I like that story more than I like the rankings. Kwendolyn was trying to understand something, deciding what mattered and going back for evidence. That is what reading is for.
Mississippi’s turnaround began before the law that now gets most of the credit. In 2000, Jim Barksdale, the former chief executive of Netscape, and his wife, Sally, committed $100 million to improving reading instruction in their home state. Barksdale had struggled to learn to read as a boy. He had made his fortune helping to bring the internet into American homes, but he understood that access to all the information in the world doesn’t do much for a child who can’t read it.²
Then, in 2013, Mississippi passed its Literacy-Based Promotion Act.
The law is often described as phonics plus a third-grade test. That leaves out most of the story. Mississippi trained teachers, put coaches into struggling schools, screened children early and provided tutoring and summer programs. The test created a deadline, but the teaching gave children a chance to meet it.
Kelly Butler, who led the Barksdale Reading Institute, put it plainly: “We know how to teach reading. We just have to do it everywhere.”³
By 2024, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading score had climbed five points above the national public-school average. Its fourth-grade math score was also slightly higher, although the difference wasn’t statistically significant. Since 2013, Mississippi’s fourth-graders have made the largest gains in the country in both reading and math.⁴
The familiar claim that Mississippi now ranks first is more complicated. It comes from an analysis that adjusts for poverty and other demographic differences. Under that calculation, Mississippi ranked first in three of four categories. It did not finish first on the raw national scores.⁵
Still, this is no statistical trick. Mississippi taught a great many poor children to read better.
But the question remains of what happened to them afterward.
Mississippi remained below the national average in eighth-grade reading and math in 2024. Its math gap has narrowed sharply, but its eighth-grade reading score has barely moved in more than two decades.⁶
That doesn’t erase the fourth-grade gains. But it leads to a more important question.
A decade after Kwendolyn sat in that classroom, Candace Hamberlin was teaching eighth-grade English in another poor Delta community. The walls were covered with score posters and data charts. Students spent hours on practice tests and adaptive software.
Hamberlin wanted them to pass. But she had moved to eighth grade because she loved the harder part of reading: figuring out what people mean, why they say it and how they try to persuade us.
What bothered her most wasn’t that some students struggled with vocabulary. It was that they didn’t want to read.
“Usually in the classroom, somebody always has a book,” she said. “I don’t have any of them that has a book.”⁷
That is the distance between passing a reading test and becoming a reader.
I began wondering whether we are still clear about what education is supposed to do. Getting children to read by fourth grade is an enormous achievement. But do they keep reading? Do they become curious? Can they use what they learned when the question no longer looks like the practice sheet?
And now there is AI.
I use it every day. Sometimes it helps me see something I had missed. Sometimes it gives me a polished version of something I hadn’t really thought through. The dangerous part is that the two can look remarkably similar.
A recent experiment with high-school math students found that those using a general AI assistant performed much better while it was available. When it was taken away, they did worse than students who had never used it.