Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Truth About Mississippi's Education "Miracle"

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Education outcomes have been getting worse across much of the world, with reading and math scores falling to historic lows. The U.S. has seen some of the steepest declines in decades. But, why does Mississippi look so different? Mississippi education reformer Rachel Canter has been at the forefront of the state’s dramatic improvement in reading and math over the past few decades. Today, Derek is joined by Rachel to discuss the so-called “Mississippi miracle” (a name she says misses the mark!). Together they break down how years of policy changes and implementation transformed the state’s schools and how other states can replicate their success. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Rachel Canter Producer: Devon Baroldi Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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anything 30, 30. Get almost, almost anything with Uber Eats. Order now. Order a minimum of $30 required, valid on grocery, convenience, retail, specialty foods, or flower delivery orders only, Terms and conditions apply. Last week, the world got its latest report card on education. It was pretty god-awful.

The newest PISA results found that reading and math scores across rich countries have fallen to their lowest levels in the history of the test. In reading, the average student has lost about a year of learning since 2015. American scores are down too. Eighth grade reading scores have fallen 10 points since 2013, and roughly one-third of eighth graders now score below basic in reading the largest share in the history of that test.

Something has gone very wrong with education in America and around the world. And what makes this especially frustrating is that we have spent decades trying desperately to fix our schools. There was, if you recall, no child left behind with its obsession with testing and accountability.

There was raised to the top under Obama. There was common core. There were charter schools and teacher eval and personalized learning, and how about those laptops in every classroom? It's not as if all of these ideas failed everywhere. Some of them worked in some places,

but none have become the national breakthroughs that its champions promised. American education reform sometimes feels like a scrap heap of ideas that reformers once claimed to be silver bullets. But then, there's Mississippi. In 2000, Mississippi was one of the poorest states in America, with some of the worst schools in America. But in the last 25 years,

Mississippi's reading and math scores have soared. Today, adjusted for demographics, Mississippi students are among the best performers in the country. This transformation is sometimes called the Mississippi Miracle. I imagine that many of you have read about this in the news or heard about it in podcasts. But today's guest objects to that word, miracle.

Rachel Cantor is a long-time Mississippi education reformer and the author of a fascinating new report called Inside the Mississippi Marathon. In it, she writes that our narrow understanding of Mississippi story is wrong. The state's success was neither sudden nor miraculous. It was the result of nearly two decades of policy changes, bureaucratic reforms, teacher training, accountability, and unusually relentless implementation. As other states now rush to copy the most famous parts of the Mississippi model, She thinks they are at risk of severely understanding why it worked in the first place.

So, today, why is education getting worse just about everywhere, while one of America's poorest states just got dramatically better? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Rachel Cantor, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Rachel, I want to start with the bad news. American reading scores have been declining for roughly a decade.

The latest NAEP results show that eighth grade reading is at historic lows, and 12th grade reading and math are at their lowest level in decades. What the hell is happening in American education? Yeah, so a lot of people have been talking about our decline in the last couple of years in the context of COVID, where we did see, you know, schools closed, and we saw kids go home and not learn very much over the course of that year. and then we saw decline afterwards. But really, this decline started before COVID.

We saw stagnation and then decline. And there's been a lot of speculation as to why our students are going in the wrong direction. But it's a really worrisome trend. And it is, you know, across the United States, we see it in every different type of community that students are learning less and know less now than they did a decade ago.

And not just the United States. There were new piece of results just last week that showed that reading and math scores across rich countries and the OECD have reached their lowest levels in the history of that test, the modern history of that test. Much of that decline also, to your point, started before COVID. If it was just the United States, then I would say, aha, we have a problem with American education policy. We have a problem with America's science of reading and math.

The fact that this is happening everywhere around the world or only, almost everywhere throughout developed countries, seems to rule in some other candidates for understanding what's happening. So what does it tell you that so many different education systems are experiencing this decline at the same time? Yeah, I think that there have to be some systemic factors that are affecting every country. And certainly we have lots of speculation,

both in the United States and globally, about what could be causing these declines. and COVID certainly didn't help. You know, we know that kids being absent from school significantly impacts whether or not they're going to learn things. You have to be in school to learn things. We know absenteeism has increased since COVID. But the fact that this started before COVID shows that there's got to be something else going on in the social context that must be affecting kids. And we have a lot of ideas about, you know, the use of technology in school, the use of

digital devices, whether or not we're using the best methods of instruction, all these different things. But it's most likely there's not one single cause that there's a variety of causes that are both contributing to this decline and making it difficult for students to recover. Big problems attract big ideas. And American education has spent the last 25, 30 years cycling through a bunch of big ideas. You've got no child. left behind. There's race to the top under Obama. There's Common Core, Charter Schools, teacher accountability, personalized tutoring. It feels like every few years somebody announces that we finally figured out how to fix schools. And then inevitably, that revolution disappoints.

