Ep 76. The Story Behind Mississippi’s Education Turnaround with Rachel Canter
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Canadian Podcasting Productions.
In this episode, Anna Stokke is joined by Rachel Canter, Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America's Schools Project and author of the report Inside the Mississippi Marathon. They explore how Mississippi transformed from one of the lowest-performing states in fourth grade reading and math to one of the highest-performing in the U.S., despite Mississippi being one of the poorest states.
They discuss the policies behind the turnaround, including growth-based accountability, early literacy initiatives, higher expectations for students, evidence-based instruction, and being transparent with parents. They also discuss how Mississippi improved education outcomes for some of the most marginalized students and what other jurisdictions can take away from Mississippi’s success. This episode is a must listen for educators, school leaders, policymakers, parents, and anyone interested in learning how sustained, evidence-based reform can improve student outcomes.
This episode is available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke
TIMESTAMPS [00:00:22] Introduction [00:04:51] Mississippi’s education system in the 90s [00:10:57] Holding underperforming schools accountable [00:14:25] Transforming accountability through A–F school grades [00:20:16] The Literacy-Based Promotion Act and the Science of Reading [00:28:07] Being honest with parents about student performance [00:32:09] Third-grade retention: The controversy and the impact [00:39:44] The three Ps of reform: Policy, People, and Persistence [00:41:33] Mississippi's gains in reading and math [00:49:41] Why accountability is difficult but important [00:52:24] The political will behind Mississippi's turnaround [00:55:39] Can other places replicate Mississippi's success? [00:58:26] Final thoughts
[00:00:04] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host. Welcome back to another episode of Chalk & Talk.
Today I'm joined by Rachel Canter, Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America's Schools Project and founder of Mississippi First. She's authored a recent report, Inside the Mississippi Marathon, which tells the story of how Mississippi's fourth grade reading and math scores went from among the worst in the United States to among the best, despite being the poorest American state. Some people have referred to this as the Mississippi Miracle, but really there probably are no miracles in education, and the rise more likely comes down to implementing the right policies and hard work.
So I was excited to find out what's actually going on in Mississippi. Rachel takes us back to the 1990s when low expectations and a belief that poverty made improvement impossible were holding the state back. We then talk about specific policies that changed things, such as growth-based accountability and the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which required things like universal screening and mandatory letters home to parents for children who couldn't read at a minimum grade level.
Rachel makes the case that Mississippi's turnaround came down to political will and sticking with evidence-based approaches. There's a lot to take away from this episode, and it's a great listen for educators, parents, and policymakers. I hope you like it.
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That's Teachers Talk Radio. Now on to the episode. I am delighted to be joined today by Rachel Cantor.
She is the Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America's Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. She holds a bachelor's degree in English and History from the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In 2008, she founded Mississippi First and served as its Executive Director for over 16 years.
She is the author of the recent report, Inside the Mississippi Marathon. And I'm looking forward to hearing all about education in Mississippi today. Welcome to the podcast, Rachel.
Thank you. So glad to be here. So you recently wrote an Atlantic piece based on your policy report, and it opens with the line that nothing has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the Mississippi Miracle.
For context, from 1998 to 2024, fourth grade reading and math scores in Mississippi rose from among the worst in the U.S. to among the best. And Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. So adjusting for demographic factors like poverty, Mississippi is actually in first place. But let's go back to before all of this.
Where was Mississippi back in the late 1990s? And what was the mindset driving policy at that time?
[00:04:51] Rachel Canter: I think it will come as no surprise because what most people know about Mississippi is that we are first in bad things. And back in the 90s, Mississippi was in fact last or among the lowest performing states in the country on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which is what we call the nation's report card. It measures reading and math proficiency in fourth and eighth grade.
And Mississippi was down there at the bottom. People didn't really bat an eye. We had been at the bottom, as I say in the report, for the entirety of my lifetime up to that point.
We were kind of the national punchline, actually, about being last. And the mindset of a lot of our leadership in Mississippi at the time was, well, it's inevitable. There's nothing we can really do about it.
We have a lot of poor kids. We have a lot of kids who are racial minorities, particularly black kids in our state. And demography is destiny.
And we cannot actually improve because of this. And I even heard people say things like, if we just got rid of the poorest region in our state, we'd be middle of the pack. And it was a real attitude of defeatism and a real attitude that didn't believe in what children were capable of learning.
And that played out on policy in really bad ways for kids.
[00:06:20] Anna Stokke: Yeah, that's kind of depressing, really, that attitude. But I think it's not uncommon. So you're talking about the state leaders, the local leaders, they actually thought that kids were too poor to make progress.
And that belief really shaped everything. And you actually mentioned also in your article that as a result, the state set abysmally low standards for students. So what does that mean?
Like, what kind of abysmally low standards?
[00:06:48] Rachel Canter: When you looked at what our kids were expected to know and be able to do in every grade, in the late 90s, we started developing, like many states in the United States, we didn't start developing state standards for learning until the 90s. And there was this whole movement, the standards movement in the United States, where states started to develop them. And when Mississippi did that, we had fairly low expectations of what kids would be capable of learning.
So we didn't expect them on those standards to learn a lot. And if you go back and look at national reviews of standards from the time, there's sort of some mixed reviews about how low the standards were in Mississippi. But one of the things that I describe in the paper is that we were also starting down the road of trying to measure those standards with the earliest version of state assessments.
