What The Atlantic Gets Right — And Wrong — About The Mississippi ‘Miracle’

The highly publicized “Mississippi Miracle” — the implementation of teacher training, literacy coaches, and grade retention for struggling students that skyrocketed the state’s ranking from 49th in 2013 to nineth in 2024 — has created a well-earned outpouring of praise.

Here at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, we have taken notice. In fact, the Lone Star State has much of the educational infrastructure already in place to bring home these improvements and turn the page on Texas’ middling literacy rates.

But The Atlantic’s recent essay frames Mississippi’s success as less a miracle from on-high than a “marathon” that required a broader regime of accountability, higher standards, administrative seriousness, and a political willingness to impose consequences. The “wrong lesson” being taken away, the essay argues, is that “real human effort [is] required to change education for the children of our state.”

“My fear is that poor implementation and, above all, a failure to take accountability seriously will end up discrediting good ideas.”

Rachel Canter, director of education policy for the Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), points out that states like Georgia, Michigan, and California have failed in their attempts because of their unwillingness to take hard stances on things like retention and compliance: “There are no shortcuts,” Canter concludes. “Finishing is a human marvel, but not miraculous.”

“Mississippi took every step, no matter how exhausting, to fix education,” she explained. “Other states will have to do the same.”

What Canter gets right in her analysis is that the “miracle” Mississippi experiences is not simply policy reform nor, as she puts is, an act of “divine intervention,” but the product of a sustained desire by lawmakers, agencies, and school-level leaders to maintain reforms long enough, and seriously enough, for literacy gains to take hold.

However, Canter neglects to notice the underlying utility of law itself — the mistake many make in understanding how a foundation for change must be laid before the house of adherence can be built. Because for successful policy to take hold, it must first be introduced, contested, and enacted. The policy matters, yes. But law itself, and the structure of adherence it creates, is what gives reform its force and forms the regime for which it shapes.

Fortunately, Texas is not starting from scratch. Unlike the weaker half-measures Canter describes in other states, Texas already has much of the institutional material in place: reading academies, statewide screening requirements, science-of-reading training, and agency infrastructure capable of carrying reform beyond the level of simple rhetoric.

What remains to be seen is if there will be the political will from our state lawmakers to restore coherence to our system by reconnecting literacy mastery to promotion, intervention, and implementation — with the same seriousness Mississippi was willing to sustain. That will be up to them when we finally reach the 90th Legislative Session.