RUTHFULLY YOURS

Columbus, Miss. — The boy’s word is “lap.”

“Let’s sound it out with our finger spelling,” says his summer-camp counselor, counting the sounds with him on three digits: “lll . . . aaa . . . p.”

The boy, who just finished first grade and speaks in a whisper, begins finding letters on Scrabble-like tiles. Consonants are on blue tiles, vowels on yellow ones. He pulls out the blue “l” and then the yellow “a.” Struggling to finish the word, he chooses a third tile, a blue “b.” Not quite right.

Remember, “balloons go up and pigs go down,” the female counselor says, noting the different shapes of a “b” and “p.”

After his one-on-one, the boy joins the other campers on the lawn outside, where teams of kids in matching baby-blue camp shirts are competing in a relay race, with one kid passing a balloon over her head, the next passing it between his legs, and so on until the balloon reaches the end of the line. The last kid excitedly stomps on the balloon, popping it, and then reads the message on the slip of paper inside — “I can see the dolphin in the ocean” — before running to the front of the line and passing the next balloon over his head.

The scene on the lawn looks like any other summer camp around the country. But while fun and games are an important part of the experience, the 20 or so kids at “Camp LIT,” a program of the Mississippi University for Women, are here in late June for a more important reason: to become better readers.

During the one-week camp — a first for the university’s department of speech-language pathology — students between the ages of six and twelve are each paired with a graduate student trained in the Orton-Gillingham method of reading. This involves one-on-one therapy to work on phonic building blocks of reading: letters and sounds, digraphs and blends. Every component of the camp, even arts and crafts, has a literacy element.

“These are typical kids,” says Ashley Alexander, the clinical director of the department. “It’s just reading that is a struggle for them.”

It is this intense focus on what is known as the “science of reading” that has brought so much positive attention to the Magnolia State in recent years.

For decades, Mississippi has trailed the national pack in a variety of critical measures; the state has one of the highest rates of poverty in the nation, its infrastructure is lacking, and its health-care system is consistently ranked among the nation’s worst.

Until recently, its education system hadn’t fared much better. Mississippi students had long had some of the lowest reading scores in the country. In 2013, the state’s fourth-graders were 49th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report, known as the “nation’s report card.” A great majority of kids could not read proficiently.

But over the past decade, something changed. And Mississippi has shot up in the national rankings. In 2019, amid a generally dismal NAEP reading report, Mississippi was a bright spot. The state’s fourth-graders met the national average, and the state topped the nation in fourth-grade reading gains, rising to 21st. In 2022, post-pandemic, it held its rank. Gains were visible across demographic groups, with black and Hispanic fourth-graders in Mississippi now scoring higher than the national average for black and Hispanic students on the NAEP test.

“Learning to read is just not a choice,” former governor Phil Bryant, a Republican, tells National Review. “You might have a choice of learning to play the flute or learning to square-dance, but you must learn to read.”

Some have called it a miracle. Critics have alleged that Mississippi must be gaming the system — a charge that the state’s education leaders emphatically deny. What is undisputed is that over the past two decades, through a convergence of private advocacy and political coalition-building, Mississippi has revamped the way reading is taught.

The story begins more than two decades ago, when Jim Barksdale, a former CEO of Netscape and a native of Jackson, returned to his home state from California. He was troubled by the state’s education scores, its culture of low expectations, and the dispiriting narrative that had formed about Mississippi and its kids. So in 2000 he donated $100 million to create the Barksdale Reading Institute.

Also a former executive at FedEx, Barksdale had been a pioneer in that company’s use of data and standardization to track and deliver packages around the world. Kelly Butler, the Barksdale Institute’s most recent CEO, recalls his thinking: “He said, ‘If we can get a package from the middle of Manhattan to the middle of Tokyo in 48 hours, track it along the way, guarantee its safe arrival, we ought to be able to teach every child in Mississippi to read.’ ”

With a mission and money, the small staff at the institute set out to become experts on reading science. Research has shown that, unlike spoken language, reading — still a relatively new human development — does not come naturally to people. To learn to decode letters into words, people usually must receive instruction in phonics — the study of the sounds that letters make.

“It’s not new research — some of it is 40 years old — that has methodically looked at what are the things that good readers do,” Butler explains. “They decode accurately, they build fluency, and they have sufficient oral language to put meaning to what it is they’re reading.”

But phonics was at odds with the method of reading instruction that many teachers, in Mississippi and elsewhere, had learned: the “whole language” approach, which holds that kids will learn to read just by regularly seeing books and looking at the words in them. As Emily Hanford of American Public Media put it in a 2018 podcast series on reading science, “phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative.” Bryant confirms this. Phonics was seen as “this right-wing conspiracy” in the 1990s, he says.

After the whole-language approach was discredited as ineffective, its supporters tried to replace it with a middle-ground method called “balanced literacy.” Balanced literacy taught some phonics, Butler says, but it also instilled bad habits, urging kids to guess words based on pictures, context, or the first letter — a practice known as “cueing.”

According to Hanford’s podcast, a Barksdale study in the early 2000s found that Mississippi teacher candidates were getting only about 20 minutes of phonics instruction in their entire four-year program. In response, the institute’s staff hired dozens of reading coaches to begin training teachers in phonics education.