And our first state assessment, which was called the Mississippi Curriculum Test, set a really, really low bar. We had standards that didn't expect very much of kids to begin with. And then the way we assessed on those standards was a really low bar for performance.
And what that meant is that kids rose to the low level of expectations that we set for them. And then everybody would act shocked that kids didn't know anything when, in fact, we had not attempted to teach kids enough content that they would be able to perform well on either a state or national assessment. And it was just part of this mindset, like, we can't raise standards, we can't expect more of kids, we can't expect more of teachers because we don't think they're capable.
[00:08:26] Anna Stokke: That's crazy. But at the same time, the NAEP, though, is across the entire U.S., right? That's right.
That's going to measure a certain standard. What you're saying is the standards in the state of Mississippi were set lower than the NAEP standards. Is that true?
[00:08:43] Rachel Canter: Yes. And this is actually a common thing across the United States because the National Assessment for Educational Progress was created in the 90s. But it really wasn't until the early 2000s that states were required to take it every two years, which was a change that came as part of No Child Left Behind.
And until then, it was voluntary. But most states started to participate at some point in the 90s. But every state is allowed to set its own learning standards and its own bar for rigor of what performance means.
And then the NAEP had this national viewpoint about what that should be. But the gap between what Mississippi expected of students and what NAEP expected of students was huge. And some people have referred to that as the honesty gap.
And I think that's a really apt term because, in fact, we looked a lot better on our state assessment than we did compared to other states in the country because we had such a huge gap between what we expected of kids and what was actually sort of a nationally competitive bar for performance. And this drove how we did everything. Because if you're telling yourself, oh, you're fine, you don't really have it, not only you're fine, you're fine and you can't do any better, then you're not going to have that drive to want to make changes.
[00:10:05] Anna Stokke: Yeah, definitely. I mean, generally, that's an issue in education. People aren't going to rise to a bar higher than what we expect of them.
The teachers aren't probably going to teach more than what's expected of them in most cases, and students don't generally rise above the bar we set for them. That's just kind of human nature. But let's talk about when what's called the miracle, which I know you have a problem with that term, and we're going to bring that up as well.
But this process that would later be called a miracle, which it's commonly referred to in the media, this began in around 2008. And you write that it started with confronting chronically underperforming schools. So what happened there?
What consequences would underperforming schools face?
[00:10:57] Rachel Canter: So we started to, as a state, have a process of what we called an accreditation process for schools for a really long time. We started in the early 90s and we were essentially looking at different metrics. There were not a whole lot of consequences tied to it.
It was really more of a transparency thing. We looked at demographic information, teacher information, and then there were some student outcome data. But our state takeover process was really in the 90s around, are you financially found as a school district and are there no health and safety issues?
Over the 90s, the legislature started to think about, well, what if we also required school districts and schools to reach our very minimal bar for educational advancement in order to continue to operate with business as usual? So the legislature started to tweak around the edges with state policy around that. But the problem was that they weren't really taking strong enough measures.
And we had a number of school districts on those early assessments that we started in the 90s and into the early 2000s, especially after No Child Left Behind happened and we started with state assessments and we started with No Child Left Behind process that had just had very, very, very low performance rates that had been low for a decade. And our state leaders finally decided we should do something about this problem. It was an era of, first of all, No Child Left Behind where there was a lot of focus on low performing schools.
And we had a school improvement list required by the federal government that just kept growing and growing and growing. And then on top of that, there were conversations in states like Louisiana, which is our neighbor, where after Hurricane Katrina, you saw a lot of state takeover and chartering of schools, especially in the city of New Orleans. And our leaders in Mississippi often look at other states around us, our immediate neighbors, to take their cues.
And they were looking at Louisiana and they're looking at these schools that have had chronically very low performance and saying, well, maybe we should try some of these strategies. And so they came together to pass a bill around. We are going to create our own recovery school district and these school districts that are just really, really, really low.
We are going to put them in this recovery school district, not because of financial troubles, not because of health and safety violations, but because of their very low performance, which was a shift in mindset. And we are also going to shift our mindset that our job with these low performing schools is not to get the car out of the ditch and put it on the road, but to actually make progress. But because it was really around these chronically underperforming schools, it was a very narrow, at first a very narrow, this is the state intervention, the worst of the worst of the worst, we're going to try to do something about.
It was not this bigger project for more schools and statewide improvement.
Anna Stokke (14:04 - 14:25)
OK, and so let's talk a bit about the A to F letter grades. My understanding is these letter grades were implemented in 2012 and that was a turning point, I think, in your mind is what I gathered from reading your work. Why do you think this mattered so much?
So first of all, I guess to explain it and then tell us why it mattered so much.
Rachel Canter (14:25 - 19:00)
So Mississippi, like I said, it had been rating schools for a while. And when No Child Left Behind came along, it said you have to rate schools specifically based on student outcomes and not other things. So Mississippi bifurcated our system.
We put all of the compliance oriented, do you have licensed teachers stuff in the accreditation process? And then we created an accountability system and an education policy. When we say accountability system, we mean a rating system for schools.
That's typically what we mean when we say accountability. And the rating system that we created at that time was really opaque. It included things like proficiency on state assessments, which again was a really low bar.
It had an early growth measure, but that growth measure was based on do students in your same demographic profile, do you perform better or worse than the average? And that was whether or not you meet growth. So it was possible for if every student in your demographic was actually declining in performance and you just declined less, that you would have, quote unquote, met growth.
