Back to Basics: Southern Successes in Reading and Why It Matters
- Schools must prioritize core skills like reading and math.
- Southern states show measurable gains after returning to phonics and clear standards.
- Curriculum choices and funding priorities have real consequences for children.
Anyone paying attention to education or with kids in public schools can see the crisis: too many students leave elementary school unable to read or do grade-level math. This was true before COVID and got much worse when schools shut down and priorities shifted away from basics. Parents are angry and rightfully demand that schools teach the essentials first.
Several southern states decided to stop experimenting and start teaching reading the old-fashioned way: phonics, structured literacy, and accountability. The results are real and measurable, with Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee posting steady gains while richer states lag behind. That’s a wake-up call: money alone doesn’t guarantee results if you’re spending it on fads instead of fundamentals.
Here’s a blunt point: when classrooms prioritize social engineering over reading instruction, students pay the price. Teaching theory and ideology may satisfy activists, but it does nothing for decoding, fluency, and comprehension. Parents expect schools to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, not lecture kids about every trending culture topic.
Kelsey Piper writes at ‘The Argument’ on Substack:
Illiteracy is a policy choice
This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage.
In my home state of California, for instance, only 30% of public school fourth graders can read proficiently. Fully 41% cannot even read at a basic level — which is to say, they cannot really understand and interpret written text at all. Eighth graders, as you might expect, look almost as bad…
But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.
The difference is most pronounced if you look at the most disadvantaged students. In California, only 28% of Black fourth graders read at or above basic level, for instance, compared to 52% in Mississippi. But it’s not just that Mississippi has raised the floor. It has also raised the ceiling: The state is also one of the nation’s best performers when you look at students who are not “economically disadvantaged.”…
First, it’s not just Mississippi — Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have adopted the same strategies, stemmed the bleeding affecting states elsewhere, and seen significant improvements…
This is the part of the story that has gotten the most attention — teach phonics! And you should, indeed, teach phonics. But making schools adopt the approach took more than a mere nudge. The Southern Surge states have tried earmarked funding, guidance to districts, and outright mandates to accomplish universal adoption.
The takeaway is simple: set clear standards, fund effective instruction, and stop treating schools like laboratories for ideology. Policymakers who want better results should copy what’s working in the South: focus on core skills, measure progress, and hold schools accountable. This is about kids earning the tools they need to thrive, not adult agendas.
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