Thirty-one percent.
That appalling figure is the percentage of Philadelphia public school third graders who read at grade level — an even lower number than before the School District implemented its new literacy curriculum last year.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Just look at Mississippi. Before 2013, the state ranked 49th in the country for literacy. Today, it’s number one — a feat colloquially referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle.” As The 74 reported last year:
First, it’s worth remembering that Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. Its per-capita income is below $50,000, and it spends less on its public schools than all but three states. But when the Urban Institute adjusted NAEP scores based on each state’s demographics, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores came out on top.
Even without those adjustments, though, Mississippi looks pretty great. Its Black students rank third nationally, and its low-income kids outperform those in every other state. Mississippi is also the only state to see gains across all performance levels over the last decade. Its average went up, but so did the scores of its highest and lowest performers. Mississippi raised the bar and the floor at the same time.
Of course, what happened in MS was more a marathon than a miracle, with policies (the statewide Literacy Based Promotion Act); funding ($15 million a year statewide); and practices (intense training and coaching of teachers) — all of which Pennsylvania and Philadelphia should learn from. Or as Rachel Canter, former head of Mississippi First, an education nonprofit that helped implement the state’s curriculum, put it in a recent Atlantic magazine article: “Mississippi’s transformation depended on holding students, educators, and even policy makers accountable for better student performance.”
Hear more from Canter, now a director of education policy for the Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute, at The Citizen’s annual Ideas We Should Steal Festival presented by Comcast on December 8.
Other speakers at the event will include Lonnie Ali and Simon Cohen from the Muhammad Ali Center, introducing their compassion index for Philly; First Amendment hero Afroman; author Anand Giridharadas, whose new book proposes solutions to our homelessness crisis; Trump whistleblower Alexander Vindman and Jacob Weisberg, author of Profiles in Cowardice; and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician known for exposing the Flint, MI, water crisis and who has launched the nation’s first community-wide prenatal and infant cash prescription program.
LAST YEAR’S IDEAS WE SHOULD STEAL