And then it also had a high school completion component, which is not graduation. It also gave you credit for having students that passed the GED. But this was our accountability model.
And we had these very opaque categories for how we described schools. And they went all the way from star, which was the highest, all the way down to failing. And then they had like a variety of terms in between.
And if you were a parent and you saw that your school had been rated, say, successful from the state, you might have thought, that's great. But in fact, successful was the middle category. And then there were four categories like below successful all the way down to failing.
Well, one of the things that when we did that state takeover law called Children First, it did was it tied that rating to whether or not you were eligible for state takeover. So if you were failing under the system, you could be eligible for state takeover. And state policymakers started to realize, hey, the accountability model is actually really important.
It's important if it measures the right things, because now there are real consequences tied to it. And everybody disliked it. It was complicated.
There was points, there were statistical calculations. And we got the bright idea originally from Florida that we should make this a much more transparent system focused on the right things. Because if we are going to say to school districts, we will take you over for poor performance, it should be based on something meaningful that they could actually work towards improving.
In 2012, we just said we're going to change the labels. We're going to go from these seven descriptive categories that don't really mean anything to A through F, because everybody knows what an A rated school district would mean, what a C rated school district would mean, and what an F rated school district would mean. But we knew that wasn't enough because there were problems with how you got that letter grade.
And that's when we started to change how you got to your letter grade to base it on not just proficiency, which we were also at the same time raising the bar for what proficiency meant, but a measure of growth that really measured did you move from one year to another, not based on your demographics, but based on the actual pathway to proficiency. And we put in an extra emphasis for kids in the lowest 25 percent of performance. And we gave schools extra credit if they moved kids from being proficient to advanced or if they kept kids being advanced.
So we were giving schools credit for how they moved whatever population of students they had. And that reframed what schools were in the business of, because one of the criticisms of No Child Left Behind was that it was focused on proficiency alone, which meant schools focused on kids right around proficiency and sort of forgot about everybody else, whether they were very high or very low. And our accountability model is still going to be tied to these consequences.
So it really became something that people didn't necessarily like, but something that they were really motivated by because they wanted to be able to say to their community, we're an A or B rated district. They did not want to go have to say to their community, this is why we got a D this year or this is why we got a C this year. And because of the way that the accountability model was restructured, it meant that communities with lots of different types of populations could actually find a path to being a B rated district, when in the past that would have been difficult for them.
Anna Stokke (19:00 - 19:13)
So essentially, the idea is measuring progress, right? Instead of looking at how the percentage of students that are at proficient, what was improvement? Are these schools improving?
Is that how you'd sum it up?
Rachel Canter (19:14 - 19:54)
Yes. So it was the balance between because prior to this, we really had accountability systems in the United States that focused solely on proficiency. And schools kept saying, I can move kids really far away and not get them to proficiency if they're coming too far behind.
And we really needed to give schools credit for the hard work they're doing, while at the same time not losing sight of proficiency, because ultimately that is the meaningful indicator for a parent. When a child graduates high school, you don't say to the parent, yeah, they don't actually know any content, but they really improved. That's acceptable when they're younger.
But the goal is always proficiency. So if we're always moving kids along, we're eventually going to get there.
Anna Stokke (19:54 - 20:15)
That's kind of the theory of action here. OK, got it. Absolutely.
Becoming proficient and being able to do stuff is what prepares you for future success in academics. We should talk about Mississippi's famous Literacy-Based Promotion Act. Can you talk about that?
My understanding is that was implemented in 2013.
Rachel Canter (20:16 - 25:37)
That was a law that was passed in 2013. I think you should think about Mississippi's story as being, we had to first reset the fundamentals of education before we could talk about what's going on in the classroom. And resetting the fundamentals is things like, what do we expect children to know and be able to do?
That means we have to increase our learning standards. How are we going to measure that in a rigorous way? That means we need to raise our bar for proficient performance.
How are we going to transparently report that information to the public? That's the accountability rating system. What are we going to do if schools don't get there?
That's the consequences around state takeover and other interventions that our State Department of Education did at the time. But then the question becomes, what happens if schools actually don't know what to do to improve performance for kids? What should we be doing as a state to give them the training, the resources, the support to do the evidence-based things in classrooms that will lead to better performance?
And that's where you start to get the conversation around things like literacy and the science of reading and pre-K, which we also passed a bill in the same year for pre-K. And we focused on reading for a variety of factors. One is because reading is so fundamental to learning in so many other ways.
And Mississippi had historically high rates of illiteracy, and that was a huge problem to people. We also had a lot of energy around reading in our state. We had, for a long time, different literacy experts in our state.
There was the Barksdale Reading Institute that had been founded in 2000. There were literacy efforts at the University of Mississippi. So people had been thinking about it.
And when Mississippi started going, OK, we're going to make different choices, we're going to make different choices about standards, about assessments, about accountability. What else do we need to do? Literacy was obviously like a big thing that we were concerned about.
And again, we took a page from Florida where they had passed a reading retention policy in the early 2000s when Jeb Bush was governor there and had seen some success. And our legislature really felt almost desperate. You know, we are willing to try.
So the Literacy-Based Promotion Act doesn't do what a lot of people think it does. It doesn't, for example, define the science of reading or mandate that it be used in pre-K three classrooms. What it does is it says you will not be promoted to fourth grade unless you meet a minimum level of reading proficiency.