Why do you think education reform in the U.S. is such a scrapyard heap of silvered bullets? Yeah. So I tend to be very skeptical when people say this one thing is going to solve all our problems because education in any country, but certainly here in the United States, is very complex. There are different layers of authority and actors in the United States. Most education policy is made at the state level. And then you have local school districts and you have local schools. And you have all of these different things that go into what a child actually experiences in any given classroom. And I think education, because it's been difficult to improve at scale the size of a state or the size of the country, people tend to get these wild ideas that,

you know, maybe this one thing will save us. It's easier to believe in that one magic bullet than it is to think about a system and all of the different things that you have to change and all of the different people you have to affect in order to get change at scale over time. And I think that is why people have been so fascinated by the story of Mississippi, because that is what we have done is prove that you can, over time, improve dramatically student outcome. Let's talk about Mississippi. Take me back to the year 2000, turn of the century. Mississippi was, and is still, I believe, one of America's poorest states. It was then among the worst performing school systems in the country. And you wrote that the state's education ambition

was basically, just don't be last. Just please be in the high 40s. and don't start with a five. What did a Mississippi classroom? What did Mississippi's education system look like in 2000 when it was the 47, 48th, 50th best education system in the country? Yeah. I grew up in Mississippi, and I went to public school my entire life, and I graduated high school in 2000.

So I went through the school district in the 90s and in 2000. when we first started doing the national assessment for educational progress to be able to compare across states different education systems. And it was very true that people, including our leaders, felt that, you know, Mississippi kids are really poor, we're really far behind, and there's just not much we can do about it because this population of kids that we have comes from such disadvantage. And really, we're going to be doing our best just to give everybody very basic skills and to hope and pray that we are not last in the country. And it was sort of a self-defeating, you know, mindset to have about it.

Because if you truly believe there is nothing you can do to improve, you do not try to improve. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So you date the turnaround in Mississippi to about 2009. What happened in 2009? So I start the story. When I talk about it, I talk about how this was really not something that happened overnight. A lot of people nationally heard about the Mississippi story yesterday. And so they think it must have been something that happened yesterday. But in fact, it was a 20-year story. In the early 2000s and 2001, we passed the No Child Left Behind Act that a lot of people are familiar with. And this was a big federal law that required states to do all sorts of new things. You know, we had to test students every. year in math and in reading. And we had something called the adequate yearly progress, which was you had to improve kids in schools and by subgroup every year to get off of this school improvement or to not get onto a school improvement list. And Mississippi sort of was just in the process of

complying. We were just going to do what we were told to do by the federal government. We didn't want to be in trouble. We didn't want to be last. And it wasn't until around 2009 when our state leaders got just really frustrated that no matter what they seemed to do or, you know, this federal policy, we had this group of schools that were just consistently at the bottom, very low performing. And every new thing didn't change the, you know, didn't change that calculation for that population of schools. And so the state legislature started to say, what if we actually did something different? What if we tried to do something about this sliver of schools? And so the state legislature, that's here at the bottom. And so we passed something called the Children First Act that was

really a state takeover law. And from there, the state started to get sort of this idea that, hey, maybe what we do at the state level might affect the education that kids get in the classroom. And maybe it doesn't have to be destiny that kids who are in certain demographic categories end up with certain outcomes. And slowly we started to move with this mindset. We adopt Common Core in 2010, like most of the states in the country, we committed to higher standards. And really what happened in 2012 was that we had a change election with our legislature. We had a new crop of legislative leaders come into power. And that also meant a change in party control in our state legislature.

And it's really not that this was something that Republicans versus Democrats are better at. I think it was really that because of that change, the new, leadership was looking for an agenda. And they weren't quite sure what that agenda and education needed to be. Because for the longest time, the conversation had been funding or no funding. And that was pretty much it. There were not a lot of other ideas about, well, what do we do with that funding or how are we training teachers and those kinds of conversations? And when the new leadership came in, there were people like me and others in the state that said, hey, why don't we think about how we use our money and what we do in schools? And maybe if we

act like we have some ability to change that student experience, we can help kids learn more. And that opened the door to new conversations around how do we measure success? How do we report to families? And then in 2013, we passed something called the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which was for reading. And we also passed the first state-funded pre-K law that year, and we passed the charter school law. And the legislature sort of had this moment of saying, and our leadership had this moment of saying, you know what? We're going to take charge of our destiny and began to act like, you know, we have the power.

