The part of this video, where it really goes off the rails is when JT talks about the "Mississippi Miracle". This is a policy slate that was highlighted in a glowing review by The New York Times. For those who are not familiar, Mississippi has sat at the bottom of the barrel in reading scores for a long time, ranked 49th in the country in 2013.
As the Second Thought video explains, Mississippi passed what is called the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. This act has done a number of things:
- Hire highly trained reading coaches to support students, as well as special literacy-based development for all teachers.
- Switch to phonics education from whole language education.
- Screen students at a young age for issues in literacy to provide early intervention.
- Mandatory retention of students who do not pass a 3rd-grade reading test.
Since its implementation, Mississippi has seen an unprecedented rise in their rankings:
After adjusting for demographics, in 2024, Mississippi was the nation's #1 state in reading as well as in mathematics. This was the state whose students' performance increased the most from 2013 until 2022, despite the COVID-19 pandemic which contributed to depressed scores nationwide.[20]
Even without any adjustments for demographics, Mississippi ranks ninth in fourth-grade literacy.[21] African-Americans in Mississippi outperform African-Americans in 47 of the other 49 states in reading; Mississippi's Hispanic students lead the nation for their demographic in reading (and second place in math).
This is all INCREDIBLY impressive! However, something starts to look strange, once you start to track these students beyond grade 4. In 2019, Mississippi 8th graders ranked 45th in the nation for Reading according to The National Report Card. In 2024, they ranked 41st in the nation for Reading in 8th grade.
How is it that such a "miracle" exists, if its gains nearly vanish in four years? Part of the issue is that, according to some studies, gains in standardized test scores suffer from diminishing returns. A 2008 study published in the journal Economics of Education Review, looked at California schools and their various characteristics to examine factors that influence gains in test scores. Their conclusion found that:
The evidence suggests that, where standardized tests are used, variations in achievement gains over time reflect characteristics of the schools and the student population. Our findings say that observers can expect test scores to increase the most where initial test scores are low, where private school enrollment is low, and where median household income is relatively high. If rewards are not adjusted for these conditions, the difficulty of meeting goals may discourage teachers and schools from efforts to improve academic performance. For this reason, states revising their reward system or setting one up might want to take base scores and characteristics of the school and its population in consideration in setting school-based rewards.
On the national scale, this means that similar levels of gains in more affluent states are effectively impossible when compared to the kind of gains Mississippi is showing in 4th grade reading. Even if a higher scoring state was to implement the Mississippi method, the gains would very likely be modest at best.
Another factor in this issue is that as kids age, they read less and less. They read less than their historical peers by a large margin. Not only are they reading less than their historical peers, they are not able to read for the same durations as well, losing reading stamina. While Mississippi might be seeing gains (gains that are impressive only due to how poor they were at the start), they haven't actually combatted a national downturn in reading ability overall. According to a Scholastic White Paper published in March of this year (2026):
National assessments show that reading achievement has stagnated or declined over time (NAEP, 2024; NAEP Long-Term Trend). In addition, international data show that U.S. students’ reading performance and engagement lag behind peer performance in other countries, particularly as texts become more complex and sustained (OECD, 2018; OECD, 2022).
Large-scale surveys show a steady decline in reading for pleasure and independent reading across all age groups, but especially among adolescents (NEA/U.S. Census, 2024). The downward trend is systemic and disproportionately affects students who rely most on schools for access to books, time to read, and coherent literacy experiences.
But, more importantly, what Mississippi appears to be doing is a simple manipulation of statistics. This is nothing new in the education world. In an essay published in Significance Magazine, Howard Wainer (a statistician and author, and a former principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service), Irina Grabovsky, PhD, (a senior psychometrician at the National Board of Medical Examiners) and Daniel H. Robinson (professor and interim chair of the Department of Higher Education, Adult Learning, and Organizational Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington.), provide statistical and historical analysis of this kind of phenomenon:
We have seen several previous K–12 education “miracles” that turned out to be hoaxes. Five of them were in Houston, Atlanta, the District of Columbia, El Paso, and New Orleans.4,5 In the first four, investigators found fraud. The people in charge (e.g., superintendents) cheated to give the impression of increased test scores. In Houston, the numbers of students who were categorised as “special education” were increased so their low test scores would not be included in the school’s overall test scores.6 In Atlanta, records were falsified. In the District of Columbia, high-school students graduated who should not have. And in El Paso, to inflate scores, Mexican transfer students, who typically scored lower, were prevented from taking the state-mandated tenth-grade achievement tests.