And we actually raised that bar in 2019 for kids. But at first it said minimal level of proficiency. We are going to require every school district in the state to screen children three times per year for reading difficulties and report to parents if their child is underneath grade level, wherever that bar is in that given year, send them a letter explicitly telling them your child is behind.
And we're going to do that every year until we get to third grade. And then if a child does have to be retained, here are all the things that are required. It was really around the process for how we were going to measure, determine, respond if children had reading difficulties.
And I have this provision that said for schools that are in the lowest quintile of performance in the state, the State Department of Education is going to come up with a reading intervention program for them. And that one paragraph turned into what we now think of as Mississippi's literacy model because the State Department of Education said, well, what's in the law is not enough. We need to require people to do the science of reading because that is what evidence says is going to help kids not be retained in third grade.
And so they decided we're going to have this structure. We're going to roll out training, resources, support, coaching, all these things. We're going to target the neediest schools in the state.
But we're going to make it available to everybody else. And because of all this larger structure of accountability, people worried about the assessments, the transparency, other school districts, even if they weren't on that list of lowest performing, started to say, well, if that's working, I should try it, too. And this is how Mississippi got compliance across the state, even though the mandate was not for the science of reading in every single classroom.
But we got huge compliance. And then we started over time figuring out how to evolve that. OK, we need to raise the bar for what's required.
OK, we need to require teachers to take a licensure exam proving they know the science of reading before they can teach in pre-K through three. We need to talk to our higher ed about what they're teaching when aspiring teachers go through college. We need to do individualized reading plans when we figure out the kids have learning difficulties on these screeners so that we have a structured process for what we're doing intervention wise.
And we need to talk about curriculum. And we just kept iterating and iterating. And the Literacy Based Promotion Act was really the catalyst for it.
But the state did not say, OK, we're done after we pass the law. And I think that's one of the things that a lot of people don't understand about the process, because it was really more of a continuous improvement system and mindset than it was. We're going to do this.
We're going to send out the press releases. We're going to take the nice picture with the governor and then we're going to go home. Because the goal was children reading.
Anna Stokke (25:38 - 25:48)
So backing up on a couple of things, three assessments a year. So that's like universal screening in reading. Right.
How long did those take? They don't take more than an hour.
Rachel Canter (25:49 - 26:26)
Now they are computerized assessments. This was also one of the things the state did to ensure quality and was required by the law. There was a reading panel of people that chose which screeners met the bar for quality that you could use.
And if you were lowest performing, the state said you will use this one. And if you were not lowest performing, you got a choice. But they were really tight on what made that list.
And even though the law said reading, school districts are also required to do it by the State Department in math. So we do screening and reading and math three times a year in every school district in the state of Mississippi.
Anna Stokke (26:27 - 26:31)
When you say an hour, do you mean an hour for a whole class or an hour per student?
Rachel Canter (26:32 - 27:12)
They take it all as a whole class. It's not one on one screening. It is a whole class assessment.
Obviously, when you're talking about assessment in pre-K or in K, that's going to look different than assessments in for fifth or sixth graders. And so there was a lot of conversation about how do we make sure this is developmentally appropriate. And the assessment for kindergarteners, for example, they have to be able to click things, use the mouse to click on things or use a touchscreen to click on things because the screener, it's not a one on one assessment with an adult.
It is a valid and reliable computerized assessment and a child can self-take.
Anna Stokke (27:13 - 28:06)
It doesn't even take that long and probably had a huge impact. I just want to point that out because one of the things we hear sometimes in Canada is there's pushback against things like giving these screeners because people will say that it's going to take too much time. The teachers maybe don't want to spend the time on that, but that actually isn't much time at all.
And it's going to have a huge impact for kids and on closing gaps in the classroom. So I think this is an important thing to point out. And I want to talk about the parent piece because I find that really interesting that if parents, if their children were not able to read, if they were behind that the school was required to send a letter home to parents, this is probably going to have a huge impact.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Why is that accountability to parents so important and impactful?
Rachel Canter (28:07 - 31:06)
I think a lot of parents assume if they don't hear anything from the teacher, it must be OK. And they also assume that if the grades look OK, they must actually have learned whatever it was they need to learn. And in reality, those two things are often not true.
Kids can be really far behind and their parents have no idea. Grades are not always a good reflection of whether or not kids know grade level material. And the screeners really provide an outside check on the system to keep everybody honest.
So they really serve two purposes. The first purpose is for teachers. We're going to get baseline data for every single child in your class.
And in kindergarten, we are going to know that we've got several years to move you forward. But the goal is to make sure that by the end of the year, because we're going to test two more times by the end of the year, that you have made enough progress to be ready for the next grade. Teachers really can use that data for their instruction.
But for parents, it really says here it gives them an immediate knowledge in a very clear way. At the beginning of the year, your child is behind where they should be. And then you get something halfway through the year.
If it still says your child is behind where they should be, then you as a parent start to go, well, wait a minute. You know, maybe this is not what the teacher is telling me. I didn't know.
I thought it would be fine. They started behind. Maybe that's OK, but they're still behind.
And then they get it at the end of the year. It really provides parents the information to advocate for their own children in a way that I don't think we always give parents quality information about where their children are going to be. And one of the things that was really important to all of us was, hey, if we're going to retain kids at the end of third grade, that is a really strong measure.
