Pretty much the only good-news story in education through the first half of 2025 has been the “Southern Surge”—the impressive National Assessment of Educational Progress gains posted by Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee amidst an otherwise dreary landscape. Well, last month, I went down to Louisiana to help kick off the state’s 2025 Teacher Leader Summit with state chief Cade Brumley. While I’m admittedly skeptical of edu-convenings, I found this show pretty impressive: three carefully orchestrated days honoring 7,000 “teacher leaders” at the New Orleans Convention Center.

I don’t want to dwell on the summit, other than to note that it was heartening to see a state putting this kind of thought into teachers. (I used to urge this sort of thing back when I penned The Cage-Busting Teacher in 2015, and Louisiana is a pioneer on this count.) But I do think it’s worth being clear about just how well Louisiana and its southern brethren are doing. As Brumley told me earlier this spring, “Our 4th grade scores have led the country in reading growth for the past two NAEP cycles and ranked in the top five for math growth.” Louisiana is the only state in the nation where 4th-grade reading achievement on NAEP has surpassed pre-pandemic levels. In other words, this isn’t one of those foundation-fueled PR exercises—the results are real.

Anyway, I’m moved to share a few loosely connected reflections that emerged during a long, meandering conversation I had at the summit with Brumley, who I find to be one of the nation’s sharper education thinkers.

We talked at some length about how much reform is too much, especially given the ambitious efforts of states like Louisiana and Mississippi. As regular readers know, I’ve always been more skeptical than most when it comes to school “reform.” It’s been more than a quarter-century since I published Spinning Wheels, in which I explained that urban school reform often disappoints because it’s part of a constant churn of initiatives that educators deflect by closing their doors and telling each other, “This too shall pass.” In schools, where culture plays such a crucial role in determining success, this is deadly. Now, looking at Louisiana, one might note that they’re tackling reading, classroom culture, math, CTE, and more and be moved to ask, “Is that too much reform?” It’s a reasonable question. But I think the answer is no.

In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, we see a coherent series of actions that point in the same direction. The problem with most school reform efforts is not the sheer number of changes but the cultural discordance—the whiplash, fad-chasing, and stopping-and-starting. So, when a literacy agenda involves a number of moving parts, it’s not a problem so long as they’re working in concert. It would be a mistake to imagine the lesson of Spinning Wheels is that inertia is good for schools. Rather, it’s that chaos is bad for them.

Brumley and I also got into “Let Teachers Teach,” a comprehensive agenda for school leaders and legislators that the Louisiana Department of Education released last year. I love this initiative. Devised in concert with a few dozen respected Louisiana teachers, the recommendations aim to make teaching more manageable. They call for limiting students’ cell phone use, placing ungovernable students at alternative sites, abolishing antiquated lesson-planning requirements, reducing the burdens of mandated teacher trainings, ensuring adequate time for preparation, and so forth. It’s overdue and the kind of thing that I’ve been (mostly fruitlessly) urging “reformers” to do for decades, both for the practical benefits and as a way to show respect for those doing the work.

It’s tough to capture just how dramatically “Let Teachers Teach” contrasts with the ethos that’s fueled so much reform during the past few decades. Heck, I can still recall pretty clearly the time (15 years ago) when the push for value-added teacher evaluation yielded half-baked algorithms and crappy placeholder measures for the 70 percent of teachers who didn’t teach reading or math in grades 4 through 8. I’ve seen plenty of advocates roll their eyes at teachers who dare to voice sensible concerns about student misconduct or raging student absenteeism, especially when those teachers are crosswise with the dictates of “restorative justice.” It’s laughable but sadly true that a reform focused on making it easier for professional educators to do their damn job qualifies as novel.

But what stuck with me most from the conversation was a question Brumley asked: “Why do you think nobody is studying this?” I asked him to elaborate. He said that he’d been shocked at the lack of interest in “Let Teachers Teach.” He was puzzled why advocates and national researchers hadn’t bothered to make their way down to ask what was going on in the Pelican State. He noted that the state has drawn a fair amount of national media attention for its academic results but little to no attention from the scholars nominally responsible for studying education and the nation’s schools.

I floated a few hypotheses as to what might be going on. Researchers like to use familiar data sets, since it’s much easier to study the same old stuff than get up to speed on Mississippi or Louisiana. There’s the inclination within academia to regard red states as cultural backwaters. And we’ve got a research culture that prides itself on moving slowly; perhaps researchers will get around to Louisiana in five years, once they’ve had a chance to publish their old research and write some new grants. Moreover, for a lot of education researchers, there’s nothing especially sexy about reform that emphasizes phonics, teaching basics, and coherence. But this is mere speculation. The truth, of course, is that I have no idea why the researchers aren’t descending in droves. I find their absence as odd as Brumley does.

A decade ago, would you have guessed that the nation would be looking to Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee to serve as our K–12 torchbearers? If so, I think you’d have been in sparse company. It seems well worth paying a lot more attention to what’s responsible for their success so others can learn from it. Here’s hoping the education scholars and experts will eventually turn their gaze to the South.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”