And that was a real mindset shift. But it was also a risk because we could not have known, and we didn't know in 2012 and 2013, that we would be where we are now after having passed these laws because there were all sorts of other steps that had to take place in order to actually change how students were learning to read, and what kind of content they were exposed to in class.

So let's hold in 2013. If I am a third grader in Mississippi, or if my child is a third grader in Mississippi, what are the most important ways that education changes for that child under the Literacy-Based Promotion Act and other parts of this Mississippi First portfolio that you're putting forth? Yeah, and so it wasn't just Mississippi First, but it was a combination of advocates in the space pushing these things.

But if you were a child in 2013, you were starting to see the beginning of the change that was about to really hit Mississippi because we adopted Common Core in 2010 and the State Department of Education had sort of this slow rollout plan. We're going to start in kindergarten, first and second grade with doing this new content. School districts knew there was a new assessment coming, so they were trying to figure out what that meant for them. They were adopting new curriculum. And then in 2013, the legislature passes a law that says, hey, if you don't read above the most basic level on our state assessment, you're going to get retained. And not only that, we are going to assess you. We're going to give a screener to every child

three times a year, and we're going to send a letter home to your parents, telling them whether or not you're on track to pass that benchmark. And it was, this was so controversial because people, there was a camp of people who thought, well, we're setting children up to fail because there's no possible way. There's no possible way we are going to be able to get kids reading at a higher level than we've ever expected them before in two years. Because the legislation said by the 2014-2015 school year, we were going to implement this change. And the other sort of camp of people, which I was in, said,

but we know what happens to kids if they can't read and they get passed along anyway. And they have really bad outcomes. So we're not doing this in a vacuum. It's not like retain or don't retain. We have no idea. We know exactly what happens to kids who don't know how to read. And we've got to do something.

And maybe if we have a conversation about what we do differently before retention comes into play, we can get somewhere. A lot of media coverage of the 2013 laws focused solely on Mississippi's science of reading reforms, which implemented these structured literacy programs. I want you to do two things. First, explain what is the science of reading? How is it different from the way that reading and literacy is often taught or had been taught in Mississippi? And then why do you think this is not just about the science of reading?

The science of reading is what we refer to as the body of knowledge. knowledge that over decades, scientists across disciplines, including things like cognitive science and other fields, have come to understand about the way that humans learn to read. And all of this knowledge, we have sort of refined into a set of principles and practices around what is true about how our brains learn to read and what the best instructional methods of them are. There's something called the simple view of reading, which sort of takes all of this knowledge and tries to distill it down to something that is easy to understand for people. So when you talk about the simple view of reading, you talk about this basic equation

that is word recognition multiplied by language comprehension gets reading comprehension. And when we talk about can you read, we really mean reading comprehension. Can you look at something and understand what it says? and does that have meaning to you in your brain? And when we talk about word recognition, this is where we talk about phonics. So a lot of people say the science of reading is phonics, but that's only a piece of the science of reading.

The science of reading is really about how do we develop reading comprehension in humans? Because reading is not a natural thing. Reading is language is a natural thing, but reading is actually something pretty complicated that we have to do in our brains. We have to know that you take letters and they make sounds and you add them together and they make words and those words have meaning. And when they go in a sentence in a certain way, that has complex meaning.

And that's how we communicate. And I think that in the past, there were some teachers who were trained on something that we refer to as whole language, which is just give kids books that are great to. read and they will naturally develop the skills to understand what they say and that will bring them a love of reading if we give them these rich picture books, etc. But that ignores the complex things that have to go on in your brain for you to actually be able to read. And there was this whole debate throughout the 90s. We called it the reading wars over sort of these two camps of people, the whole language people and the phonics people. And there was a big report that came out in 2000 from the National Reading Panel that was trying to sort of settle this debate and said,

yeah, we need the, you know, we need to focus on phonics and all these other aspects. And over time, that, what started off in that reading panel report, we've only been able to add to it with even stronger studies around these things like phonics is fundamental to how kids get those basic word recognition skills. It is not true. It may seem like magic to parents because your kid goes from not reading to reading overnight, sometimes it seems,

but it's actually not magic. There's something very sophisticated going on in a child's brain when they move from not being able to read to read. And that requires, for a lot of kids, explicit instruction in phonics. All right, so that's the science of reading. And I do think that many news reports

looking at what they call the Mississippi Miracle essentially interpreted it as the conclusion of the reading wars. They said the reading wars are over. Mississippi proves phonics is the thing that works, and phonics explains all of Mississippi's progress, which is why I think it's interesting that you, having played such a close role in all of this,

are saying, no, that's a total misunderstanding of what actually happened. So in what way are we over-attributing Mississippi's results to the science of reading? I think because hindsight is 2020, if you look at the laws that people pass now, They are passing laws based on all of the lessons that we learned after we started going down this road. But when we started in 2013, that Literacy-Based Promotion Act was exactly as it sounded.

