Mississippi is  America’s poorest state. With its paucity of resources and chronic underdevelopment, it often  ranks near the bottom of rankings of

The "Mississippi Miracle": How America's Poorest State Dramatically Improved Its Schools

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2024-11-21 17:00:05

Mississippi is America’s poorest state. With its paucity of resources and chronic underdevelopment, it often ranks near the bottom of rankings of quality of life.

But a new study suggests that there’s something the Magnolia State may be able to teach the rest of the country how to dramatically improve our schools.

In 2013, the state legislature pushed through a package of educational reforms codified in the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) that boosted support for early childhood literacy. The LBPA did a range of things, including expanding access to full-day pre-K programs, focusing education phonics and the science of reading, investing more in professional development of teachers, increasing the use of reading screenings tests, and enforcing requirements for students to repeat grades if they don’t pass reading assessments.

In short, the LBPA was a battery of measures intended to improve reading skills for Mississippi children — and there’s little doubt that things started to improve in the state after it was passed.

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