It cannot be a surprise to any parent or any child that they are behind and have been behind. We need to send the warning signal every year. And we can't just do it at the beginning of the year and just kind of leave it alone.
We got to do it continuously throughout this process because that's the only way that we're all going to be honest with each other about what progress we're making and actually be track whether or not we're doing it. That's how change happens. That's how progress happens.
And we can't be afraid of telling the truth to each other. And we can't be afraid of telling the truth to parents. They have a right to know whether or not their kids are ready for the next grade level, are learning throughout the year.
And I think we took a stance that was essentially, we're going to stop this process of looking good to each other for the sake of looking good to each other, because that is not helpful for children. And that is why we're last. And we don't want to be last anymore.
Anna Stokke (31:07 - 32:08)
Yeah, I 100 percent agree with you. And I think it's something a lot of parents realize maybe later that some of those report cards, they just weren't accurate. And, you know, we all want to think our kids are doing well, but it doesn't help if we think that and it's not true.
Right. Like parents, they should be their important partners in the education system. And schools absolutely need to be honest with parents because they need to be able to advocate for their kids.
And you can't advocate if you don't know. We should talk about the holding kids back because that would be controversial. I could imagine that that was extremely controversial.
So if children were not ready, if they were not reading by the end of third grade at an adequate level, they were going to be held back. First of all, I'm surprised that was implemented, that there wasn't huge pushback. So let's hear a bit about the pushback and let's hear about actually were a lot of children held back.
Rachel Canter (32:09 - 38:20)
Yeah. So the bill was first introduced with this literally in the title Literacy Based Promotion Act, which means if you don't pass the literacy test, you will not be promoted. People were very upset about it.
A lot of people were very upset about it. It really was controversial in our legislature because people said, well, and they had all sorts of reasons for why they didn't want it. There was some maybe mixed research about the what happens to children after they're retained, whether or not it is helpful or harmful to children.
There was some evidence at the time from Florida that if even if it wasn't helpful, it was not harmful because people were really concerned about, well, if we hold them back, that's going to decrease their motivation for school. It's going to impact their self-esteem and then they'll do worse over time. And I think the way that we looked at it was, well, it is important whether or not it's harmful.
And if we truly believe it would, the harm would outweigh any sort of benefit, then maybe this isn't a good idea. But we didn't have solid evidence that it was harmful. What we already knew was harmful was what happens to children if they get passed along in school and they have no skills.
They are either going to fail at a later grade or they are going to drop out of high school or they're going to get a diploma and have no ability to transition into further education or career or whatever pathway they choose in life because they didn't have strong enough skills. And so we were looking at it as, well, what's the alternative? Because right now, children do really poorly, whether they pass or not, they do really poorly in our state.
We have to do something. But the point wasn't really the retention. The point was, how is the retention going to cause the urgency around what we do differently to prevent children from failing?
What are we going to do differently? And originally in the law, it said a minimal level. So at the time, we had four categories of performance on our state assessment, and you had to just be above the minimal level.
It wasn't you had to be grade level. It was you have to be above the minimum level. So that meant that we were just looking at retaining children who had the worst skills, very low skills.
And so that was part of the conversation. Now, there were a lot of people who said, well, we don't fund schools enough. We can't expect them to teach kids to read unless we provide a coach, a reading coach for every single classroom across the entire state, which would have been a very expensive proposition.
Then we can't possibly do this. And the legislature essentially said, no, we're going to do it anyway. We think that this will light a fire under our entire system and get people focused on the cause of literacy.
Now, we did have something we called good cause exemptions. And other states that have reading retention policies also have good cause exemptions. But those exemptions are so broad that it makes the whole policy meaningless.
Our exemptions were pretty strict. So, for example, if you were a student with a disability and it was inappropriate for you to take a state assessment, you could get a good cause exemption and be promoted and not be retained because of the reading policy. You were an English language learner and had fewer than two years of English under your belt.
You could not be retained. If you were a student with disability and you had been provided intensive reading instruction for two years, but you had to attempt the test, but you still couldn't pass it after three times because everybody in the state was allowed. There was one test and then there were two retakes.
So if you still couldn't pass it after the third retake, then we look at do you qualify for one of these good cause exemptions? And if you don't, then you're retained. So people thought at first one of the fears was we're going to have a third of kids.
We're going to retain a third of kids. And in reality, we worked our butts off and the number of kids that were actually retained that first year was far, far lower than what people thought it was going to be in the first year. It was around maybe seven or eight percent.
And then it declined substantially every year after that. And then Mississippi looked at the system and said, you know what, we are doing such a good job. We think we can make it a little bit more rigorous how much you have to know to pass this test.
And so they made it, we moved to five levels of achievement, but they moved up the bar so that you had to be above the lowest two levels. So you had to be in the approaching proficiency range in order to pass the assessment. And in the first year that we did that, the retention rate did spike.
It spiked around nine percent. That was the highest it ever was. That was in 2019 for third graders.
You may recall that something happened in 2020, which was the pandemic. That set of third graders never took a fourth grade assessment because we had the pandemic. And there's been a lot of chatter about whether or not this retention policy is actually the cause of our success in the sense that we gamed the system in some way.
And if you look at the data behind that, there's not really rigorous evidence that that is, in fact, what was going on because, first of all, the retention rate was far lower than what people bandy about. And second of all, all of the kids who are retained eventually go on to fourth grade. They cannot be retained more than twice.
