A miracle? Nope. Hard work and sound policies, MS principal says
A new education report hasn’t received the attention it deserves here in Mississippi, and that’s a shame because it shows that the hard work of our teachers and students is paying off.
Researchers at Harvard and Stanford reported that Mississippi is one of just three states where students have returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in reading. Mississippi also made the largest academic recovery in math compared to any of the 30 states in the study.
So why aren’t we celebrating? At a minimum, we need to tell the naysayers to hush up.
Recently, critics questioned whether the gains students have made in literacy, often dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle,” weren’t real but based on fuzzy math. That wasn’t fair or accurate, and this latest report provides further evidence that the policies and practices we’ve shifted to are working.
Tired of being last on education measures, Mississippi policymakers and educators came together a decade ago to raise our standards and expectations and kick off the science of reading movement. Using evidence-based reading strategies and related training for teachers, our state scores increased on the
Nation’s Report Card and other measures.
Those kids who first started learning to read this way — with an explicit emphasis on phonics, along with a focus on background knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension — are now students in my high school. We’re seeing the effects of those investments in reading; this year we had a significant increase in students reaching the highest achievement levels on our English II state assessment. And it’s not just what we’re doing with early readers that’s making a difference. This year, we supported teachers with training offered by the state to support our high school students whose reading wasn’t where it should be.
I’m a former high school English teacher, and I can assure you we’re not typically trained in teaching kids to read. Most of us expect our students to have developed those foundational skills long before they arrive in their classrooms. But the reality is there are kids in high school who struggle with reading, and we have to help them. The training my teachers received gave them the tools to help students fill in foundational gaps.
We’ve gained a lot of attention for our literacy gains in Mississippi, but I hope the strides we’re making in math aren’t overlooked. Nationwide, students experienced major declines in math after the pandemic, with eighth-graders experiencing sweeping declines that wiped away decades of progress. But there are lessons that can be learned from the recovery Mississippi kids are making.
For starters, it’s critical to resist pressure to lower standards. When we were at the bottom of national achievement rankings, our policy leaders raised the bar and made our standards higher and tests harder. And, over time, they’ve made further adjustments to improve our standards to ensure students excel. Others should follow that example. While it may have made sense to go easy on kids at the height of the pandemic, those days are behind us and now is the time for more rigor in schools.
The Mississippi Department of Education also has provided districts with sustained professional development in math aimed at targeting specific content areas that teachers say they need help with. This support is offered by individual grade bands, which is important. There’s nothing worse for a teacher than having to attend a professional development session that’s not targeting an area of need or the grade they teach. The state also took a more robust stance toward vetting the quality of instructional materials that districts may choose to use.
It’s easy for school and system leaders to become overwhelmed by pandemic learning gaps, but even relatively small changes can make a big difference. In our school, we shaved about five minutes off of every period and came up with a new 40-minute block in which students who need tutoring in a subject can get it from an expert teacher in our building. I know other places have added tutoring after school. We are able to provide more students the help they need by offering this critical support during the school day. Plus, being able to assign highly effective teachers to this vital task makes me feel confident they’ll get the job done.
I’m not trying to paint an overly rosy picture. We still have to help more kids to achieve at the highest levels. Too many students are still behind, and absentee rates that are too high — a crisis plaguing schools nationwide. Here at Starkville, we’re connecting with families and working hard to create a more engaging high school experience. We’ve expanded our opportunities for students to enroll in career academies within our school, and some of our students feel that having that clear, real-world connection between the classroom and the workforce has given purpose to their learning.
That solution may or may not be right for another school community, but universally we can’t just accept the problems we see in schools. As adults, we have to do the hard things required to improve young lives. In Mississippi, I believe we’re doing that, and I hope we keep at it until every child in our state gets the world-class education we can deliver and they deserve.
Darein Spann is the principal of Starkville High School. Before becoming a principal, he was a high school English teacher. He’s a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the Nation’s Report Card.