Mississippi nevertheless deserves enormous credit. It stopped accepting failure as inevitable. It trained teachers instead of simply blaming them. It identified children who needed help, put coaches into classrooms and stayed with the work long enough to produce real results.
Now it has to do in grades four through twelve what it began doing in kindergarten through third grade: turn the ability to read into the desire and judgment to keep learning.
Kymyona Burk, who helped lead the reforms, no longer calls it a miracle. She calls it the “Mississippi Marathon.”
“Success is never final,” she says. “Reform is never complete.”⁹
That sounds about right.
The real miracle won’t be that a 10-year-old named Kwendolyn could find the main idea in a passage. It will be that, at 21 and 41 and 71, she can still find the main idea in a world increasingly determined to hide it.
Bibliography
1. • Jackie Mader, “After Years of Reform, a Sign of Hope for a Rural Mississippi School,” The Hechinger Report , June 24, 2015. https://hechingerreport.org/after-years-of-reform-a-sign-of-hope-for-a-rural-mississippi-school/
2. • Bracey Harris, “Jim Barksdale Invested $100 Million in Mississippi’s Children. Did It Create a Miracle?” Mississippi Today , January 24, 2025. https://mississippitoday.org/2025/01/24/jim-barksdale-100-million-miracle/
3. • Sharon Lurye, “How Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana Became Unlikely Leaders in Reading,” Associated Press, May 17, 2023. https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississippi-alabama-louisiana-5bdd5d6ff719b23faa37db2fb95d5004
4. • National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Reading and Mathematics State Snapshot Report—Mississippi, Grade 4 , U.S. Department of Education, 2025. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2024/pdf/2024220MS4.pdf
5. • Matthew Chingos and Kristin Blagg, “States’ Demographically Adjusted Performance on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress,” Urban Institute, February 2025. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographically-adjusted-performance-2024-national-assessment
6. • National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Reading and Mathematics State Snapshot Report—Mississippi, Grade 8 , U.S. Department of Education, 2025. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2024/pdf/2024220MS8.pdf
7. • Natalie Wexler, “Mississippi’s Reading Revolution Faces Its Next Test,” Wired , 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/mississippi-state-testing-reading-comprehension-literacy/
8. • Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı and Rei Mariman, “Generative AI Can Harm Learning,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , vol. 122, no. 26, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122
9. • Jill Anderson, “What Mississippi Got Right About Reading,” Harvard EdCast , Harvard Graduate School of Education, March 2026. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/26/03/what-mississippi-got-right-about-reading