Overselling the Mississippi Miracle

Southern poverty is a policy choice

If there is one topic I get asked about the most it is the so-called Mississippi Miracle. “Is it all that?” a non-education obsessed friend wrote recently. “If I have to read another story about the Southern Surge I’m going to puke,” another pal chimed in. “Got anything for me?” Alas, I do not. If you are hoping for a debunking, this is not the post for you. I’ve been writing about education for long enough that I know how unusual sustained progress is. To channel my friend Karin Chenoweth, author of the outstanding Districts that Succeed, while pundits may be too quick to proclaim that Mississippi and Alabama ‘have it all figured out,’ (8th grade reading scores are still terrible), insisting that any increase in achievement must be a scam doesn’t exactly aid the cause of public education.

And at a time when Republicans have gone all in on private school vouchers, it’s actually pretty inspiring that Mississippi remains one of the few red states that has fended these off. In fact, when the GOP made yet another attempt to bring vouchers to the Magnolia State earlier this month, a panel of state senators rejected it unanimously–after 84 seconds of deliberation. To which the chair of the Mississipp Democratic Party responded with the kind of ringing defense of public education that can be so hard to find among Dems these days.

Our public schools are the cornerstone of every community in this state, and this unanimous rejection sends a clear message: Mississippi will not abandon the students and families who depend on quality public education—no matter how much out-of-state money tries to buy our legislators.

The poverty problem

As someone who spends a disturbing amount of time musing, or as some would say, obsessing, over the intersection of education and politics, what concerns me is the partial nature of the story being told about Mississippi et al. In news story after column after post, we are sternly instructed to ‘gather behind Mississippi’s banner.’ And yet that banner–which until 2020 was the actual Confederate Flag–represents some unsavory realities that takers, pundits and pols glance right over. What does it tell us that states that remain the very worst places for children are being held up as policy exemplars for the rest of the country? It tells us quite a bit, as a matter of fact.

“When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school,” someone once wrote. OK–that someone was me. The point being that just as our fights over, say, books or bathrooms aren’t really about books and bathrooms, the overselling of the Mississippi Miracle isn’t just about the best way to improve reading instruction. As I’ve been arguing on this page and in various places, the deeply-held American belief that we can educate our way out of poverty has crashed upon the shoals of our chasming inequality. ‘Just go to college’–the Dems’ policy prescription for four decades–is losing out to ‘tax the rich’ as the left populist wing of the Democratic party ascends. Not unsurprisingly, these shifting political tides have prompted a furious backlash from centrists for whom faith in the ‘fixing’ power of education is akin to a religion.

The power of the Mississippi story is that it offers proof that the centrists have been right all along. Poverty persists because of bad schools, bad teachers etc. Improve these and kids will go onto college and cease to be poor. (It really is this simple.) Critics of this line of reasoning (like me, for example) can then be mocked as “pessimistic leftists” for believing that “even attempting to shrink the gap between rich and poor students is a fool’s errand,” as this opinionator opined recently.

Cheerleaders for the Southern Surge tend to skate right by what seems like a fairly key question. Why are there so many poor kids in these states? Why are they so poor? And why has childhood poverty here persisted for so long? Big questions, yes, but even a cursory glance at history provides an answer. Kids in states like Mississippi and Louisiana live in deep poverty by design. Mississippi, for example, has built into its constitution language making it exceptionally difficult to raise taxes in order to fund schools and other services. Did you know, for instance, that the Magnolia State enacted the nation’s very first supermajority requirement back in 1890? The rationale was straightforward: to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War by disenfranchising the state’s black voters and making public spending for schools and other services (for black people) more difficult to secure.

After 1965, the south saw a surge of support for these supermajority requirements, with one state after another blocking future tax increases and the further transfers of wealth from the white propertied classes to poor residents. Now perhaps you’re thinking, ‘but that was the Ole Miss! The new Miss is all about lifting kids out of poverty by improving the quality of the state’s schools.’ Except that the new Miss recently abolished a major revenue source for public education: the income tax, leading city leaders like the mayor of Canton, Dr. William Trully, to warn of a looming disaster for low income residents.

I ask the Mississippi Legislature to give serious consideration of how poor people, poor whites and poor black in your community are going to survive because there’s no exit strategy.There’s no salvation. There’s no path.