It was primarily a retention act. And it had one tiny mention of the science of reading in it. And when the State Department of Education, you know, they get the legislation after it's been signed by the governor, and they started going, okay, what are we got to do? Because we cannot have kids held back. what are the most effective ways to teach reading? They luckily had experts in the State Department and access to experts in the state who said, it's the science of reading. We've got to teach teachers how to teach kids how to read. And we have this decades-long scientific consensus around the best

way to teach reading. It's called the science of reading. And the reality is that a lot of teachers probably aren't using it because we don't do enough to teach them what that is. And the State Department and actually had the ability through the law to create an intervention program in the lowest performing schools. And they used that authority to essentially say, we are going to require that every teacher and every administrator in these schools be trained on the science of reading, use a curriculum that we select, and go to training, and go to and get coaching in their classroom practice. And so they actually didn't have the authority or they didn't think they had the authority to demand that the whole state do this. But they did have the authority with this lowest 25%. And what they proved through that process was, hey, this works. And other school districts started to say, you know what, we want to come to the training.

We want we want coaches. We want people trained on how to do these things. And it was that sort of forward thinking of people that were surrounding the State Department. of Education and in the department at the time that said, if the goal is to get kids to read, then we can't just sit back and hope for the best. We've got to take a proactive stance to this. And I think a lot of people don't recognize that that was not a foregone conclusion when the law passed. It was leadership on the part of advocates and experts and State Department officials who really truly cared about whether or not kids passed to the fourth grade.

And I want to emphasize something that I think gets lost sometimes in the focus on reading. And that is that Mississippi's math scores also went up significantly in this period. In 2024, fourth graders ranked 13th nationally in math without adjusting for demographics. And Mississippi also now performs very well among eighth graders in math after adjusting for demographics. Obviously, science of reading cannot explain an improvement in math scores. So what does explain the fact that Mississippi, saw a significant increase in math scores as well. Yeah, this is why I tell people that even if you think of our literacy reforms as sort of the center of the reform universe in Mississippi, there was

this whole context around it that built an infrastructure for improvement before, during, and after, you know, this law passed. And it really started with raising our learning standards for kids. What do we expect kids to know and be able to do? And the reality was prior to us adopting Common Core, which has now become a dirty word in education circles, we had very, very low expectations of what kids should know in math. It was very, very basic, you know, to the level where on the state assessment, you could take the answer and then plug it into the question

and eventually you would figure out by process of elimination, which one was correct. We were just not expecting anything of kids. And when Common Core came along and we adopted it, we had to radically change what class, instruction looked like to match these new expectations and this more rigorous assessment. And teachers really took that charge seriously, and school districts adopted much better curriculum. And so in our focus on literacy, I think it's certainly true that kids who

have better literacy skills, have better skills in all of the subjects because they're able to understand content better. But you don't know more math content just because you can read better, right? had to teach kids more math content. And that is what that standards, accountability assessment piece did for us. And I think it also changed the way that schools looked at their work. Because in addition to screening kids were reading difficulties three times a year, they started screening kids in math, too. And so kids take a reading assessment and a math assessment three times a year. And school districts started saying, hey, we have this math data and it doesn't look any better than the reading data. What are we going to do about this?

And so it changed the mindset, I think, and the practice about how schools went about figuring out what kids knew, what they didn't know, and what the job was to move every child, not just kids who are right around that proficiency level, but all the way down to the lowest and all the way up to the top. How do we move them forward year after year? And a lot of people, I think, don't realize that. And when they talk about literacy and then they, you know, sometimes we get criticism because our eighth grade scores are not as stellar. as our fourth grade scores in literacy, they ignore the fact that, you know, our math scores go all the way through eighth grade. We're seeing continuous progress in math. And that has to do with a system's focus and not just the singular focus on literacy. In the report that you wrote on the Mississippi Marathon,

you called it a marathon. And you rejected the idea that this is just a miracle because miracle sounds like it's trite, it's sudden, it's a deus ex machina that falls from the heavens, and this is the opposite. This is something that took a lot of time and a lot of policy and a lot of blood and sweat.

