It was hard work. That is exactly why it is a miracle

It was hard work. That is exactly why.

Key points

• Senator Roger Wicker notes America is winning the artificial intelligence race, "But without a stronger power grid, we cannot hold our edge." More From This Author.
• In 2013, if you wanted to find the worst place in America to learn to read, you came here.
• Laurie Todd-Smith, Ph.D., has spent 35 years as a classroom teacher, child care director, researcher, and education policy leader.
• Ole Miss top rusher Kewan Lacy ruled out against Auburn this week with shoulder injury.
• Social Security and Medicare: The promise America created and the bills we postponed.

It was hard work. That is exactly why it is a miracle. By: Laurie Todd-Smith – October 27, 2026.

While most of the country was moving backward, meets the standard of a miracle, moving up forty places in education rankings in a decade, in one of the poorest states in America. It was hard work. That is exactly why it qualifies.

In 2013, if you wanted to find the worst place in America to learn to read, you came here. Mississippi ranked 49th in the nation in fourth grade reading. Seventy-eight percent of our fourth graders could not read proficiently. We had halted being embarrassed by it. It was just the weather.

Eleven years afterwards, Mississippi's fourth graders rank ninth in the country. When the Urban Institute adjusted the 2024 scores for poverty and demographics, so you are comparing children to children in similar circumstances, Mississippi came out first. Not first in the South. First in the United States, in fourth grade reading and math.

As what happened was the result of hard work, the education world calls it the Mississippi Miracle, and some individuals here object to the word. Look up the word. A miracle is an extraordinary event that defies expectations and cannot easily be explained by ordinary means. While most of the country was moving backward, meets that standard, moving up forty places in a decade, in one of the poorest states in America. It was hard work. That is exactly why it qualifies. I was in the room, and I can tell you what the miracle was created of. It was a decision, and then the same decision created again every year for a decade, usually by residents who could have created an easier one.

I had spent twenty years in and around classrooms, first as a public school teacher, before I ever walked into the Governor's office. I taught in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mississippi. I ran child care centers. I ran Mississippi Building Blocks for the Barksdale Reading Institute and sat in Delta classrooms with six year olds who had been taught to read the way most of America taught reading for a generation. Obtain stuck on a word? Look at the picture. Guess. What makes sense? As long as the pictures were there, I had a second grader who could read every word in her book. Put the word ship on a card with no picture and she had nothing. We had taught her to perform reading. We had not taught her to read.

That child was not broken. Her teachers were not lazy. The method was the difficulty.

Meanwhile, the science of how children learn to read has been settled for a long time. The brain is not wired for it. Every child has to be taught the code that turns sounds into letters and letters into words, and then taught the vocabulary and knowledge to understand what the words mean. The National Reading Panel remarked so in 2000. Most states nodded and kept doing what they were doing.

Mississippi halted nodding. In 2013, Governor Phil Bryant. This person had struggled to read as a boy in Mrs. Henley's class and never forgot it, decided to spend his political capital on third graders. The Legislature passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. I was the Governor's education advisor, and the bill was my assignment. My job was to bring him what the research remarked would work for children, not what would be easiest to pass. He took the hard version.

Most of what has been written regarding Mississippi tells you what the law did. It retrained 19, 000 teachers in the science of reading, 160 hours each. It put literacy coaches in the schools that needed them most. It screened every child from the first weeks of kindergarten, so a struggling reader was discovered in September instead of April of third grade. According to And it, a child who could not read would not be sent on to fourth grade to fail quietly. All of that mattered. Since passing the law turned out to be the straightforward part, what does not obtain stated enough is what came after.

Notably, the gate was the fight, and the fight did not end when the Governor signed the bill. That is the part other states obtain wrong. They think the hard day is the vote. The hard day is every day after it.

