it really hurts those kids that they're saying that they're trying to help because they're just passing them

6:24through and not working harder as the adults to raise them up to the standards. So all kids have the ability to succeed. And we shouldn't allow the status quo system to give them excuses anymore and to give themselves excuses really to fail. Now what about some of the older grades? I understand they closed the gap tremendously for a third grade. And maybe it just hasn't been long enough. Have you seen compounding positive returns for the older grades? Yeah, I want to see those results materialize. I guess it's too early to tell. But at the end of the day just because Mississippi took some great steps in the right direction for the lower grades, doesn't mean that Mississippi should just check the box and say we've already done education reform. We're done. There's still more work that Mississippi needs to do. And I'm looking at reforms like school choice where if you have more competition that gives those public school systems even a stronger incentive to do a better job. And so while these reforms from 2013 and

7:30that era really focused on the lower grades, when you implement competition, that's a rising tide that lifts all boats for all grades, whether you're in third grade or 12th grade, that gives your school an incentive to say, hey, that's a customer. I don't want them to be able to vote with their feet somewhere else. Now seeing this spectacular rise in Mississippi, you think there would be other states looking at this being maybe a little embarrassed that this is happening there and thinking what can we do in our states? Are you seeing other states scrambled to implement these same strategies? It's more of the red states, but the thing is the blue states, the politicians there are controlled by the teachers unions who want to make their jobs as easy as possible. They don't want a spotlight on the work that they're doing. And the teacher's union boss is really fight to just protect the lowest common denominator. They're not really out there to help the kids. This should be a bi-partisan reform. But the problem is you have 99% of the campaign contributions from the teachers unions going to Democrats every single cycle. So they have

8:36a lot of influence, but hopefully there's some signs of of cracks in that wall. And I'm looking to even a place like Massachusetts of all places, which is very Democrat dominated. Their legislature recently passed the policy to try to get more towards the science of learning as well with phonics based instruction, despite the the screeches that came from the teachers unions. So there's a lesson to be learned from places like Massachusetts, even where, you know, if enough Democrats lock arms and say, you know what, we're not going to we're not going to let the unions bully us anymore. They can do the right thing too. So I'm hoping that we'll have more bi-partisan momentum going forward as well. So I'm just wondering what is the hold up for implementing strategies that work? I mean, you would think teachers also want kids to be able to read. What kind of evidence do they point to to justify the methods that have had such a poor track record?

9:36Yeah, that's not based in evidence. It's just based in what they want. And, you know, their evidence may be I talked to five people who said that this was a good idea. And oh, we've always been doing this way. So it must be evidence based, which the science of reading is pretty clear. Phonics based instruction is preferred. And so I'm thankful that some of these state legislatures are kind of getting with the program and figuring this out despite the wishes of the teachers unions who want to continue the old way of doing things that hasn't been working in so many school systems. They just want more money to do less, to do to not change anything and to not be told the right way to teach kids how to read. The thing is that the unions are not concerned about getting kids to read, write, and do math. They're more concerned about their activism that they've been pushing into the classroom, getting more money from taxpayers. And if you look at their annual convention last year in Oregon, they passed all these resolutions

10:37that read more like a declaration of war on the Trump administration than anything else. And then back in 2019, they failed to pass a resolution at the NEA convention to realign themselves to being about student learning. So I think the problem is, people who are listening to this podcast might think that we're all rowing in the same direction to just try to improve education. But you have so many people in the political sphere and special interest groups that they don't have the same goals in mind. Their goal is to enrich themselves as opposed to improve academics for kids. I think you need a separate intervention to also improve mass scores as well. I'm not quite sure if there's much story on math improvements, coin-sighting with the reading improvements. But either way, it's a step in the right direction to get reading up to par. But I think this is why Mississippi needs to not get complacent and say, oh, look,

