In the New York Times, Emily Hanford writes that “Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post significant gains on the fourth-grade reading test” in the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Her article is headlined, “There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It.”

In the Spring 2020 issue of Education Next, in “Put ‘Whole Language’ on Trial,” Michael J. Petrilli writes, “There are isolated examples of improvement—Mississippi, for example, requires aspiring teachers to take two phonics-focused classes in reading instruction, and it passed a law supporting phonics training for professors at schools of education throughout the state. The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed Mississippi students making progress in reading, even as student performance declined nationwide.”

— Education Next