So when you're retained and then you go on, the hope is that you have stronger reading skills. That is the point of retention. The point of retention is you get an extra year.
If they go on with stronger reading skills after an extra year, we have achieved the goal of retention. Right. In addition to all the prevention efforts that we've been doing all along with everybody.
But it's not true that kids magically disappear because of our policy. They don't disappear. They're still there.
And most of them go on to fourth grade on time.
Anna Stokke (38:20 - 38:33)
Yeah. So, I mean, it's not a matter of gaming the system. But I imagine it provided a lot of incentive, which is something that was needed and has obviously had a pretty big impact.
Rachel Canter (38:34 - 39:24)
When I think about the retention policy, I think that the most important impact it had was the impact around how seriously we took the job prior to the third grade assessment. Because everybody from the State Department down had this mindset that this is not something that just happens at the end of third grade. This is something that begins in pre-K that we're doing all the way up until third grade.
And we are going to do screening. We're going to tell parents we're going to do new curriculum. We're going to do real intervention process when kids have reading difficulties.
We're going to do all of these things because the goal is to retain as few students as possible. And that is really the impact that the retention policy had was the way that we completely shifted our mindset about what our job was pre-K through three.
Anna Stokke (39:25 - 39:43)
You identify what you call the three Ps of reform, policy, people and persistence. Before we move on to the results and talking about reframing the miracle, are there any other details that you want to add about the three Ps at this point before we move on?
Rachel Canter (39:44 - 41:06)
When I talk about in the report, this framework for reform, it wasn't that we did one magical policy. It was that we did a variety of policies that fit together in a coherent way and reinforced each other. It was a system of incentives, support and consequences that made coherent sense.
And it took time to build that system. This was part of the persistence of it. We didn't do it in one legislative session.
We didn't do it in two legislative sessions. We didn't do something and then turn around and throw it out the window and try something new. We kept going and building, building, building, building over time.
And that's part of that persistence. And the people in that system who were in the legislature, in the state department, in external organizations like mine, the reading experts, all these different people coming together with this singular vision in mind, like we're creating a system together. I think that's really important.
You know, when they see these educational turnaround stories or really any turnaround story, they think of one magical human who did the whole thing. With their one magical set of beans in their pocket that nobody else has. And that's really not what this story is.
And that's why I don't call it a miracle. That's why I call it a marathon.
Anna Stokke (41:06 - 41:32)
There really are no miracles, especially in education. People like to think there are. That's why I think fads are so pervasive in education.
Everybody wants that golden thing that's going to make things really easy. But there isn't. It's always just a lot of hard work and doing the right thing.
But we should talk about the results. So how are Mississippi students doing now? And what about poor students or students with disabilities?
Rachel Canter (41:33 - 45:30)
Between 1998 and 2019, which was the year before the pandemic, Mississippi had this slow, steady, long-term rise to the national average in both fourth grade reading and fourth grade math. And then in eighth grade reading, we did a little bob, but it mostly trended upward. And in eighth grade math, actually, our results are very similar to our results in reading, where we didn't get all the way to the national average, but we substantially closed the gap between us and the rest of the nation.
And in that success, when you go and you break down the data, one thing that you often see, especially at a school district level, when you see a high-performing school district, when you look under the hood of those average test scores, you see wealthy students doing really well and poor students doing poorly, but the average looks OK. That is not what Mississippi's story is. Mississippi's story is a story of shifting the curve literally for every subgroup of students.
So whether you're looking at economically disadvantaged students or students with disabilities, students in racial minorities, they're all making progress. They're all meeting the national average for their peers before even the statement, the national average with the country. And then they're beginning to exceed their peers nationwide.
And this is why when you adjust for demographics, we do so well, because we moved the needle for all kids, not just white, wealthy kids in suburbs. It wasn't that we were knocking it out of the park with the 75th percentile and then the 10 percent is going in the wrong direction. And that is if you look at the national data, that's what our national data looks like, where kids in the 90th percentile, maybe they're not improving, but they're not backsliding.
But then you have this huge backslide for kids at the lower percentiles. And that a lot of that can be masked when you're just looking at average performance post pandemic. Of course, like many other states like the country, Mississippi had a dip.
Now, we did not have a dip in fourth grade reading. I think this is one of the things that's very remarkable about our success is that we actually just stood still in fourth grade reading in the pandemic year. And I know that I was not alone in holding my breath for those 2022 data, because we all sort of knew in Mississippi that if we took a huge step backwards, people would say it was a fluke.
And if you look at the data from 2019 to 2022, it is a small like scale score wise. It's a small decline, but it's actually not statistically significant. And we haven't yet gotten to statistically significant improvement, but we've started to trend back in the right direction as of 2024 in math that we had a little bit of a sharper dip, but we've had a sharper turn upward.
So we are also probably hopefully if we stay on the same trajectory, going to start exceeding the national average in math as well in fourth grade. And we have a similar story in eighth grade reading where we stood still. We did not decline and the country has continued to sharply decline.
And then in math, that similar dip and come back up. We are all waiting to see because in Mississippi, we really do use the NAEP as a check on ourselves. Is our state assessment giving us the right signal?
Have we pegged our proficiency bar where it needs to be? Are we working as hard as we need to be? We think that the NAEP gives us that quality of information.
