Mississippi falls short of an eighth-grade literacy miracle

by Julia James for Mississippi Today

Note from the Reading Kingdom blog: This article is typical of the kinds of soft-news reporting we see on literacy. The fact is that there is NO Misssissippi miracle and never has been. Mississippi’s eighth-grade reading scores were lower in 2021 than in 2011. As for the so-called “miracle” 4th grade scores, those were a mirage created by gaming the system with harmful retention policies that keep the poorest students from appearing in the results. As Kevin Drum, who analyzed the reported Mississippi “miracle” concluded: “In 2013, Mississippi fourth graders are 13 points below the national average if you look at all students. After that year, “all students” excludes all the bottom kids who were held back. What we need to know is what the Mississippi scores would look like if we added them back in. And it turns out that Mississippi scores in 2022 are still about 13 points below the national average. In other words, the 2013 reforms had all but no effect.”

Much has been made nationally of Mississippi’s improvement in fourth-grade reading scores.

Whether being celebrated or scrutinized, attention has been squarely focused on elementary students and their reading instruction. Mississippi students and educators have closed the gap and reached the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This growth can be attributed to several factors, but chief among them is a 2013 state law that created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn’t hit a certain benchmark.

But this national test also measures students again in eighth grade. The gap between the national average and Mississippi’s eighth-grade reading score has gotten smaller over the last decade, but it hasn’t closed at the rate of fourth-grade reading.

Read more here.

Reading Kingdom is an online K-3 reading program that uses a new “phonics-plus” model to teach students to read and write at a 3rd grade level with comprehension. Sign up for a complimentary Reading Kingdom trial (or any of our other products) here.

We also have a program for students on the autism spectrum and others who face unique learning challenges called ASD Reading. Sign up for a complimentary trial of ASD Reading here.