The Mississippi ‘Miracle’ – Mirage or Model?

Correlation is not causation.

Mississippi was ranked 49th in fourth-grade reading nearly a decade ago – now it’s in the top ten, a feat many pundits and experts have giddily dubbed a “miracle,” calling it a model for other schools. Some people refuse to believe such gains could happen without gaming the system because most education “miracles” in the past have been fraudulent. Now, a recent article provides evidence suggesting Mississippi’s literacy improvements might be more mirage than miracle.

The Mississippi ‘Model’

Mississippi implemented the Literacy Based Promotion Act in 2013 and reoriented its educational system toward the “science of reading,” adopting a phonics-based curriculum with additional training for teachers. A new policy was also enacted: Students who fail to pass a reading test at the end of their third-grade year are held back. This is the part where so many people have raised a red flag. Most recently, three credentialed academics published an article in Significance magazine arguing that most – if not all – of Mississippi’s reading gains result from its retention policy.

“It is a fact of arithmetic,” explained the authors, “that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores (what is technically called ‘left truncation of the score distribution’).” They crunched the numbers and discovered that the percentage of Mississippi’s improvements matched what they would be if it had excluded the bottom 10% of students, which is about the same as the state’s retention rate. So, miracle voided, right?

Not exactly – the authors fail to mention one key factor. It’s not as if the students who are held back for a year or two just vanish from the face of the earth and never advance to the next grade. They eventually move up and take the fourth-grade test, the standard measure for whether these pupils are improving. The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show Mississippi fourth graders are tied nationally for eighth place in reading, far better than in 2013, when the state was nearly dead last. However, rankings for eighth-grade scores between 2013 and 2024 only changed from 50 to 41. So the pupils are showing great gains in fourth grade, but not holding onto them.

Errors and Omissions

It’s difficult to determine whether Mississippi’s literacy program is the shining star so many people want it to be. Freddie deBoer, author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, suggests we should be highly skeptical about Mississippi’s literacy gains. In a Substack essay, deBoer points to several previous education “miracles” in other states that later turned out to be manufactured in some way. He highlights the so-called “Texas miracle” from nearly a quarter century ago, which investigations later revealed was the result of “selection bias through widespread underreporting of dropouts, ‘disappeared’ struggling students, and data manipulation.” Some dropouts “were given phony classifications such as having transferred or moved into GED programs.” A high school in Houston reported zero dropouts in 2001-2002 despite hundreds of students leaving the school. “Abuse of special education exemptions for testing/accountability was rampant, with the number of students in some districts doubling between 1994 and 1998.” The state consistently misinterpreted its standardized tests, too, “thanks to a complete failure to account for measurement error,” which also boosted its scores.

The role of special education should not be dismissed. Nearly 8 million kids nationwide in pre-K–12 schools are now eligible for services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), almost double the number in 1977. Compared to the rest of the country, Mississippi supposedly underidentified its share of students with disabilities prior to its 2013 transformation, but now it’s near the national average. Notably, kids receiving accommodations via IDEA are less likely to take the fourth-grade test.

“[S]hifting students into special ed who never would have been classified special ed even a decade ago is one of the most common forms of soft assessment corruption out there,” explained deBoer on Substack. “We have absolutely skyrocketing rates of students with declared disabilities, with some districts having a quarter or more of all students on IEPs [Individual Education Programs], and this is driven almost entirely by autism and ADHD diagnoses, many of which are questionable at best.”

Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama have all improved K–3 literacy using approaches similar to Mississippi’s, yet there’s still no definitive answer to explain the Magnolia State’s positive gains. Most advocates for the Mississippi “miracle” point to the phonics-based curriculum and the additional teacher training to explain the rise in scores, though many often cushion their statements with something like “We don’t know for sure, but …” Could Mississippi be gaming the system? Possibly. Either way, they should pay more attention to those eighth-grade scores. It’s one thing to prepare third graders to take a test in fourth grade, but getting them to read at or above grade level as they advance further in their education is an entirely different matter. To call it a model might be a stretch – unless the primary objective is to make students look good on paper for one year.