Mississippi has seen substantial gains in fourth-grade reading and math scores over the past decade, following the implementation of stricter literacy standards and phonics-based instruction. The state's fourth-grade reading proficiency rose from 49th to 9th nationally between 2013 and 2024, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress data. These changes contrast with declining performance in states like California and Massachusetts that relaxed academic requirements.
In 2013, Mississippi introduced a reading fluency test at the end of third grade, requiring students to pass before advancing to fourth grade. Failure results in retention for up to two years. This policy, combined with a shift to phonics instruction—emphasizing letter-sound relationships over context clues—has contributed to the improvements. Phonics teaches students to sound out words systematically, unlike methods that encourage guessing based on pictures or surrounding text.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results for 2024 show Mississippi's fourth-grade reading scores climbing from 49th to 9th place nationwide, while math scores improved from last (50th) to 16th. When adjusted for factors like poverty and race, the state ranked first. The retention rate dropped from about 10% in 2018 to 7% in 2022, and participation in NAEP testing remained above the national average.
Critics, including statistics professor Howard Wainer, argue the gains are misleading because retained students do not take the fourth-grade test immediately, potentially inflating averages by excluding lower performers. Wainer stated, "It is a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores."
However, responses to this critique note that retained students eventually take the test after repeating third grade, contributing to long-term data. Journalist Kelsey Piper wrote, "A student that repeats the third grade does not conveniently vanish off the face of the earth. They just take third grade again, and then they move on to fourth grade. The state still tests them; they just do so a year later." Mississippi's progress has been steady over two decades, not a sudden jump.
By eighth grade, improvements are more modest: reading from 50th to 41st, math from 49th to 35th. Similar reforms in Louisiana and Alabama have yielded gains, with Louisiana's fourth-grade reading rising from 50th to 16th since 2019, and Alabama from 49th to 34th.
In contrast, California eliminated the eighth-grade algebra requirement around a decade ago, and San Francisco proposed an equity policy in 2023 allowing passing grades at 40% with unlimited test retakes. Massachusetts, after adopting Common Core in 2010 and removing MCAS graduation requirements in 2023, saw the portion of students meeting expectations fall from 50% to 42%, with failures rising from 11% to 18%.
