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Rachel Canter is the Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute and the founder of Mississippi First, an advocate for education initiatives in Mississippi. She recently wrote a piercing account of the state of American education, giving special focus to the success of the state of Mississippi.

She writes: “Frustrated by sagging reading and math scores, educators, advocates and lawmakers across the country are curious about reforms that transformed Mississippi from a national punchline into a leader in reading and math proficiency . . . If helping kids to read and do math at grade level is the goal, the evidence shows that what we’ve been doing in schools across the country for the last 12 or so years hasn’t worked. Children have lost so much ground, they not only know less than their counterparts did a decade ago; older children know as little as they have this century.”

Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show stagnation or decline in student achievement across all age groups. Reading scores for fourth-graders fell to 2000 levels, while math showed only partial recovery from 2022 lows—still below peaks achieved more than a decade ago. For middle and high-schoolers, reading and math scores in 2024 either matched or fell below their lowest levels in the 21st century. Data from the international PISA exam released this week echo this story: The nation’s 15-year-olds scored far below pre-pandemic highs in reading and math and tied their lowest scores ever. This decline didn’t start with COVID. The pandemic was simply “the mudslide that followed seven years of erosion in student achievement,” as Tom Kane of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research said in May.

But Mississippi has emerged as an exception to this trend.  Why?  Canter writes that “For years now, the education world has been fascinated by the story of how Mississippi tackled our literacy problem by ensuring teachers applied the ‘science of reading’—a set of principles and practices brought to prominence by the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report that called on educators to teach phonics, to help children systematically match letters to sounds and to supplement that learning with background knowledge and vocabulary to aid comprehension.”

• “After Mississippi passed its Literacy Based Promotion Act in 2013, which required children scoring in the lowest level of reading performance to be held back at the end of third grade, the state began offering teachers and school administrators training—and required training and coaching for the lowest-performing elementary schools.”
• “The state also required all schools to administer state-approved screening for reading difficulties three times a year, from kindergarten to third grade, and to immediately notify parents when children fell below benchmarks.”
• “These changes helped bring test scores from the bottom of national rankings to the top in fourth grade math and reading, and even eighth grade math, adjusting for demographics. Without adjustment, Mississippi moved from tied for last to the national average in fourth grade reading and math in 2019. By 2024, Mississippi fourth-graders weren’t just posting the nation’s biggest gains since 2013; they were also beating students in most states outright, tying for seventh in reading and 13th in math.”

Canter makes a series of additional observations about politics and educational reform.

• “States dominated by Democrats have been slower to embrace similar reforms. Of the 18 key early literacy policies tracked by ExcelinEd, a national, nonpartisan organization for education policy and advocacy, blue states have adopted 9, on average, compared with about 13.5 for purple and red states, as of February 2026. “
• “Organized labor might explain some of this gap. In June, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute updated its state by state ranking of teachers union strength. Sure enough, blue states like California, Massachusetts and New Jersey top the list, with red states like Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Arkansas at the bottom.  When my colleagues and I compared the Fordham teachers union strength ranking to ExcelinEd’s early literacy tracker, we found a strong, negative correlation between the two—the more powerful the unions, the fewer literacy policy principles the state had adopted.”
• However, “some states with the lowest literacy policy scores from ExcelinEd are Republican-led and have weak unions—like Wyoming and South Dakota. About half the country is ‘red,’ but only states in the Deep South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee—have adopted similarly comprehensive policies, or undertaken the work to implement them over a long period to achieve results. There’s a reason education experts have taken to talking about ‘the Southern surge,’ not the ‘red state rise.’”
• “In New Mexico, lawmakers unanimously passed new legislation bringing the state’s literacy policies closer to Mississippi’s, including on issues like teacher licensure, coaching and curriculum. Amanda Aragon Bernabe of NewMexicoKidsCAN, a leading advocate for the reforms, said the biggest victories involve laws requiring schools to test young children for reading progress and to notify parents of the results. Parental notification is a key accountability component of Mississippi’s policy. It took New Mexico years to pass these reforms, but state unions recently dropped their opposition to the bill after months of advocacy by supporters, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.”
• “Most astonishing is the case of Massachusetts, which ranks third overall in union strength. In late June, Gov. Maura Healey signed new legislation aimed at ensuring that all Bay State public school children receive ‘evidence-based literacy instruction.’ It also codifies and tightens requirements for teacher training, K-3 reading curricula, screening and parental notification, while granting the Massachusetts Department of Education robust powers to enforce transparency and accountability. Education reformers see the law not only as a tremendous victory, but as the greatest legislative loss for the teachers union in a decade. As in New Mexico, the final bill passed both chambers unanimously and enjoyed strong support from the governor.”

