Mississippi recently made headlines, and for all the right reasons. In 2014, Mississippi’s fourth graders lagged an entire grade level behind the rest of the nation. In 2023, the percentage of Mississippi fourth-grade students who passed the reading assessment test soared to 85 percent! News outlets praised the tremendous success, calling it the Mississippi Child Literacy Miracle. The teachers in the Magnolia state know the tremendous amount of work that went behind their success. Kristen Wells-Wynn, the literacy director for the Mississippi Department of Education, refers to the miracle as a marathon.

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How they did it is no mystery. Besides the hard work the teachers put into their students, the educators used a phonics-based reading program known as The Science of Reading, a curriculum that focuses on the use of phonics, allowing students to understand how the words look and sound as they acquire vocabulary and then use it to understand the meaning of paragraphs and reading passages. The Science of Reading is the converging evidence of what matters and works in literacy instruction, organized around models describing how and why. Rather than guessing and experimenting with what might work, teachers use a structured learning approach that has proven successful. One literary director says, “Learning by memorization is right-brained, while the Science of Reading is left-brained.”

Mississippi’s miracle exceeded their wildest dreams, not just because of their outstanding accomplishment in raising reading scores but also because they did it at a fraction of the cost of other states. According to the latest data in 2022, Mississippi ranked near the bottom in the amount of money spent per pupil, at $10,983.

Early schools in this nation used a robust phonics approach to teaching reading. Although some early educators felt phonics was too rigorous for children, no major change occurred until John Dewey entered the education scene in the late 1800s.

John Dewey, the Father of Progressive Education, was a socialist who wanted students to evolve socially and academically. In his 1916 book School and Society, Dewey argued that high literacy would hinder socialism. Mr. Dewey felt that a primarily phonics-based system promoted self-thinking individuals who would not benefit a socialist society. Dewey once complained, “It is absolutely impossible to cultivate habits of social change when schools devote themselves to the formal side of language.” Dewey promoted a reading program based on the look-say or the balanced literacy method that abandoned the phonics approach and focused on teaching children to read through contextual clues, like pictures. His ideas paved the way for the Dick and Jane picture book primers. It didn’t take long before America’s literacy rate started a downward trend.

A few people tried to reverse the literacy decline. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch sounded the alarm on non-phonics-based reading programs in his best-selling book, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It. Our nation’s declining literacy scores revealed the Dewey look-say method of teaching children to read was a failed experiment. Flesch critiqued the method and pled for a return to phonics-based reading programs. His pleas were ignored, so in 1982, Rudolf Flesch wrote another book, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read: A New Look At the Scandal of Our Schools. Once again, Mr. Flesch gave evidence of the faulty system of the look-say method of teaching literacy and pled again for a return to a phonics-based program.

The Mississippi Literacy Miracle success story could well signal a miracle in the making for all students and, ultimately, for our nation. We could witness a miracle as educators abandon their socialist-based teaching methods of look-say and balanced literacy and embrace a successful reading program that produces a literate and independent society that can think for itself.

The path may not be easy, but Mississippi led the way and proved that literacy in America can be reversed and even eradicated. Educators can do it with less money than the cost of illiteracy. When Mississippi began the Science of Reading curriculum, it ranked 49th in the United States for elementary school literacy. Today, it ranks 21st and is climbing.

The Science of Reading is gaining bipartisan support and reshaping reading instruction across the United States. So far, 38 states have adopted measures to place The Science of Reading instruction in their public schools, and multiple other states are looking into adopting the program. Thank God for Mississippi and its literacy miracle. Because they led the way with their program and hard work, American education stands on the brink of a major breakthrough that could change our nation.

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Nancy Huff is an educator with a mission to equip believers to pray strategically for the Cultural Mountain of Education. She has authored Taking the Mountain of Education: A Strategic Prayer Guide to Transform America’s Schools,  Safety Zone: Scriptural Prayers to Revolutionize Your School, and Decrees for Your School. She leads prayer groups to pray at key educational locations across the US. For additional information go to: https://takingthemountainofeducation.com/author/nancyahuff/. Photo Credit: Ben White on Unsplash. Photo Credit: National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.