CLARKSDALE — On a Tuesday afternoon in the fall, Jessica Johnson held up index cards of words as students crowded around the table to identify the type of vowel sound and sort them into buckets.

In another classroom, Shalandria Ivy guided students as they identified images, sounded out the first letter of the item in the drawing, and found that letter in their cards. These teachers at Kirkpatrick Health & Medical Science Magnet, an elementary school in the Clarksdale Municipal School District, are also tutors in the Reading Roadmap after-school literacy program. 

Johnson and Ivy are among hundreds of Mississippi reading teachers and leaders that helped create a rise in test scores after the passage of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013. Mississippi, which has long struggled with reading outcomes for students, has been showered with international acclaim for its gains that some dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.”

But in several school districts across the state, including here in Clarksdale, the drastic reading gains haven’t been as strong. For the teachers and students, the effects have felt less than miraculous, for reasons ranging from resources to teacher turnover.

“We’re in a space where students need hardcore remediation, (we) can’t really teach the grade-level themes because their comprehension is not there,” said Janice Citchens, a first-year English teacher in the West Tallahatchie School District. “My students are 100% capable, if they had the resources and the right people … then the sky is the limit.”

‘The science of reading’

The 2013 state law created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn’t hit a certain benchmark. While the law did not create a mandatory curriculum, the State Board of Education promoted, and in some cases required, teacher training on the principles of the “science of reading.” This term refers to a body of research that demonstrates the importance of phonics instruction in learning to read.

The success of the new system, which includes targeted teacher training, more parent communication and interventions for lower-performing students, brought much national attention to the state. 

These test score improvements have come primarily on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test administered by the federal government in the fourth and eighth grades that is often used to compare between states. A decade ago, Mississippi ranked near the bottom of the list for its fourth-grade reading scores. In 2019, the state made headlines for making the most gains in the nation on fourth-grade reading. Again in 2022 and 2023, Mississippi has been lauded for surpassing the national average in this area.

Nearly every district in the state has seen some amount of improvement: A recent analysis by Mississippi First, an education policy nonprofit, found that 97% of school districts improved third-grade reading scores since the passage of the 2013 state law. 

Despite this success, many districts across Mississippi are still struggling to get all their students to be successful readers, with 24 having 10 percent fewer students passing the third-grade “gate” on the first try than the state average. Teachers and policy experts attribute the challenge to multiple factors, including higher teacher turnover rates and fewer resources in low-income communities.

“One of the things I think we did with the Literacy-Based Promotion Act is prove … that Black kids and low-income kids can learn to read just like everybody else,” said Kelly Butler, former CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute that workeds to improve Mississippi students’ pre-literacy and reading skills. “So when you think about those districts that still have big pockets of low performance, I think part of it has to do with being able to attract (educators) in these hard-to-serve schools.”

Citchens, the West Tallahatchie teacher, said she can see in the data that many of her seventh- and eighth-grade students have regularly been behind grade level. She attributes this to her students receiving inconsistent reading instruction and a disparity in resources.

Citchens also said the teaching coaching she received has been some of the most influential training in her career, as it covered resources and best practices as well as how to use them in her classroom. She believes the benefits of these trainings are stemmed when teachers regularly leave a district. 

“They’re pouring into the teacher, they’re getting these coaches, but if (the teachers) don’t stay long enough to perfect these practices … then the students are still at a disadvantage,” she said. 

A recent Mississippi First analysis had similar findings. Its review of state testing and teacher turnover data for the 2022-23 school year found districts with higher rates of turnover were more likely to have low proficiency on state tests. While this analysis does not prove one factor is causing the other, it also points to research on the negative impacts on student learning when teachers leave. 

Other educators have also observed this pattern. Rosemary Collins, a reading interventionist working in Leland, said that, while some districts have more resources, knowledge and experts to implement new tools, other districts are “asked to do more with less.”

Collins works with third-grade students who are projected to fail the reading assessment, or “third-grade gate” as it is colloquially known. She said she would like to see a highly structured literacy curriculum implemented for all students, not just those she works with, as she believes it would decrease the need for intense intervention. She also discussed the need for effective and equitable teaching training to make this happen, something that is stymied by turnover.

“To keep teachers in the classroom, it has to be a mindset change about what educators are and who they are for the community,” Collins said. “You have to feel respected and valued as an individual to want to stay in an environment.”

Both Citchens and Collins described an increased investment from parents in helping their children pass the third-grade test after all of the discussion and positive press related to Mississippi’s “reading miracle.”

“With the growth, and with all of the positive promotion of the growth, I see parents in my community … willing to be more active in their child’s education because they’re not only proud for their child, it’s like a sense of pride for themselves as well,” Citchens said.

‘The gains aren’t zero-sum’

Reading Roadmap, founded in Kansas, came to the Mississippi Delta in 2017. The interactive program places students in small groups based on their skill level and uses instructional materials that follow the “science of reading” principles promoted by the state education board.

“Mississippi as a whole has done it successfully, but here in this area, an area that’s sort of marginalized or stigmatized, I think we wanted to bring equity and bring a better light to this area,” said Taurean Morton, Mississippi state director with Reading Roadmap. 

The excitement and investment around reading is something Clarksdale Municipal Superintendent Toya Harrell-Matthews said Reading Roadmap helped bring to her district. While COVID-19 interrupted some of it, she said she is working to see the energy return and help the program thrive. 

“The first training they did in that little boardroom right over there, just the excitement (of) the teachers learning a new approach and the science of what they were actually going to be doing … I want to get back to that,” Harrell-Matthews said. 

Morton, the state director for Reading Roadmap, said the program uses the local district’s benchmark testing results to sort students into skill groups and track their movement to ensure they are getting the interventions they need. Activities at each skill level are interactive or gamified, which allows students and teachers to reset from the school day. 

He also said he’s noticed a gap in higher education teacher training programs around phonics and “the science of reading.” Morton said he hopes that if they can show the effectiveness of these strategies in their work, it will help create a shift at the post-secondary level. 

Butler, the former CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, also said strengthening Mississippi’s teacher training programs remains one of her key focuses. She said the programs have made improvements but there is still a lack of accountability for higher education programs. 

“Until they are required to do something differently, we’re always going to be retraining teachers,” Butler said. 

The Mississippi Department of Education attempted to address this issue in 2016 by requiring candidates to pass the Foundations of Reading assessment to receive an elementary education license. 

Morton is excited by the growth students in the program are experiencing, with some of the schools they serve in Clarksdale also seeing improvements in their accountability grades. But even in the years where the program hasn’t seen huge improvements, his team still considers it a success. 

“Each year we’ve seen movement and growth,” said Becky Nider, director of programs for Reading Roadmap. “Maybe a kid doesn’t go from being in the red to the green like we want, but we see them move through the red… We get to celebrate those small successes because it’s not a small success for that child.”

This mindset of incremental progress is one that some teachers would like to see more consistently represented in discussions of the so-called “miracle.” 

Langly Dunn, an elementary librarian in the West Tallahatchie School District, said her district can have both a celebratory attitude and a clear understanding of the work they have left to do. It’s something she wishes politicians would also embody instead of “weaponizing and politicizing” the reading gains for their own benefit. 

“When it comes to reading, the gains aren’t zero-sum,” she said. “It’s not like ‘we solved all problems and the way that we teach reading in Mississippi is perfect in every district, in every school, in every classroom all the time’ or ‘the results are unreliable’. It doesn’t have to be one of those two things. We can have made great strides and still interrogate what’s left for us to do.”

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