The ‘Mississippi Marathon’ Is Teaching Kids to Read

By Rahm Emanuel

Hattiesburg, Miss.

Step into F.B. Woodley Elementary School, and you know immediately that you’re entering an institution of educational excellence. This isn’t some well-heeled suburban school serving privileged kids. It isn’t nestled in a high-income gated community. This is an urban school in a majority-black city, set in the postindustrial Deep South.

Felica Morris, who cut her teeth as a teacher and has since become the school’s principal, doesn’t suffer nonsense or accept failure. By setting an orderly but welcoming tone, she has helped Woodley’s teachers drive reading and math results well above the state’s fourth-grade average. The average daily attendance rate is nearly 95%. All of which suggests something profound: The answer to America’s core educational challenge is in Hattiesburg, not Harvard.

Not many Democrats on the national stage visit Mississippi these days. The state hasn’t gone blue in a presidential election since 1976. But I decided to trek down to learn more about what some are calling the “Mississippi miracle.” I can report that everyone throughout the country, regardless of politics, should be paying much closer attention to the state’s education turnaround.

I’ve long been puzzled as to why, at a moment when we’ve seen some of the worst nationwide test scores in 30 years, education debates rarely focus on basic academic excellence. The Magnolia State’s reading scores haven’t only bucked the national trend—they’ve been rising for years. Mississippi once ranked 49th in fourth-grade reading. It’s now ninth. Yet the average fourth-grader in Mississippi today outperforms the average fourth-grade Californian. Half of black fourth-graders read at grade level in Mississippi, while barely more than a quarter do in the Golden State.

What is Mississippi’s secret? The state leapfrogged California and my home state of Illinois not by becoming wealthier or changing its demographics. It’s actually very simple and—given that Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama have pursued similar paths—replicable. Mississippi chose to spend less time on topics that dominate Washington’s education agenda and instead maintained a focus on what happens inside the classroom. It focused on the fundamentals.

Mississippi didn’t sprinkle fairy dust on its schools to improve them. It abandoned the hokum that convinced educators that they could teach kids to read through pictures and context clues rather than decoding words. The state restored phonics- based systems that rigorous scientific studies have shown to work. But more than that, with the help and support of former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, the Magnolia State constructed a system to train teachers so that they are effective at teaching students to read.

It also imposed systems of accountability to ensure that administrators, teachers and students alike meet their marks. As Mr. Barksdale said to me, “Mississippi miracle” is

a misnomer because it suggests that test scores improved overnight. What happened would better be understood as the “Mississippi marathon.”

But the state’s success has proved uncomfortable for the right, which has largely abandoned the promise of public schooling in the belief that the whole enterprise should be sacrificed in favor of vouchers. And it has proved uncomfortable for the left, which has surrendered to what President George W. Bush called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It stopped holding schools accountable on the presupposition that there is no real way for educators to lift up children living in poor, crime-ridden, drug-laden neighborhoods.

Both sides have given up on our kids. But what’s happening in Mississippi and its adjoining states proves that both sides are wrong. Rather than discarding public schools or educator accountability, the rest of America should adopt a model that has been proven to work.

The made-for-social-media debates on cable news are completely divorced from parents’ concerns about whether their kids will be prepared to thrive in tomorrow’s economy. When I participated in a town hall with roughly 160 people in Water Valley, Miss.—a city of 3,400 people in a county President Trump won by 21 points—local citizens were so eager to have their concerns addressed that the local sheriff had to come down and direct traffic. When we opened the floor, the questions were about vocational education, social media bans, early-childhood education and other substantive issues.

Also important is the discourse among educational policymakers. For all the debates about whether voucher systems, charter networks, parochial institutions or traditional public schools are best, they have lost sight of the big question: Is the education in any given classroom excellent or mediocre? Yes, financing formulas, geographic disparities and family dynamics play powerful roles in determining a child’s path. But those shouldn’t distract from teaching a child how to read. Are teachers equipped to succeed at that fundamental task—and are they supported when they need help? As Principal Morris made clear to me, we can’t make progress without measuring it. For all the complaints in my party about “teaching to the test,” Ms. Morris argued that, without accountability, we can’t drive results.

Mississippi’s success is a blueprint for fixing American education today. To paraphrase the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, it’s the fundamentals, stupid. But those aren’t our focus. On television, on social media, even at conferences of education policymakers, we’re distracted too often by debates about pronouns, funding formulas, school names and governing structures.

Let’s all channel our inner Felica Morris and focus on what’s happening inside the classroom. We know how to make our educational system world-class again. The question is whether we have the strength and guts to do for our kids what our parents, teachers, principals and coaches did for us.

Mr. Emanuel, a Democrat, served as a U.S. representative from Illinois (2003-09), White House chief of staff (2009-10), mayor of Chicago (2011-19) and ambassador to Japan (2022-25).