I started reading about Mississippi because the numbers didn’t make sense to me.
Mississippi was supposed to be the state at the bottom of every education ranking. Suddenly its fourth-graders were being described as the best in the country.
That turned out to be an exaggeration. The achievement wasn’t.
On May 8, 2015, Cytha Guynes arrived at Quitman County Elementary School in Marks, Mississippi, expecting bad news. The state was releasing the results of a new reading test that could keep third-graders from moving on to fourth grade, and Guynes and her teachers spent much of the day trying to get into an overwhelmed computer system.
At Quitman, in the rural Delta, the whole school had been reorganized around reading. Teachers from other grades tutored third-graders. Children moved among classrooms according to what they needed. Literacy coach Cindy Hale took the weakest readers all the way back to short vowel sounds.
When the report finally appeared, 85 percent had passed on the first attempt. For a school that had long trailed the state, reaching the Mississippi average felt like a victory. Guynes remembered “a real sense of relief.”¹
A few weeks later, a reporter watched a 10-year-old named Kwendolyn finish a passage about inventions intended to help blind people see. She didn’t guess and move on.
“I’m going back in the text to see what the main idea was in the story,” she explained.¹ Then she found the paragraph that supported her answer.