And, you know, if the 2026 test scores come back, they've been testing since January. If they come back and they show a dip, everybody in Mississippi is going to say, what did we do wrong? We got to get back on track.
And it's that continuous improvement mindset that I think is what we built above and beyond anything else is this feeling of we have the power to change whether or not kids learn things. And we have to do the work. It's not a question of who our kids are.
It's a question of how we adults respond.
Anna Stokke (45:31 - 45:47)
And you mentioned math. So we always hear about reading Mississippi, huge gains of reading. So what about math?
What kind of gains has Mississippi seen in math? And did the reforms have anything to do with math or were they all reading focused?
Rachel Canter (45:48 - 48:40)
One of the things that I often like to talk about is math because there's been so much focus on literacy and people look at our fourth grade literacy scores and then they look at our eighth grade reading scores and they say, well, the strong improvement doesn't continue in eighth grade. So the fourth grade must not be real. Or you have a retention policy for literacy.
So the fourth grade data must not be real. And I always say to them, have you seen our math gains? Because in some ways, our math scores are more impressive than our reading scores.
They continue through eighth grade and they've been strongly improving over that time period. And even though the Literacy-Based Promotion Act does not talk about math, we have substantially shifted the way that we teach math in the state of Mississippi. And it really started with those learning standards.
It was very clear, if you look at what we required of students back in the late 90s into the early 2000s, that it was just a very low bar. That what we expected of math for kids in Mississippi was nowhere close to what kids in, say, Massachusetts were expected to know at eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, anywhere. The level of algebra that they were expected to know, it was just not comparable.
And we were also using very basic, we weren't doing word problems, for example, or multi-part questions on our state assessment. It just wasn't very complex. And my organization heavily supported school districts in trying to manage the shift to Common Core.
And we worked with math teachers, actually, in some school districts. And one of the things that some of the math lead teachers told us about was like, they would have to sit down and work math problems with their colleagues to make sure that they understood the math so that they could explain it to kids. Because we don't require enough math for elementary educators to get their certification until you really get into the content-based instruction in high school.
But we're setting the foundation for whether or not kids can do math at a higher level in the elementary years. So I think that really, when you look at the math data, this is the power of standards, assessment, accountability, curriculum in math. And Mississippi woke up and realized, hey, we need to focus on math too.
And we had a math pilot program for the last couple of years doing math coaching in a similar way we've done reading coaching. This year passed a big bill in the legislature to start a math initiative comparable to our initiative in literacy. But I really think that there have been seeds of this all along, because like I said, when the State Department said, you're going to do literacy screeners, but you're going to do math screeners too.
So now we have embedded in the DNA of schools a structure around screening support MTSS that is similar to literacy already. And I think that that is why you're seeing it in the math data.
Anna Stokke (48:40 - 48:56)
Yeah, I mean, if you set higher standards and if you have some accountability measures in place, I think the other pieces tend to fall into place. Because, you know, if there's accountability, people are going to have to shift and use teaching methods that work. Right.
Rachel Canter (48:57 - 49:08)
That's right. And we're having a whole conversation about what is the science of math, because there's probably a science of math and we need to figure out what that is. And that's what we should be doing in classrooms.
Anna Stokke (49:09 - 49:40)
Yeah, that's kind of what this podcast is all about, by the way. So let's talk a bit about adoption in other states, because I gather that one of your concerns, and it's a legitimate concern, is that other states are going to look at what Mississippi did. And they're going to take some things they like, but not all the things.
So I could imagine that they might take the literacy coaches, but not take the accountability measures. And so is that happening? And what are the issues with that?
Rachel Canter (49:41 - 52:00)
Accountability is really difficult. It's difficult politically, and it's just difficult from a human perspective. None of us like to do things that feel really hard.
And there are some of us that are really internally motivated and we can be told you should do something. We're going to try really hard to do that thing. We may or may not be successful if we don't know how.
But the human condition is one where we need transparency about whether or not we've done things and we need somebody checking up on us about whether or not we've done things. But that sounds politically unpalatable to people. And so while they want to do things that sound warm and fuzzy, and coaching sounds very warm and fuzzy, we're going to come in your classroom and we're going to support you.
Why should a teacher listen to a coach that they may or may not see on a regular basis, that they have no relationship with, and there's no expectation that they actually do these things other than maybe the awkwardness of this person coming in their classroom? And then also from a teacher perspective, if you're not guaranteed that this person coming in your classroom is actually good at their jobs and has something to say to you that will be worth your time, why are you going to listen to them? And that is why these other structures around accountability are really important, because Mississippi didn't just send money to school districts and say, go hire a coach.
They hired directly from the state level, the coaches, they gave them consistent training, and they said, we may have 75 spots, but if we don't find 75 qualified people, we are not going to hire just to have 75 people. We are going to make sure that every single person has a track record of success with students before we go ask teachers to listen to this person. And other states are not doing that.
And I think it's that friction. It's that political friction that accountability sounds difficult. It might sound negative, but the reality is you cannot make progress without honesty about where you start, honesty about where you're going, and honesty about where you end up, and then at some level, consequences for that.
You know, some of it you can achieve just by transparency, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to have consequences for some of that. And the question is, what are those consequences? Do they make sense for what you're trying to achieve?
Anna Stokke (52:01 - 52:23)
But I do want to actually ask, because some of the things you're describing, I can't imagine them being adopted where I live. Like, I can't imagine any government going for some of these things like the retention, et cetera. What is the political climate like there?