11:41where the Mississippi miracle, where at the top of the pack, it's always going to be this way. They need to continue to fight to improve just because you've taken a big step forward, doesn't mean we got to stop walking. So this is why I think school choices is really the next step forward. And Mississippi, if you look at places like Florida, they had a lot of improvement, coin-sighting with their school choice reforms where they were at the bottom of the pack on the nation's report card decades ago. They now have universal school choice. And they're now at the top handful of states on math and reading in Florida. They also don't spend a lot of money. But they also have over 600,000 kids using school choice scholarships in Florida. And the public schools have really improved. It's been a rising tide that lifts all both. So I think Mississippi being basically the only state in the South that doesn't have a meaningful school choice program, that's the next frontier. And it's a logical one as well because if you're a monopoly and you don't have an incentive to spend money wisely, you're not going to be as successful as you could be.

12:49So I think in order to improve math outcomes and also just to have families get to a place where they're sending their kid to a school that's aligned with their values, that's another piece of the puzzle as well. If you're, if your school is knocking out of the park on math and reading, but you're learning that there are 65 genders and that a man can identify as a woman and and that, you know, there's, there's just leftist propaganda in your schools. Well, math and reading is is only part of the equation. You also want to be able to sort into a school that's that's not going against everything you're trying to do at home. Well, I think the 2020s have been a major wake up period for public schools and I think people are increasingly skeptical of some of the standard model and they're ready to try something new. Corey, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I also reached out to the Mississippi State Literacy Director, Dr. Amanda Malone, for her comments on what the state has achieved and how they plan to build on that success.

13:50Dr. Malone, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. So I understand you made statewide changes, but it can be really hard to push reforms through when your rank and file are used to the way things have always been done. So how did you actually implement these changes? Well, first of all, we use legislative allocations to disperse coaches. We have literacy coaches that are disperse all over our state. And another thing that is important when we talk about those literacy coaches is that not only were they dispersed, but they focus on tier one instruction, good, hardy classroom instruction for all of our students. And so that really helps with early prevention of later on reading difficulties. Something else that we did is we implemented screeners. Our students in kindergarten through third grade take a screener three times a year. So they'll take one at the beginning of the year, middle of the year and end of the year, which really helps us focus on early identification

14:53of any possible reading difficulties. And we also found that it was very important for us to train our teachers across the state and Mississippi. So we trained them in reading science and we continue professional development and professional learning for all of our teachers throughout the state. You know, anytime change is implementing, there's going to be some pushback. And so we train our coaches to expect that our coaches provide that support for them. And they're really, they just really come alongside those teachers and they work in the classroom with them. So they're partners rather than a supervisor. They're not supervisors, but they are a partner so that we're not in an administrative position. It's really partnering with the work. Well, ensuring the work of teaching is a very different approach than dictating from above and cajoling not to mention adding extra tasks for teachers outside if they're already pretty long schedule. Now what are the next steps for Mississippi in terms of continuing the positive trajectory? Phonics is the ground level for reading, but true literacy is a much higher level skill than that. For sure, we are going to continue

15:56this move across our nation. We do know that we have some work to do in adolescent literacy. So as those ticks become more complex, students still need continued support so that they can access those ticks. So we have some things in the works for our students in fourth grade and up. Search for literacy is not just about phonics. And so one of our models that we use here in Mississippi through our training and the sites of reading is how the Scarborough's reading rope and that top part of the reading rope is that language comprehension piece where that bottom part is where the phonics falls in the word recognition, site recognition, decoding, that information is in that bottom part, but that top part of the rope continues to grow. And that top part of the rope includes vocabulary, that top part includes language structures, background knowledge, those types of things. And so those are things that continue that we continue to teach kids in our classrooms each day. We're also working with word origins. We're also working with Greek Latin roots, right? To help with

17:00understanding the word. So that process continues that's still grounded in the science. All right, well, Dr. Malone, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so much for having me. It's always a joy for me to come alongside someone that is looking at our marathon here in Mississippi and really getting the opportunity to highlight the great work that our teacher has done. That was the Mississippi State Literacy Director, Dr. Amanda Malone, and previously we spoke to Heritage Research Fellow, Cory D'Angeles. And this has been a weekend episode of Morning Wire.