Edited by Madelyn Bello, Rishi Chandra, Amelia Cantwell, and Owen Andrews
Since 2022, the proclaimed “Mississippi Miracle” has been plastered across big media headlines, unleashing a whirlwind of excitement and hope for the future of educational achievement in Mississippi. However, as a state historically low-ranking in education and long underserved, Mississippi has a much more complicated relationship with its elementary schools than “improved” rankings suggest. According to the Mississippi Department of Education, these historical gains have garnered immense national attention, with educational groups ranking Mississippi No. 2 in educational improvement in 2019, 2020, and 2021, yielding a prominent and hard-to-overlook growth within Mississippi’s educational system. Additionally, Mississippi has been ranked No. 2 for closing reading achievement gaps amongst differing socioeconomic groups. However, the most eye-catching ranking is a rise from 50th in 2013 to 16th in 2025 in education. From an outside perspective, these statistics are outstanding gains for a state that once had an average NAEP 4th grade reading score of 209 versus a national average of 221; however, the underlying question is how long these unusually rapid gains will last.
Some critics argue that the “Mississippi Miracle” is a result of selection bias, a process that has skewed the testing pool through only measuring the scores of the students transitioning into the fourth grade and leaving out the scores of those being retained. However, this argument does not sufficiently answer the gnawing question of how a state can sustain its educational gains and continue to push students toward their academic potential. That said, while the “Mississippi Miracle” may appear to be a distinct educational advancement on paper, the error of selection bias heavily discredits Mississippi’s immense educational “gains” and its ability to sustain them. School districts must provide additional educational services for students to properly prepare the next generation of Mississippians.
Before 2013, Mississippi’s educational standards were the bottom of the barrel. The state was ranked 49th out of 50 in reading according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). First administered in 1969, the NAEP is best known as the Nation’s Report Card and is often associated with how well a state’s education system performs based on test score outcomes. Before 2013, Mississippi consistently ranked near or at the bottom of the list largely due to chronic underfunding of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program created in 1997 and concentrated poverty in rural areas, which widened the literacy rate gap due to a lack of resources. Although Mississippi children were not reading at grade level, they still advanced to the next grade due to “social promotion,” which involves non-academic factors such as avoiding societal pressure and stigma around being held back. As a result, students fell further behind each year. However, the tide changed when the Mississippi state government passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) in 2013. Many education professionals claim the act drove the alleged “Mississippi Miracle.” The bill aimed to ensure that all Mississippi third-grade students read at or above grade level by providing advanced professional development for teachers, dedicated and targeted assistance to struggling readers, and, most importantly, held back third-grade students who did not pass Mississippi's reading assessment. While this policy prioritized research-based components of reading, such as phonemic awareness, reading fluency, and vocabulary, it also included a highly controversial aspect: it prevented students who failed to surpass threshold scores on the assessment from entering the third grade.
Critics claim this retention policy is key to debunking the “Mississippi Miracle.” Under this policy, third-graders who did not meet the score threshold were removed from the score distribution group and were not allowed to enter the fourth grade. By removing the most academically challenged students from the group, the average scores rose, painting a picture of an educational “miracle”. Educational Analyst Diane Ravitch notes that Mississippi has a higher retention rate than any other state. Citing the Mississippi State Department of Education, from 2018-19, 8% of all Mississippi K-3 students were held back, a rise from the 6.6% the previous year. In total, around 20-25% of all Mississippi students are held back due to retention rates, further fueling skepticism about the benchmark’s efficacy.
While purposefully skewing test-score groups to boost educational rankings might be appealing for a state’s publicity, it can have serious consequences for student retention. As seen in other states such as Louisiana, where retaining fourth graders increased dropout rates by five percentage points, and in North Carolina, where extreme retention has been associated with higher dropout rates and increased behavior issues, Mississippi could be the next victim. As state governments across the nation have implemented retention policies for third graders, studies have shown that retention raises students’ likelihood of dropping out of high school. Importantly, however, Mississippi does not have to fall subject to these long-term consequences. In 2021, the Education Trust conducted a meta-analysis of the long-term effects of retention and found that retention is beneficial only when students receive additional academic resources and support. Free, in-depth tutoring for all students falls directly into this category.
As a Founder and, now, Executive Advisor of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides tutoring services to underserved youth in Mississippi, I’ve witnessed the concrete academic advances that students can achieve through one-on-one tutoring—an approach that could be implemented within Mississippi school systems contingent on adequate funding and staffing. Many of my students came to their first session with Education Matters Tutoring afraid and nervous to tackle their dense homework of reading passages and vocabulary questions. Instead of letting my students read the passages in their heads, I encouraged them to read the questions aloud, then answer the questions I created. Over time, these students learned to answer comprehension questions confidently and grew more interested in reading. After weeks of consistent attendance, my students’ once-shy attitudes transformed into confidence that lit up the library, and their grades began to soar.
Education Matters Tutoring’s services were inspired by a model called high-dosage tutoring. This system features one-on-one small-group sessions with a limit of four students per tutor, high-quality educational materials aligned with the student’s classroom content, at least three 30+ minute tutoring sessions per week, and consistent tutor support. High-dosage tutoring is proven to be 20 times more effective than typical tutoring strategies for math and 15 times more effective for reading, moving the average student from the 50th to the 66th percentile. Additionally, a meta-analysis of nearly 100 tutoring trials found an overall pooled effect size estimate of 0.37 SD, the weighted average result of how much better tutored students did in their studies than similar students who weren’t tutored. This standard deviation is enough to roughly bring a student at the 20th percentile to the 32nd percentile. For a struggling student, these advances are crucial to furthering their academic development, as a student who once outscored only one in five peers would now outscore nearly one in three. These benefits extend to students most at risk of retention, as a 2024-25 randomized trial in Kansas City found that students who began the year “well below” grade level saw some of the largest reading gains through personalized, one-on-one tutoring. With additional in-person tutoring services, Mississippi districts not only improve these gains, but actively sustain them by catching learning struggles early and providing intensive recovery for struggling students.
The “Mississippi Miracle” is recognized as an educational triumph for a state that once had deplorable educational standards. However, the real issue lies in the mechanisms Mississippi lawmakers used through the LBPA to drive sharp educational gains in the classroom. These harmful mechanisms, notably retention, carry severe consequences, and the only way to address them is by providing tailored academic assistance that can sustain academic growth and prepare the next generation of Mississippi youth to flourish in the world.