Mississippi and Subsidiarity – Religion & Liberty Online

Delta Health Alliance was founded in 2001 with the primary goal of coordinating community-based healthcare in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions in the country. Early on, however, its leadership recognized the connection between health and education outcomes: A child who cannot read is a child whose long-term health, income, and flourishing are all at risk. This perception pushed DHA to build literacy programming into the core of its mission through the development of “Promise Communities,” which are place-based partnerships in Mississippi counties that pair DHA staff directly with local schools, families, and civic partners. 

My experience last summer was one piece of this infrastructure: the Literacy Fellows Program places tutors directly with rising third graders identified as reading below grade level the summer before the state’s high-stakes third-grade reading exam. The success I saw in my students was not happenstance. A study by the Center for Community Research and Evaluation at the University of Memphis found that struggling third graders in programs conducted by Literacy Fellows improved by 68 scale points on average—a gain large enough to move many students out of the “at risk of retention” category entirely. What makes this work distinct from the state legislation it complements lies in its form. The LBPA operates through mandates, assessments, and retention policies, all of which construct the machinery of state accountability. DHA, however, operationalizes this accountability through relationships: a tutor who went to the elementary school she now serves, a summer camp coordinator who knows every family by name, a parent employed by community partners who hosts after-school programs. Policy and public funding alone cannot build the trust that convinces a nine-year-old that she is capable of writing a full letter by June. This is the work of civil society, and in the Delta—the region of Mississippi with the deepest poverty and steepest educational disparities—it is hard to imagine the “Mississippi Miracle” happening without the support of the communities it directly reflects. 

Ohio provides a useful point of comparison: The state passed legislation remarkably similar to Mississippi’s but did not produce similar results. The Third Grade Reading Guarantee, enacted in 2012, predates Mississippi’s LBPA by less than a year and included similar retention and intervention provisions. If legislation alone accounts for Mississippi’s dramatic turnaround, Ohio’s outcomes might reasonably have been expected to yield similar improvements. Instead, its reading outcomes have moved in the opposite direction: Fourth-grade reading scores dropped from 38% in 2019 to 33% in 2022. In 2023, Ohio lawmakers weakened the Guarantee further, practically eliminating mandatory retention requirements for third graders. While Ohio had collective impact programming, including the “Success by Third Grade” initiative led by the United Way of Central Ohio, the character of these efforts was quite different. Ohio’s efforts were oriented around removing nonacademic barriers to learning rather than building the specific instructional infrastructure a literacy law necessitates: trained faculty and staff, shared models of instruction, and a community that is informed and supportive of such endeavors. Mississippi’s civil society organizations spent years developing precisely that infrastructure before the state ever required it. 

Economist Sakib Mahmud compared the implementation of third-grade retention policies in Arizona, North Carolina, Ohio, and Mississippi. Although Mississippi’s retention policy produced statistically significant gains, Mahmud found that the effect of retention alone was relatively modest. Instead, he argues that Mississippi distinguished itself through the intensity of implementation and the investments preceding the law. The underperformance of Ohio does not, on its own, prove that Mississippi-style civil society infrastructure would have changed the outcome. It does show that legislation nearly identical to Mississippi’s was not sufficient on its own. Mississippi’s success is better explained by the sustained, ground-floor investment that preceded its law than by the law itself. 

The most consequential reforms in Mississippi were not a substitute for state government but acted as its scaffolding; remove that scaffolding, and the structure collapses. In a January 2026 article published by the journal Significance, statisticians argue Mississippi’s improvements are a statistical hoax or great exaggeration produced by excluding retained students from the tested cohort. It is a serious objection, and one worth engaging candidly. Economist Noah Spencer offers the strongest rebuttal, noting that retained students are not removed from the testing pool permanently, as they still proceed to the fourth grade and take the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) that next year. Other analysts reached similar conclusions, although from unique perspectives. Political writer Kevin Drum, once skeptical of the Mississippi Miracle due to the state’s history of high retention rates, used data from the Urban Institute showing that the average fourth-grader’s age barely changed after the law took effect, which would not be expected if mass retention was driving the score gains. Together, these analyses suggest that Mississippi’s gains are not easily dismissed as a statistical artifact. A key question remains, however: Why did the state’s reforms succeed where similar legislation elsewhere has struggled or failed? 

Mississippi’s prebuilt foundation is visible in the mechanics of the Barksdale Reading Institute’s work. In the years before the LBPA, the Institute assessed how reading was actually being taught in classrooms across the state and deployed reading specialists directly to schools that needed them, building a working knowledge of what effective literacy instruction looked like on the ground. It also built lasting partnerships with the state’s teacher-preparation programs, working to change how future teachers were trained before the law existed to mandate it. By its own account, the Institute treated coaching, high-quality instructional materials, and targeted intervention as the central levers of literacy improvement, and it built a training and coaching model around them in direct partnership with the Mississippi Department of Education. When the legislature later mandated literacy coaches and teacher training statewide, it scaled a model that a civil society organization had already spent more than a decade building, testing, and refining in classrooms across the state.