How was this able to happen and be supported?
Rachel Canter (52:24 - 55:01)
I think you have to go back to the context of the place that we were in as a state. Nobody could really hide from the fact that we were last. Everybody knew that the country thought very little of us.
And when we stopped giving ourselves the excuse that it was inevitable, then it became a question of, OK, well, this is our responsibility. What are we going to do about it? We know we're last.
It is very obvious. We have all this data and doing nothing has not resulted in success. So we better try some things.
And I think part of it was the sense that the legislature was like, you know, we've tried it one way, which is to not do anything, to not require anything of anybody. Maybe we should try taking some responsibility for a little while from a state perspective, because certainly there were teachers in classrooms who have always taken responsibility for their children. They may or may not have had the right training and support to teach in the best ways.
But from a state perspective, we were asleep at the wheel as a state. And it became no longer enough people, myself, my colleagues that I worked with in nonprofits, people in the legislature, people in the State Department. Enough of us decided this is an unacceptable.
We can do something different. And we had pre points, too. They weren't always in the state of Mississippi.
It took time for us to find proof points in the state of Mississippi. But there were places across the country, individual schools, individual school districts that had similar kids to the ones that we had, and they were doing a lot better than us. So what is our excuse become?
I think it's really ultimately a question of political will, because people always ask me, well, is this because Mississippi is a Republican state? And I say, no, certainly there were political contextual factors. When the Republicans came into office, they were looking for an agenda and this was an agenda that they could adopt.
And they didn't necessarily have prior beliefs about what their agenda should be and who they had to placate. And so that maybe was a condition that helped us. But at the end of the day, it was really about political will.
And when enough people decide enough is enough, you can do things that you didn't expect. And what we found is that it was easier to do things than you might think. Was it always easy?
No. Was it really hot at some points in time? Yes.
But after you start down the road, when you get a little bit of a success, especially in a place like Mississippi that is not used to success, people become very invested. Let's keep going. Let's keep going.
Anna Stokke (55:02 - 55:09)
Yeah, that's true. So it's kind of like hitting rock bottom and really having to do something about it. Yeah.
Rachel Canter (55:09 - 55:14)
And I hope other places do not have to hit rock bottom to get that level of conviction.
Anna Stokke (55:15 - 55:38)
Exactly. And on that note, and we'll close off now, but, you know, you kind of prove Mississippi kind of proves actually that poverty isn't destiny. Some people might say, though, that what happened in Mississippi can't be replicated.
What do you think? Give us a pitch for why this matters and why other states and other jurisdictions could do it.
Rachel Canter (55:39 - 58:25)
Yeah, I think it's nonsense that other places can't do it. I think it does have to start with a mindset, though. You have the power to make change for the children that you serve, and that is your most important job as an educator is to make change for the children that you serve.
And you should be unapologetic about it. And it should be what you should be looking for every last tool in the toolkit, trick in the book to figure out what is it that is effective for getting kids to learn. I think, again, ultimately, it comes down to political will.
Mississippi has this playbook now. You can look at the my report where I'm trying to articulate what the parts of that playbook are around. Here's the policy framework that you might need.
And one of those pillars is evidence informed instructional policy. We don't have all the answers, but the ones that we have, why are we not using them? And there could be lots of different things that go in there about math and science and all sorts of different things.
But you need to start with what do you want kids to know? How are you going to measure it? Is it rigorous?
How are we going to hold people accountable? What are we going to do if they don't meet the bar? How are we going to do instruction?
And then how are we going to support people? Because Mississippi realized that there wasn't an army that was going to come in and go into school districts and help them. We had to do it.
Our state department had to do it. We have rural school districts. They're very small.
They don't necessarily have the capacity on staff to go out and find the newest research in the best ways. We had to put our state had to play that expertise role. And that meant we had to change on the state level who was in our state department and what their jobs were in order to support districts.
But these are things that every state in the country can do. There is not a single logical reason why other states in the country can't do those. The problems are political and it's the political will.
And then it is the stick-to-itiveness to keep going, keep going, keep going. One of the things I talk about in the report is just like you said, this fad, we're going to try something and then we're going to throw it out the window. We're going to try something else.
And people don't stick with things long enough. Like, should you stick with something that is not research based? No, you have no indication that's going to work for you.
But if we know how to teach reading and we do, and if we have this emerging science of math, which there is, why are we not doing those things? It's only at that point about the human element of do we have the right incentive supports and consequences for the humans involved, the adult humans involved to get to the outcomes.
[00:58:26] Anna Stokke: Thank you so much. It was really interesting to hear about all this today because we hear so much about Mississippi and the miracle, which is really a marathon. It's not a miracle.
There are no miracles. We hear so much about it in the media. So it was great to hear about it from you.
And we'll link to your report in the show notes. And I really encourage people to check it out. And thank you for coming on and telling us all about it today.
Yeah, thank you so much.
[00:58:51] Rachel Canter: I'm so excited to be here. And I love that you're working on the science of math. Thank you.
[00:58:57] Anna Stokke: Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five star rating on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast app or on YouTube so you never miss an episode.
You can stay connected with me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Blue Sky or LinkedIn. All links are in the show notes. And check out my website, annastokke.com for more information. This podcast is funded by a grant from La Trobe University and from the Trottier Family Foundation through a grant to the University of Winnipeg to fund the Talk & Talk podcast.