One of the more interesting things in your account is just how much Mississippi changed the State Education Department. And you've referenced this, but I just want to make sure that we recircle it because before 2012,

Jackson basically wrote rules, but it left implementation of education policy to districts. But what your reforms did in many cases is not only change policy, right, trained teachers, at a retention policy where if you don't pass the test,

you remain in third grade, monitor schools, intervene when things aren't working. You also, at large, turned, it seems to me, this diffuse bureaucracy of implementation into something that was more centralized. I mean, how significant do you think that centralization was,

the empowerment of the state in explaining why the Mississippi Marathon worked? I think it's a critical, critical piece of it. And one that gets overlooked, because when you start talking about state education governance, people are like, I don't want to listen to that. That sounds boring. But the reality is that if you have sort of a mess at the top and nobody's really responsible and nobody takes, you know, any sort of accountability for whether or not schools are getting what they need and doing what they need to do, then you get a mess at the bottom, right? you don't have very much success. And Mississippi, I think we looked at our school districts and we just made a really basic

calculation, which is that we have really small school districts in the state of Mississippi. Most school districts have fewer than 5,000 children. And that means that most central offices are small. They don't have the capacity to manage the change at the level that we need them to to be successful. They might not have the resources to do the training. they might not have the expertise locally to be able to know what they're doing wrong and how to fix it. And if our state didn't take a really strong role and, you know, have that perspective that we are the ones that need to be giving capacity to school districts when they don't have

it. I don't think we would have been where we were. But that required a lot of change. It required a change in mindset, first of all, from our state leaders. I hear states all the time say things like, well, we're a local control state. We can't tell local people what to do. Mississippi was a local control state too. But the reality was it wasn't serving us well to be a local control state in that way. And we had to have this mindset shift that, well, if the job is to educate children, then we need to make sure that we're doing the job and we need to take responsibility for that.

And that meant that the State Department of Education had to shift radically. because like many state departments, it was a compliance-oriented bureaucracy. Did you turn in the piece of paper? Have you filled out the form? Have you checked all the boxes? And it was full of people who were hired to do that kind of job. But the reality was we needed a department that had expertise, that had people that knew how, you know, what the science of reading was,

that knew how to evaluate training vendors to know if they were really going to be good at the job, that knew how. to align across different departments the work that different people were doing instead of just, you know, this department is doing this thing and this department is doing this contradictory thing and nobody knows what is going on. And so we had to fundamentally reshape who worked at our department and how it was organized around those goals. And Kerry Wright, who was our state superintendent, was hired in 2013 to take that with that mandate. You know, you've got to figure out how to implement the new pre-K law, the new standards, the new assessment, the new literacy work,

and you've got to figure out how our department is to be organized. And our legislature actually gave her authority to reorganize the department that I think a lot of people don't know about because they say, well, you know, we have these same problems, but what are we going to do? We have this bureaucracy. And our legislature said, yeah, we're going to put our money where our mouth is. we're going to give you the authority to change who works at the department. We're going to give it to you for two years. And then everybody's going to go back under state personnel board rules. But in these two years, we're going to trust that you're going to be able to reorganize the department around these outcomes that we expect of you.

And that was fundamental, I think, to our success. So there's a flip side here. Stronger states means weaker districts. There's no way around that. There's only so much power when it comes to making decisions. And you have pointed out in some essays about the Mississippi education reforms that states with stronger teachers unions have adopted fewer of the literacy reforms that you advocate for. Why might teachers' unions be resistant to the sort of changes you're calling for?

I want to first say that to take issue with weaker districts, because I think weaker and in terms of, you know, whole cloth power to decide the rules, right? But maybe not weaker in terms of capacity, because that's the whole point of the state taking a strong role is to build stronger capacity at the local level. Because the state can't teach every class. The state can't make every instructional decision. We have to have people who are really expert at that at the local districts. And so having a stronger state is to attempt to build more capacity at the district.

But I do think your point about teachers unions is correct, and I've recently written about this. And, you know, this is sort of a complicated question, but what we, because different teachers unions in different states have had different opinions about different aspects of this sort of the literacy reforms. ExcelNet is an organization that tracks literacy policy adoption nationwide. They have a tracker that has like 18 different policies. And depending on what policy we're talking about, a U.S. union may align differently on it. But we see some of the stronger unions be resistant to any change, especially because what we're asking of teachers is for them to do their job differently. We're asking them, you know, you may have learned something in your college of education, and you may have been

doing it this way for 15 years, but actually there's a different and better way to do it, and we're going to now tell you what that is and expect you to change your instruction. A lot of our teachers didn't get very good instruction on how to teach reading in the first place. So for them, this is brand new content. It's not necessarily contradictory. But for other teachers, you know, they feel like I'm the expert. I should be able to decide what I teach in my classroom. And we've seen unions who basically say, yeah, we should let them decide. We shouldn't tell them differently. And that may be fine if we were truly giving our classroom teachers all the training and all the knowledge they need.