Canter concludes that “While political headwinds remain a hindrance to education reform, these recent legislative developments show that policies supporting evidence-based literacy can gain traction across diverse constituencies. The question is whether policymakers, regardless of party alignment, have the courage to risk taking heat on behalf of our children’s future.”

There is an additional challenge for American public education—the education of disabled children. Educating disabled children is a popular policy, but the sums required under current laws are problematic to say the least. Across the country, school districts are pulling money from general-education funds to pay for services for pupils with special needs. Even as school enrollment declines, the number of students in special education across the country is rising. Between 2014 and 2023 it grew by 1.4m, from 11.6% of all pupils to 14.7%. “In several states—including Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wyoming—that figure is higher still at roughly one in five. As costs rise, states are confronting fraught questions about who should pay, how well programs work and what must be pared back to cover the bill.”

The Economist published a noteworthy article summarizing the challenges associated with educating special needs children.  “Fifty years ago, it was estimated that over half of the country’s disabled children received an insufficient education. To remedy this, in 1975 Congress passed what eventually became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), one of several laws that together guarantee disabled children a “free appropriate public education”. Each eligible child receives an Individualized Education Program (IEP) specifying the services a school district must provide. These range from occasional speech therapy to a classroom aide or placement in a specialized school, which can cost districts hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.”

Consider these observations:

• Congress initially envisaged that the federal government would shoulder much of the cost. IDEA authorized but did not require Washington to fund up to 40% of average national per-pupil spending on each disabled child. In reality, between 2005 and 2021 federal funding for IDEA fell by 12% in real terms, amounting to an average of just 15.5% of total funding. That has left states and local school districts to find the rest. A report from Bellwether, an education think-tank, found that in 2020 districts footed on average nearly two-thirds of their special-education bill. Districts generally fund schools from local property taxes, which are difficult to raise without provoking revolt. States typically pay for schools from general revenues such as sales and income taxes, but nearly all have balanced-budget requirements that are challenging to meet.
• The biggest strain is the rising number of special-education students, a figure that more than doubled between 1976 and 2023, to 7.3m nationally, according to data from the Centre on Reinventing Public Education, a research group at Arizona State University. Partly this reflects expanding recognition of disabilities previously neglected. Students with autism swelled from a little under 5,000 in 1991, when the disorder was designated as a federal disability category, to just under 1m in 2023. Developmental delay, a category introduced in 1997, grew from roughly 1,900 students that year to about 300,000 in 2023. Criteria for the conditions have broadened; better detection and concerted efforts to evaluate children earlier have probably contributed, too.
• As demand swells, districts plug the deficit with money from their general budgets. Bellwether, sampling almost 6,000 school districts and using data from 2020, found a $24.1bn gap between actual special-education spending and the state and federal funds earmarked for that purpose. Because special-education services are legally mandated, finding savings is tricky. A school cannot arbitrarily pare back an IEP. Districts “overspend and overcommit,” says Maggie Cicco Rault, a researcher at Georgetown University, rather than risk violating rules or inviting litigation. Some states have so-called “hold-harmless” provisions which protect districts from losing any of their special-education funding even if changes in enrolment would otherwise reduce it.

In the US, public education is a state function organized around local school districts  largely financed by property taxes. Furthermore, the Trump administration has basically shut down the Department to Education and shifted special education to the Department of Health and Human Services.  There is thus no easy, quick-fix solution to the funding of special needs children in America. While Mississippi offers a solution and realistic hope for dealing with children’s reading scores, funding special needs children in terms of their education remains profoundly difficult.

See Rachel Canter in the Wall Street Journal (12-13 September 2026); The Economist (5 September 2026), p. 21.