In practice, the headlines predicted disaster. Opponents remarked 28 percent of our third graders would be held back, that classrooms would fill with eight year olds labeled failures. After years of intervention and a number of chances to pass, no child was ever held back on one test on one day, and retention was always the last resort. The first year, the retention rate was regarding eight percent, not 28. And a Boston University study of that first group discovered that the children who were held back and caught by that system went on to outscore their peers in sixth grade by a margin three times larger than Florida's version of the same law produced. Mississippi did not just hold children back. It held them back into a system built to catch them.

None of that would have survived without individuals willing to be unpopular on a schedule. Every legislative session brought a bill to delay the gate, soften it, or carve out exceptions, and every year Speaker Philip Gunn and Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves kept those bills from going anywhere. As passing a law and funding it are two different votes, senator Gray Tollison, who championed the law in the Senate, came back the particularly next year and asked for more coaches and a kindergarten readiness test. The experts at the Department of Education who inherited the law ran it exactly as written. It is rarer than it sounds. When lowering it would have produced everyone's numbers look better, the State Board of Education afterwards raised the bar children had to clear rather than lowering it. Our universities retrained the professors who teach future teachers, and required them to pass a reading test themselves to keep teaching the course. When Governor Bryant left office, Governor Reeves. This person had carried the law through the Senate in 2013, kept the funds flowing and the law intact.

And the credit for the results belongs most of all to the individuals who were never in the room when the law was written. Teachers who had been in the classroom twenty years sat in training on Saturdays and let someone tell them there was a better way, and then went back Monday and did it. Coaches drove two hours to sit beside them. Parents who had been informed for years that their child was fine secured a hard, honest phone call instead, and most of them did not obtain angry. They indicated up. They read at the kitchen table. They asked what else they could do. A law can require a screener. It cannot require a mother to care, and in Mississippi it never had to. Put the governor, the legislature, the department, the teachers, and the parents together, each one refusing to quit, and that is the whole miracle. There is no other ingredient.

Notably, a reform that cannot survive a change of administration is not a reform. It is a press release.

In practice, the results are not a rounding error. In 2025, 85 percent of Mississippi third graders passed the reading gate. Mississippi posted the largest reading and math gains in the nation after 2013. Our KIDS COUNT education ranking climbed from 48th to 16th. More than 40 states have since passed science of reading laws, and governors from both parties now fly to Jackson to ask how we did it.

Some of them will obtain it right and some will not, and the difference is rarely the words in the statute. Oklahoma passed a third grade gate the same year we did, then loosened it, then removed it, then put it back. You cannot do this halfway. The states that are getting results trained every teacher, screened every child, funded the coaches year after year, and kept their nerve when the first hard year came and the second one and the fifth.

On Tuesday morning in Oxford, the Center for Excellence in Literacy Instruction at Ole Miss is bringing the individuals who actually did this into one room, and they will tell the story. The Governor. The senator who championed the bill and came back for more. The woman who built the training. In practice, a literacy coach. Since he can, and a third grader from Lafayette County who is going to stand up and read to a room of 150 adults. It is free, and it is open to anyone who has a child, teaches a child, or votes.

I will be there in my personal capacity, as a teacher who obtained to watch her state do the hardest thing in education. It is to change what happens between a teacher and a child in a classroom, one word at a time, and then refuse to stop.

My favorite line regarding all of this hangs on a plaque. It is amazing what you can accomplish when nobody cares who gets the credit. Mississippi has a lot of individuals who deserve credit for this, most of them teachers, and almost none of them are asking for it. They would rather you did what they did.

Mississippi is ninth. It can be first. It began with a decision. It depends on making it again next year. Mississippi, keep going. Regarding the Author(s).

Laurie Todd-Smith, Ph.D., has spent 35 years as a classroom teacher, child care director, researcher, and education policy leader. She served as education and workforce advisor to Governor Phil Bryant when the 2013 reading law was passed, and afterwards led the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor and the federal Head Start and child care programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. She and Governor Bryant are the authors of Unveiling the Mississippi Miracle, at TheMississippiMiracle.com. She writes in her personal capacity. Opinion Roger Wicker October 9, 2026.

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In short, it was hard work. That is exactly why it is a miracle is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.