Mississippi fourth graders are top in the nation for improving their reading and math scores, jumping from 49th and 50th in 2012 to 9th and 16th in 2024 for reading and math, respectively – a growth many have termed the “Mississippi Miracle.”
That miracle, which is due in large part to reintroducing phonics-based instruction, has since spread to dozens more states. Tennessee, for example, sat at 35th in fourth grade literacy scores in 2022, but jumped 12 places by 2024, according to the 2025 Nation’s Report Card from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
The NAEP’s 2025 Nation Report Card shows fourth grade reading levels across the country remain two points below the pre-pandemic score of 2020 but three points higher than the most recent (2022) report. The NAEP measures educational success on a 0-500 standardized test-type scale, with the national average for fourth grade students at 214 – two points lower than recorded in 2022 and five points below the pre-pandemic score of 219.
Mississippi’s improvement from second to last in 2013 to top 10 in 2024 marked the state as an example for others for how to advance children’s literacy across the nation.
The 2013 Mississippi “Literacy-Based Promotion Act” ensured that students passing kindergarten through third grades have actually met the requirements for those grade levels. An amendment to the LBPA in 2016 added a required “individual reading plan” (IRP) to record each student’s literacy education and progress. The amendment also required teachers to use research-based literacy education techniques, including “the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.” Phonics-based reading teaches students individual letters and pairings to make different sounds.
“This trend has received national attention, and representatives from other states have remarked that they are looking closely at Mississippi’s methods to see if there are lessons learned that could be applied in their home states,” Bailey Shelton Ray, Director of Communications at Children’s Foundation of Mississippi, told Heartlander News in a statement.
Tennessee’s NAEP score for 2024 was 215 – only one point above the national average – but it was the first time the state’s average surpassed the national average since 1992, when levels were first recorded.
Although Tennessee does not explicitly cite Mississippi as the inspiration behind its legislation, the state’s TLSA legislation includes many of the changes as Mississippi’s 2013 law, such as reverting from a “balanced literacy” approach to the scientifically proven phonics-based approach.
The debate surrounding balanced literacy and phonics-based education for reading dates back to the 1800s with Horace Mann, the “father of the public-school movement.”
Mann believed a student did not need to learn the individual sounds of letters but instead should memorize whole words, so the child would learn the meanings of words without the distraction of individual letters. In contrast, the school of phonics argues a child needs to be taught that words are made up of parts and that when put together in varying ways, can sound different and have new meanings…
