The Inconvenient Success of Mississippi

It's not just education reform skeptics who are giving the Mississippi Miracle the side eye

If you’ve been following the breathless coverage of the Mississippi Miracle, you may have noticed a distinct ‘told ya so’ theme. Not only have students demonstrated impressive academic growth, but said improvement has occurred on the cheap, and in a state where unions are weak or non-existent. In other words, the Mississippi story is inconvenient for the likes of public education advocates like yours truly. Alas, that is not the subject of this post. Instead, I’ll be focused on the inconvenience of the state’s academic improvement for the Mississippi GOP, which is orchestrating an altogether different version of the ‘Southern Surge,’ a sort of reverse leap backwards aimed at returning the Magnolia State to the pre-Civil Rights era.

Let’s start with vouchers, shall we?

We shall, because even as the virtual ink was still drying on the latest round of ‘make like Mississippi—or else’ posts, the school voucher lobby was descending upon the state. That’s because unlike many of the states that make up the Old Confederacy, Mississippi defied the deep pockets and political bum rush that has delivered universal vouchers across the South over the past few years. Credit deep unpopularity among the public, impressive organizing by groups like the Parents’ Campaign, and resistance among some GOP holdouts, a number of whom worried aloud that draining money from the state’s barely-funded public schools would drive a stake in their progress. But that was last year.

While vouchers remain as unpopular as ever among the public, expanding ‘education freedom’ is a top priority for the state’s political leadership, including Speaker of the House Jason White and Governor Tate “Tater Tot” Reeves, who is said to be planning to call a special session of the legislature in order to get a voucher bill passed. Which is how we ended up with a brigade of ‘experts’ appearing before the newly-formed House Education Freedom Committee. The all-star cast featured self-styled free-market edupreneur and Trump ally Erika Donalds, school choice scholar Patrick Wolf and two different representatives of the US Department of Education, including Project 2025 authoress Lindsey Burke.

Although voucher proponents no longer have much to say about academic achievement, Mississippi’s academic success put this crew in a bit of a bind. After all, the product they’re pitching is aimed at destabilizing the state’s schools en route to eliminating public education altogether. Also, aren’t all ‘government schools’ always already failing by definition? Which is why the voucher-ites arrived in Jackson armed with the message that young Missippians have made no progress over the past 50 years, as Burke claimed. A card-carrying member of the Koch group, Americans for Prosperity, made the same argument, telling school choice skeptics at an event that Mississippi’s progress is an illusion.

Back to the future

“Why on earth would we adopt the failed policies that are taking other states backward?” asked Parents’ Campaign executive director Nancy Loome recently. I can answer that. For a glimpse of both the ‘why’ and the ‘where’ behind the push to bring vouchers to Mississippi we need only visit the state’s not-so-distant past, revisited here in this thorough—and thoroughly alarming—review by historian Steve Suitts, aptly subtitled “the past is the future.” As Suitts makes clear, Mississippi and other Southern states are carrying out a classic bait-and-switch, first selling voucher programs as a boon to low-income students or, unbelievably, as a civil rights cause, even as they erect a separate system of publicly-funded private schools.

The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but four of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.

For a deeper dive on school segregation in Mississippi and the ferocious drive to protect and expand it, I highly recommend Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s epic and highly-relevant-for-today, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. Let’s just say that whether it’s patriotic education, instilling conservative values in the youth, or the effort to keep youngsters from accessing materials that promote racial tolerance and ‘communism,’ we’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.

Which brings me to the main point of this post. Mississippi’s upward academic trajectory is now battling the backward trajectory of the state’s own history. If you still don’t believe me, let’s discuss another recent policy development that out-of-state miracle chroniclers seem oblivious to: the elimination of the state income tax. Estimated to cost the state roughly one-third of its entire general fund budget once fully implemented, going tax free will, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “put enormous strain on essential services in the poorest state in the nation.” Now, combine the loss of income tax with looming cuts to federal funds upon which Mississippi and its schools are highly dependent and you can see the problem. Schools here, already at the bottom of the funding heap, with teachers among the worst paid in the country, are about to see funding evaporate.

This too has an ugly precedent. Go back to the turn of the twentieth century, and you’ll find Mississippi going to extraordinary lengths in order to get out of having to pay for public education, part of a larger effort to weaken the political power of the state’s Black residents.

White policymakers — particularly in Mississippi — used highly restrictive property tax limits and supermajority requirements to weaken school funding in Black communities, disempower Black residents, and shift the tax base to more inequitable revenue policies like sales taxes. Mississippi shifted its tax base from white property owners to poorer Black households in 1932 through the advent of the modern sales tax. Black people, with substantially less income, kept paying just as much as their white counterparts, if not more, and contributed significantly toward funding white-only schools while their own schools deteriorated.

So what happens next?

For a preview, we need head no further than Florida, which barely a decade ago was the toast of school reformers for achieving the last education miracle—rising student achievement done on the cheap, all while school choice options bloomed like a summer red tide. Alas, the miracle turned out to be mostly a mirage, as the academic gains young Floridians achieved in fourth grade disappeared when they hit eighth grade—chronicled to devastating effect by edublogger and former school board member Billy Townsend. These days, the miracle is a distant memory, as Florida’s ballooning universal voucher program consumes, not just the state’s public schools but Jeb Bush’s legacy. Indeed, when the most recent “Nation’s Report Card” showed that Florida’s reading scores had hit a 25-year-low, now former state education chief Manny Diaz Jr. seemed to argue that all of the good test takers were now taking vouchers to attend private schools.

Alas, Florida continues to rule on the only metric that really matters: the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom ranking. Florida topped the annual Report Card, along with the likes of Arizona, Idaho and Arkansas. Mississippi, by the way, came in at a distant 17, dropping six spots from the previous freedom tally. While Mississippi may be the toast of school fixers, not so much for the folks at Heritage, which dinged the state for spending too much on its schools relative to its ‘ROI’ on NAEP scores. Fortunately, there’s a path forward—or rather backward.