The New Orleans miracle was caused by a natural disaster. Hurricane Katrina tragically relocated about a third of the students who came from the poorest areas. Removing thousands of low scorers immediately raised the average test scores of the students who remained and it did so without increasing any student’s individual score.
The Houston, El Paso, and New Orleans examples are of particular relevance to the latest Mississippi miracle. The improvement in the average performance of Mississippi’s fourth-graders on NAEP was preceded by two key changes in their schooling in third grade. One was the a priori sensible idea of trying to improve classroom instruction by improved teacher training, instituting preschool, and a variety of other helpful actions. This was to be accomplished through the promise of an additional annual state expenditure of $15 million for the 134,376 students enrolled in kindergarten and up to third grade (in 2017). This provides a boost of about $111.63 of extra funding annually for each pupil. Comparing this amount to what are annual contemporary per pupil expenditures nationally, we have to agree that if such small expenditures can make a visible difference in student performance it truly is a miracle – a Mississippi version of St. John’s loaves and fishes.
But it was the second component of the Mississippi Miracle, a new retention policy, perhaps inspired by New Orleans’ Katrina disaster a decade earlier, that is likely to be the key to their success. Third-graders who fail to meet reading standards are forced to repeat the third grade. Prior to 2013, a higher percentage of third-graders moved on to the fourth grade and took the NAEP fourth-grade reading test. After 2013, only those students who did well enough in reading moved on to the fourth grade and took the test. It is a fact of arithmetic 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”). Those who choose to adopt such a policy need only consult the function shown in Figure 1 to learn what proportion of the data in the left tail needs to be truncated to obtain the amount of gain (in standard deviation units) that is desired.
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It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasises the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test. This message is not a secret.
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More than a century ago, the enormous success of the industrial revolution naturally led educators to view the educational process through that lens.
This vision imagined the school as a factory in which the students were the product. When the quality of the final product was judged flawed, pundits, politicians, and educators blamed the quality of the factory. This led to programmes to improve teachers, shrink class size, replace administrators, change educational philosophies, and so on.
The educational landscape is littered with attempts to improve the factories’ performance (e.g., the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, and the American Community Survey launched in 2005) including, of course, various measures of students’ performance (e.g., National Assessment of Educational Progress, Scholastic Assessment Tests (known as SATs), American College Testing (known as ACT), Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS)) as well as measures of associated teachers’ performance (e.g., value-added models, Pre-Professional Skills Test, National Teacher Examinations, Praxis).
The model of school as factory was swallowed whole and absorbed billions of dollars in pursuit of the success that always seemed to dance just out of reach. Over time, the public became accustomed to the failure of each new programme, so much so that when a story of success – even a modest one – emerged, it was characterised as a miracle. Witness the miracles claimed in Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, DC, Texas, and, most recently, Mississippi. But, each time, a closer look at these extraordinary outcomes always affirmed Hume’s observations about miracles.
Yet there is a truth to be extracted from the factory model of schooling, for there is another way of improving factory output that could be considered. Experience has shown that factories can improve their products by upgrading the raw material on which they operate (the extent of improvement is made explicit in the equation we derived in Figure 1). The likelihood of its success can be seen in Mississippi’s data – the schools perform best when students whose performances fall far below requirements are guided into different programmes that are judged to be better suited to their particular potential. But this is a tale for another day.
It's all very disappointing to see this "miracle" being propped up in this way by a materialist of all people. Any "miracle" in our bourgeois education system should be instantly considered suspicious. Until we have a government and a system responsive to the economic and racial disparities that predominantly impact student success, districts and states will instead attempt anything that doesn't cost them a significant sum to get results. This includes the manipulation of statistics. There is no "miracle" in Mississippi, just smoke and mirrors.
GOOD post