But we know that we're not. We know that our colleges of education do not do a good job of teaching our teacher candidates, how to teach reading. We know they don't do a good job of training them on learning science, you know, all the things that we know about how the human brain learns. And because of that, teachers are often walking in blind. And so, yeah, I think that it makes a lot of sense to ordinary people and to parents to say, if there's a right way to do it,

then yeah, you should do it. We shouldn't say that you can do whatever you want. Before we round out this section, you said we know that teachers' colleges are failing. How do we know that? Yeah, so one of the things that, one of the more recent studies that we have on this point that's very specifically on this point

is something that the Fordham Institute did recently, they wanted to assess whether or not this science of reading revolution was really changing teacher knowledge of, you know, this body of evidence. And what they found is that teachers who rely on the information that they get from their College of Education versus teachers who are relying on training that they get when they go to their district are less likely to know the science of reading. And that's a really, you know, damning fact that we ask teacher candidates to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and get a four-year degree, and they come out knowing less

about the science of reading than what they get in professional development when they go in a classroom. And I think what it says is that we've been having, and we've been having this conversation about reform and colleges of ed for a really long time. And this is one of the things that Mississippi had to sort of wake up to as well was that, hey, we can't just retrain and retrain and retrain. We've got to do something about the problem at source. We have to ask colleges, of education to change what they're doing with teacher candidates. And we got into this fight with colleges of education over what they termed as academic freedom for their professors to teach whatever they wanted, regardless of whatever the science said.

Maybe this sounds like a familiar argument to you based on what we just talked about. But the reality is that you wouldn't expect in a medical college for a professor to be able to teach whatever they wanted and to say, you know what, I don't believe in germ theory. I just don't believe in it. I have a different set of beliefs. And it's my classroom, and this is my academic freedom to do whatever I want. No, we would not let that stand. But we do let that stand in colleges of education.

And what we get is generations of teachers who have not had access to what we know works for kids. Did you know Uber has a range of safety features for riders? Like the Share My Trip feature that lets you send your live location. to the people who matter most, your spouse, your kids, your best friend, so they can track your ride and make sure you get where you're going. But the safety doesn't stop there. Uber requires every driver to pass a thorough background check before they can start driving. This consists of a multi-step screening process that checks for impaired driving or criminal offenses,

followed by annual background checks each and every year moving forward. Share My Trip, and annual driver screenings are just a few of Uber's many safety features that put safety at every turn. Learn more at uber.com slash safety. Annual driving history reruns do not apply in New York City. Let me try to summarize what I think I understand to be the formula, the recipe, as it were, for Mississippi's progress. This is not just about phonics, as it has sometimes been made out to be by some newspaper articles. It's not just about reading. It's about reading and it's about math. but mostly it's about giving teachers serious training and support that keeps up with the science

of education, as you've just described it. It's about setting clear standards, measuring whether children are meeting them and intervening quickly and decisively when kids fall behind, including a clear retention policy. If you don't meet this threshold of reading quality, you will repeat third grade. It's about imposing consequences when schools or students repeatedly fail to meet that standard. and then at a higher level, it's about empowering state education departments even if that power

comes at the expense of other stakeholders like teachers unions. That's right. What have I left out of that recipe? I think one of the things that's really important is how much parents know.

A lot of times we think that because students get report cards four times a year, It means that parents know how much their children know. And that's just not true. What we found when we started sending these parental notification letters, and they were very explicit. There are a lot of states that say they do this,

but what they do is they send home an edgy jargon score report, and they expect parents to interpret it on their own. But Mississippi sends home an explicit letter, student below grade level. And the letter says, if your child does not improve, they are not on track to pass the third grade gate. We start sending that letter in kindergarten three times a year. And the letter says, this is exactly what we're going to do for your kid.

And that empowers parents with a lot more specific information than we normally give them. On the one level, it's accountability for all of the adults in the system. You know, educators and classrooms, they are committing to certain actions. It's also accountability in a sense for the parents. We have told you that there is a problem. It should not be a surprise if we get to the end of this process in third grade and your child does not pass to the fourth grade. It puts everybody on notice.

And it allows parents to go to their school and say, well, what happened with this? Did you give them this information, you know, did you give them these services that you said you were going to give them? And I think that's an important part of the system too. I want to get to some critiques because this is education policy, and so of course there are many and very loud criticisms. One criticism is that students that seem to make the leap in literacy in Mississippi don't retain that advantage several years later, that the fourth grade jump doesn't persist through eighth grade and twelfth grade.

