https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/08/28/how-do-you-spell-mississippi/
Students here long had some of the lowest reading scores in the country — but over the past decade, something changed.
The Magnolia State’s revolution in reading instruction
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.