Meanwhile, the state’s visionaries now have their sights on eliminating property taxes, a target since the days when white landholders officially reigned supreme. In other words, even as we read fawning story after fawning story about how Mississippi is the new land of education opportunity, the state is enacting policies that will guarantee, not just that children stay poor, but that more children become poor. So the next time you read a take that cheers how little Mississippi spends on education, know that there is an ugly reason for that lack of investment.

Spare the rod

By now the story is so familiar that it practically writes itself. Blue states went soft, argued Nicholas Kristof recently, adding his voice to an already crowded choir:

We succumbed to the idea of lowering standards in hopes of improving equity. With warm and fuzzy hopes of reducing race gaps, for example, Oregon reduced graduation requirements and San Francisco for a time stopped teaching algebra to eighth graders. Some schools embraced “equitable grading” practices such as refusing to give zeros, ending penalties for turning in assignments late and allowing repeated retakes of tests.

The Southern Surge states, by contrast, go hard at the kids. The secret sauce to their recipe for success, notes Kristof approvingly, is “no excuses.” (Yes, we’re doing this again.) But here too, the cheering section skips over the ingredients that are somewhat, well, less palatable. Did you know, for example, that Mississippi still allows—and makes enthusiastic use of—corporal punishment, a practice that falls literally on a particular demographic of children? One analysis found that while the practice of 'three licks with the paddle’ has been stamped out in most of the country, the schools where it is still practiced are disproportionately congregated in Mississippi.

Or take the practice of holding kids back if they’re unable to pass a third-grade reading test. It’s exactly the sort of get-tough-on-the-kids (and their parents) policy that thrills pundits, and yet its consequences for kids later in life can be devastating. “Early Grade Retention Harms Adult Earnings,” is the title of a recent study which found that while third-grade retention boosts test scores, the kids who are held back end up 1) less likely to graduate from high school 2) more likely to go to jail and 3) earning significantly less by age 26. While Southern Surge boosters were quick to point out that the study is based on Texas rather than Mississippi, what’s key here is how a harmful unintended consequence turns out to be indistinguishable from all of the intentional ways that Mississippi entrenches poverty.

Right to work for less

There’s another reason why the Mississippi model makes the hearts of a certain class of pundit go pit-a-pat: the weakness of unions in the south. The antipathy to unions, and teachers unions in particular, is familiar terrain, now being trotted out as fresh thinking in op-eds like this one. But here too, the case for going hard at teachers unions for resisting the education reform flavor of the moment leaves out the ugly backstory. Unions are powerless to non-existent in the south because of the right-to-work laws adopted in the 1950’s in an effort to keep wages low and workers, especially Black workers, weak.

That history is the reason why workers in the Southern Surge states have the lowest median wages in the country. It’s also why there is so little social mobility in these states. The relative strength of unions in a community, by the way, turns out to be among the strongest predictors of whether kids will move up the economic ladder. The weakness-by-design of unions in the South is a big part of why social mobility in this part of the country are so low.

Some years ago I interviewed a brilliant young scholar named Melissa Arnold Lyon for an episode of my podcast, Have You Heard. Like so many academics who end up studying education, Lyon started out as a teacher. In our conversation, she described how disorienting it was to hear education reformers rail against teachers unions as obstacles to ‘fixing’ schools and lifting kids out of poverty when she’d grown up in Tennessee, where unions were rarely mentioned, but child poverty was endemic. And at the non-union charter school in Texas where she taught, teachers, were in her words, treated really poorly, leading to sky-high levels of staff turnover.

That apparent disconnect between grinding reality and shimmering union-free sales pitch spurred Melissa to conduct one of my all-time favorite research projects. She assembled a massive historical database that compared states where teachers unions were strong vs. states that intentionally kept them weak. And low and behold, the latter states also had the weakest social safety nets. Teachers, it turns out, don’t just advocate on their own behalf but on behalf of a broad range of progressive policies, including higher school funding, higher minimum wages and more generous welfare policies. Keeping their unions weak by design turns out to be a very effective block against virtually any kind of economic redistribution.

The other Southern surge

Six years ago, something pretty amazing happened. Child poverty was cut in half, plunging to record lows. The cause was not improved phonics instruction or LETRS training for teachers but the expansion of the Child Tax Credit during the pandemic. Throughout the same southern states that we’re now reading so much about, the impact was particularly dramatic, cutting the number of kids living in poverty by as much as half. Alas, once the expanded CTC expired, poverty soared in those same states. That’s a Southern Surge that’s also worth paying attention to.