Is that true and what do you make of it? Yeah, so where this critique comes from is the fact that if you look at our eighth grade NAEP scores, you don't see as aggressively an improvement line as you see with our fourth grade scores. And I think that this sort of fundamentally misunderstands both what Mississippi did as a state and also what the science of reading tells us. So the science of reading basically tells us there are two different parts. You have to have something called word recognition, which is what phonics helps you with. you know, and understanding of language, like, you know, how you speak the English language and what different words means. But then you also have to have comprehension. And that multiplied together is how you get reading comprehension. And what we were doing with the literacy-based promotion app and then all

of the science of reading stuff, we were focused on K-3 teachers getting that word recognition correct and helping to start lay a foundation for that language comprehension. And we didn't do anything at all for teachers between fourth grade and on up. We didn't teach them the science of reading. We weren't giving them professional development. You know, we weren't focused on them at all. And I think that there was this maybe overly optimistic belief that if we can solve word recognition, all the other things are going to fall in place. And kids will have better skills. And so then their reading comprehension will just naturally come along. And what we've recognized, I think, is that actually, no, the science of reading says there's this other part.

We need to be really focused on background knowledge, on vocabulary, and we have to start building students' understanding of the world so that as they get into more complex texts, they can comprehend those things. And that requires different things that we need to do in the middle grades that we weren't doing. And that's why our legislature in 2026 passed a new law, on doing exactly what we've done in K3, but for four, eight grade teachers and making sure that they get that training and they get that support. Because I think a lot of teachers in grades four through eight, you know, they think of themselves as content specialists. And they think,

you should already know how to read. I shouldn't have to be teaching you how to read. But some kids still need more help with word recognition. And then a lot of kids need a lot of background knowledge and a lot of vocabulary to make sense of complex text. And that's what the science reading tells us, and we better do something about it because it's not enough to just focus on every child or reader by fourth grade. We still have a job to do. And what I think critics don't quite understand is that both sides of that equation, what we were trying to do that was successful, but then also what more is required for kids to be successful at eighth grade and twelfth grade. Another criticism is that your progress represents a bit of a statistical mirage because Mississippi holds back struggling third graders,

which means that NAEP tests fourth graders that don't include the weakest students in that sample. And so there's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison when you're comparing. Mississippi scores to the scores of states that aren't holding back certain kids. How much would you say of Mississippi's progress comes down to its retention policy, in which case it might not be the case that you're teaching students faster? You're just holding back the weaker students and therefore benefiting from an unfair comparison. Yeah. So we've looked at this a couple of different ways because this criticism came pretty early on after we hit the national average in 2019, and then a couple of different people have brought it up, and it's been debunked. So I'll tell

you a couple of the reasons that we think that retention is not driving the success. So first of all, if you look at how the percentage of children that are retained in Mississippi today versus prior to the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, it's not that different. So, it's not that we are, you know, we haven't doubled the number of kids that we're retaining and we're not also, you know, some people have said we've disappeared kids from the sample, but the reality is that in the policy, you can't retain a kid more than twice. So all of these kids go to fourth grade. The question is whether or not they have stronger skills by the time that they go to fourth grade. I also think that people who make this criticism. They don't look at things like the fact that what is the purpose of retention.

If you do retention right, kids have better skills when they go on. That is the purpose. That is a feature, right? But it's not true that we are sort of hiding kids and then passing and then, you know, then they just never show up in the fourth grade sample. They do. They may show up a year later. But it's not a substantially different percentage. We also have something in our law called good cause exemptions. So we have some kids that actually don't make the minimum score to pass that pass anyway along with their age cohort if they qualify for one of these good cause exemptions. So they are kids who maybe have a disability and they've had multiple years of intensive reading intervention and they can get a good cause exemption and they can go on. Maybe their kids,

maybe they're English language learners and they haven't had two full years of instruction. in English, they get a good cause exemption and they go on. Some of our most vulnerable students who are most likely to struggle in reading actually get a good cause exemption and they move on. So when we're talking about kids who are retained, we're talking about kids who just really didn't get the content the first time. But we also give them three opportunities to take the assessment and pass it before fourth grade. So, you know, I think that when various people have looked at it, we've looked at things like has the average age changed from fourth graders who take the NAEP versus before we did this policy and the answer is no.

