The “Mississippi Miracle:” Mississippi and Other Southern States Are Now Leading the Country In Literacy Rates Thanks to Common-Sense Education Standards
—Ace
This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage.
In my home state of California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad.
Marsha cared about this very much.
There are some obvious commonalities among the Southern Surge states. White names three, the first of which sounds obvious in retrospect but was in fact novel: The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research. This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound.
Phonics… how I and my whole generation learned to read. By grade five I was reading at a seventh or eighth grade level.
I can’t think of anything worse than denying a child of the ability to read.
On the North River 
I used to say of myself, It’s not that I am so good, it’s that others are so bad.
Perhaps MS in the lead is because the others are so bad. Look at what the losers do. Do not do what they do.
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By age four I had begun my own library. That the books were mainly Little Golden is not terribly important. I consider the ability to read to be of such great fundemental importance that civilization would not exist without it.
With the ability comes an expanding vocabulary, new ideas and concepts. The ability to conceptualize and attain that highest level of learning is derived from the ability to read.
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My grandmother was a bookbinder for Little Brown company. That company let employees take “seconds’ (imperfect books not for sale) home. She brought me many books and my grandfather who had a side business of vending machines used to bring me comic books back from his distributor, who sold returned comics with the covers ripped off for a penny a piece.
Then I discovered the local branch of the library. I was walking up there to get a book, walking home to read it and then walking back to get another; usually in the same day. Then the librarian let me know that I could take out more that one book at a time. What a revelation!
It’s not that it is a surprise that the Leftists are wrong about Education, especially teaching reading, it’s that we still let them control so many other things. Things that they always get wrong.
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