Mississippi Teaching Pennsylvania to Read?

I grew up in Mississippi, where the schools were so atrocious that my parents found a way to send us to Catholic schools on a policeman's pay.

You can imagine my surprise at the following headline from an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "To Improve Early Literacy, Pennsylvania Should Follow Mississippi's Lead."

Gob smacked.

Although I advocate complete privatization of the educational sector, I am not one to hold my nose up at improvements in government schools in the meantime, so I indulged my curiosity.

Here is what the paper calls the Mississippi model:

[I]t was the product of years of research and policymaking, followed by a decade-plus of executing that strategy in schools across the state. That included mandating phonics-based curricula; funding and then managing training for educators in proven teaching methods; and improving monitoring, accountability and intervention through assessments that ensure as many children as possible are reading fluently by the end of third grade.

Following is a highly condensed summary of why so many American schools fail to teach reading properly, namely that it became fashionable in the early 20th century to pretend that children could learn to read as if each word were a hieroglyphic.

The results so far?

Since passing phonics-based literacy training and curriculum policies in 2013, Mississippi has gone from 49th in the country in fourth-grade NAEP reading scores to 21st. When adjusted for demographics, the Magnolia State is now in the top five for early literacy in America.

Image by Rain Bennett, via Unsplash, license.

Reading is an essential skill and can help a student unlock doors for himself, which is a big part of why slaveowners almost always forbade slaves to learn how to read. If a school taught nothing else well, it could be forgiven for that one thing to be reading.

Often, when countries with planned economies introduce even a modicum of market reform, at least the affected parts of the economy improve dramatically. I suspect that a similar analogy between reading and education holds true, and am heartened by this good news and hopeful that phonics-based teaching methods continue to gain traction as they prove their worth.

-- CAV