The term has been shooting around the education field and news reports lately with increasing frequency: “the Mississippi miracle.”
The reference is to that benighted state’s surprising success in improving reading scores for its fourth-graders through a focused program of literacy instruction for teachers and pupils alike. It’s now 10 years old, an anniversary that may have inspired the most recent assessments.
Statistics show that Mississippi’s children have gone from having almost the worst scores on the standardized national reading test for fourth-graders in 2013 to narrowly exceeding the national average in the most recent test, administered last year.