There's not really any sort of evidence that outside observers and outside experts have looked at that said, yeah, there's this statewide conspiracy to hide kids on the fourth grade NAIC that doesn't count for anything other than like state pride when you really think about it. Nobody's being held accountable for these NAEP scores. It doesn't really make sense. But I do think that it is an important thing to ask the question because we have so many examples of educational fraud that happen where, you know, you see a miracle. But this is again why I think it's important to look at that trajectory of reform in over time because you can really, this was not a spike right after we passed the Literacy-based Promotion Act or, you know, after the year that it was implemented. It's a long,

steady climb, and a lot of that happened before the first cohort of kids were retained. Rachel, two questions to close. First, there are dozens of states now that say that they're embracing the science of reading. But if, as you've told me, the science of reading is just a part of the Mississippi reforms, then that's not nearly enough. That's not empowering state education departments, it's not implementation, it's not accountability. What evidence would convince you 10 years from now that the rest of the country had actually learned the Mississippi lesson rather than just created another education policy fad? Well, I think the proof always has to be in the pudding. Did kids learn more?

Are kids reading at a higher level? Are they doing math at a higher level? Are they doing math at a higher level, specifically for the science of reading, our kids reading better. And I think that one of the questions that I always ask, when I look at these policies that are being passed across the country, is I say, who is responsible for making sure that this actually changes classroom practice? And how are you going to know that classroom practice has changed? And a lot of states, they sort of put this aspirational language in their law or their policy. Everybody's going to use the science of reading. That's going to be the standard in our state.

But then when you start asking those questions, they don't have any way of knowing whether or not people know the science of reading or doing the science of reading. And there's nobody whose responsibility it is to make sure that those things happen or will face any consequences if they don't. And I think that's what's going to separate sort of. of the wheat from the chaff in terms of who's serious about the cause of making sure that children learn to read. Because if you're not building into your system, an understanding of whether or not

this, you know, mandate from on high actually matters to teachers and kids in classrooms, then you're not going to get that outcome. And I find it hard to take you seriously. So here's something I'm worried about. I'm worried that maybe American education policy gets better, maybe teachers get better. But achievement still lags because of two things. One, continued distractions of smartphones and social media. And two, the fact that as of 2022, we have a technology in large language models that can just automate a lot of homework. You can automate a lot of essay writing, a lot of even complex math, that it might get harder

and harder for teachers to verify that students are learning rather than just prompting AI to produce the results that look like learning. So how concerned are you about the smartphone thing and the AI thing? Yeah. I would say I'm deeply concerned about what role technology is playing in schools. It seems like, you know, since I've been alive, that, because I grew up in the age of like, now we have the internet and now we have, you know, all of these new things, that every time there's a new technology that comes along,

you get people who are like, this is going to revolutionize everything and solve all our problems. And then other people who are like, no, it's going to be terrible. And we've fallen in the middle on some of those things where, but for the most part, ed tech has not lived up to its promises in education and really changing the way that kids experience. experience school. And I think the risk with all of these, with, you know, with smartphones and devices

in schools is the distraction factor, just like we have very clear evidence that if kids don't show up to school, they don't learn things. Well, if kids don't pay attention in school, they also don't learn things. And if we have technology that makes distraction really easy and it makes it harder for teachers to know if kids are actually paying attention, yeah, that's going to affect achievement. But also with I think AI, we have a lot of risks here with the idea that kids can cheat really easily, especially older kids, on things like take-home assignments and essays. And when we talk about reading specifically, we know that first of all, you have to do it to get better at it. You have to challenge yourself. It can be really hard.

You have to pay attention. You have to have stamina to get through a long passage. We also know that writing is an essential part of training the brain on how to read and engage with text, and that writing is a reflects thinking. And if we're outsourcing that to technology, then kids are missing the instructional value of having to learn to write. And although we are starting to see at ed tech products that are purpose-built AI products that may support, some of the aspects of the learning environment that are difficult for teachers to do, like things like, how do I give 30 kids in a class, quick feedback on whether or not their

paragraph really hits the mark for the prompt. If we can automate some of that through AI and give teachers a summary about here are the commonalities of what kids are struggling with in their writing, that could really help teachers. But if at the same time we're just letting kids go to chatbots, you know, we have all these risks that they're not doing the assignment. There's also security risks. There are safety risks. And I think with kids, we have to be cautious. It's, they shouldn't necessarily be on the frontier of everything that could, you know, be available to them on the internet or through a chatbot. We really have to think about what are the tool, what use are these tools to the process of education? Because it is a very human-centered, um,

you know, process for all of us. Education is one of the aspects where we know the relationship between two people, an adult and a student, is key to how much kids learn. And you can't just substitute technology for that. I very much agree. Rachel Cantor, thank you very much. Thank you.