When Bryant was sworn in as governor in 2012, he too made improving Mississippi’s education system a priority. Just a year earlier, fully 78 percent of Mississippi fourth-graders had scored below proficient on the NAEP reading test. Bryant understood the challenges they were facing. As a child, he had struggled with dyslexia and repeated the third grade. It wasn’t until the fifth grade that he was diagnosed. “I wasn’t dumb,” he finally realized. “I wasn’t just going to be forever illiterate. I had a reading disorder.”

Once in office, he sought advice from Jeb Bush, who as Florida’s governor had carried out successful education reforms. And he brought together a coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, educators, advocates, and business leaders to develop new education policies. It included Barksdale and former Mississippi governor William Winter, a Democrat and a longtime education-reform advocate.

The state started screening kids for dyslexia. Charter schools were set up. In 2013, the Early Learning Collaborative Act established the state’s first state-funded pre-K program.

More controversial was the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, modeled after a Florida law. It included a ban on advancing students to fourth grade if they couldn’t pass a reading test. Bryant says he faced intense pushback from the media and from people who thought that making students — including a disproportionate number of minority students — repeat a grade would harm their self-esteem.

But the law was about more than holding kids back. Foremost, it was about identifying struggling readers and intervening early so they wouldn’t need to be held back. Under the law, students from kindergarten through third grade are screened several times a year, and schools must communicate with parents and propose strategies to help them learn.

Building on the Barksdale Institute’s earlier work, the Literacy-Based Promotion Act also funded reading coaches to work with teachers in their classrooms. “We were really ready to hit the ground running,” Butler says.

In 2013, the state hired Carey Wright, a Maryland educator, to be its new state superintendent. It was her job to implement the new policies, including the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. She says that she told her staff, “Look, we’re not going to talk about retention. All that does is upset kids, upset teachers, upset parents.” Instead, she explained to them, “we’re going to talk about prevention and intervention.”

Laurie Todd-Smith, a Bryant adviser and the former director of early-childhood research at the Barksdale Institute, says that the media painted a picture of “gloom and doom,” predicting that large numbers of third-graders would be held back and hurt by the law. But that wasn’t true. More kids are passed with good-cause exemptions than are held back, and the kids who are held back receive special reading instruction every day.

“Their whole experience in the repeating year is very different and intentional,” she says. “It’s not just throwing them in and saying, ‘Good luck next time.’ ”

In 2016, the state increased the reading score that third-graders needed to advance to fourth grade. Lawmakers also started requiring teacher candidates to pass a rigorous test to show that they could teach reading in a research-based manner.

Wright credits the state’s reading gains to the hard work of lawmakers and educators and their willingness to set high expectations for students and teachers. “It’s just been really wonderful” to have “changed some children’s lives forever,” she says. “That’s why we do this work.”

As noted above, not everyone has bought into the so-called Mississippi Miracle. In 2019, when the accolades started rolling in, critics began to question whether the gains were real.

Last month, Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik, citing the work of two bloggers, alleged that Mississippi had “gamed its national reading test scores.” The bloggers had noted that, while the state’s scores might have increased, there was still a large racial achievement gap, and the state’s eighth-graders weren’t seeing the same gains in NAEP reading scores as its fourth-graders were.

One of the bloggers, the former Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum, had claimed that Mississippi was inflating its scores by holding back about 9 percent of third-graders and keeping them out of the testing pool. When Drum added those scores back in — “a fairly easy estimate,” he wrote, though he did not explain his methodology — the state’s progress in reading “isn’t so miraculous after all.” Drum did not respond to National Review’s request for comment, but, to his credit, he recently walked back his criticism. In a mid-July blog post, titled “The Mississippi Reading Miracle Looks to Be Real After All,” he concluded, “Something really did happen in Mississippi. After the switch to phonics, their kids could read a lot better than before.”

Mississippi education leaders would agree, and they note that other attempted debunkings are hogwash as well. Students held back for a year don’t disappear; they typically progress to fourth grade the following year, and their reading scores are counted then. Mississippi leaders acknowledge that the racial achievement gap persists but emphasize that test scores have increased for all groups. And while they recognize that there is still work to be done to ensure that older students get the help they need, this does not negate the state’s progress with younger readers.

Some Mississippians suspect that the criticisms are due in part to stereotypes. “I think there are people who honestly don’t believe that these kids from Mississippi could do what they did,” Wright says.

The challenge now is to keep the momentum. The Barksdale Reading Institute closed at the end of June. When I stopped by its Jackson office, a nondescript warehouse space next to an auto-repair business, it was vacant. Butler notes that it was never meant to continue in perpetuity.

But its work will go on in important ways. Among the projects it’s handing off to other organizations are a Web-based partnership with PBS, to share with the rest of the world the reading knowledge it has developed, and a new Mississippi-based reading clinic to be operated with another nonprofit.

Back at the Mississippi University for Women, Alexander says that they intend to offer the summer reading camp again next year. There’s enough demand to fill a second week easily, and her department wants to be a good community partner. They also want to keep changing the narrative about the state.

“In movies and television shows,” Alexander says, “they have us portrayed as being very uneducated, that we can’t read and that we can’t write. We as Mississippians — we do feel that, and we do see that.”

And she adds, “We’re trying to change that, a little bit at a time.”