Here’s your chart of the week. Mississippi ranked almost dead-last in the share of students with foundational literacy skills until 2017. Now, it ranks 7th. How is that even possible?

• Mississippi was improving the entire time covered by this graph - but so were most other states. Its relative positioning (rank) did not change much.

• In the mid-2010s, the rest of the country stagnated… and then began to decline. Mississippi kept rising.

• Mississippi has erased nearly all of its COVID-era losses for fourth graders while many other states regressed even further from 2022 to 2024.

Combine all these factors and Mississippi has leap-frogged 39 states in just seven years.

So… the real question is how Mississippi got stronger when others faltered. As I noted a few months ago, there is a bizarre lack of curiosity about their success in the education sector. We need to fix that. educationdaly.us/p/miss…