In the year 7BHH (Before Hoosier Huddle) I posted about the astounding educational miracle happening in Mississippi-once seen as one of the most backwards states (We even had a thread about that around 20BHH.
Below is an update. When I posted before, Mississippi rose from the bottom to the middle in primary reading skills. Now it is near the top for Black students. Meanwhile progressive states like California is getting worse. That’s good news for Mississippi. Better news is that the reading miracle is spreading to other states, but not to progressive states.
The key to a vibrant functioning society is good education. The key to good education is literacy. The key to literacy is the tried and true bedrocks of phonics, teacher training, and accountability. None of that takes more money. All it takes is a well defined fundamental purpose.
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choice
Some argument about the extent of the effect:
https://substack.com/@freddiedeboer/note/c-167000623
DeBoer's main points are this:
The gains from phonics are modest, they only apply to some learners, they do not appear in research on children after second or third grade, and they do not lead to meaningful improvement in comprehension, which is what is actually useful to young readers. Most students learn to read just fine no matter what the system, and students at the higher end of the performance spectrum don't need to be taught at all.
A much longer piece from DeBoer arguing that education really doesn't matter as much as we think, in the sense of schools, types of teaching methods, etc.:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/10/phonics-education-california-mississippi-schools/
deBoer is more ideological than educational substance. The point is that with sound educational methods, the performance of all can be better. This isn’t about relative movement.
https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/a-radical-idea-to-improve-schools-do-what-works
Kinda hard to take that complaint seriously given the article of his I linked. It’s full of substance.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/10/phonics-education-california-mississippi-schools/
deBoer is more ideological than educational substance. The point is that with sound educational methods, the performance of all can be better. This isn’t about relative movement.
https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/a-radical-idea-to-improve-schools-do-what-works
Disagree. I think his points 2 and 3 are complete hogwash. He is firmly imbedded in the bigotry of low expectations. An illiterate person might be very smart.
More here. The rise of southern education is not just about literacy, large doses of discipline and personal responsibility are also important.
There are many ways the liberal mindset deprives youngsters of not only a good education, but also a decent start in life. Important life lessons are learned with discipline, responsibility, and accountability. Excessive leniency for bad conduct is not doing a favor.
Rahm Emanuel: ‘A Lot of Interest Groups’ Want to Ignore Mississippi’s Reading Success
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2026/04/18/rahm-emanuel-a-lot-of-interest-groups-want-to-ignore-mississippis-reading-successrahm-emanuel-a-lot-of-interest-groups-want-to-ignore-mississippis-reading-success/
Rahm Emanuel is correct about this. Quality public education addresses so many social problems we see in society. Reading skills is important for education. Yet interest groups, mostly from the left and Democrat supporters (Teacher unions) oppose it. I don’t get it.
I bet most or all of us here learned to read at home, prior to going to nursery school or kindergarten even. At the very least, most of our learning to read, occurred at home with one or two parents or caretakers.
I personally don’t remember learning to read. But I knew how to read when I got to school. My children learn to read with us at home and we didn’t do any sort of phonics other than using Dr. Seuss’s alphabet book to learn the letters of the alphabet. every time any friend of ours has had a child. My first gift was always that Dr. Seuss alphabet book.
The only “teaching“ of how to read that we did aside from the alphabet book was simply reading with our child in our laps book in front of both of us simple picture, books, day after day, quality time together. Reading, reading, reading. Eventually, they know how to read. How? Magic I guess.
I assume this is a cultural phenomenon. Evidently some parents don’t spend that daily quality time with their children reading, from birth. Leave that the most important and most effective solution for hundred percent literacy of our children is kids being read to as infants. if they can’t read by first grade, I would assume it becomes more challenging to learn.
Incidentally, my children grew up bilingual. I spoke English, my wife spoke Slovenian. More magic was that when they learned a word in one language, they continually showed knowledge of it in the other. This became more pronounced when they began to speak. They also learned to read in both languages at home, although they both started nursery school at one, and were Read to there on a daily basis as well.
I once talked to a linguistics professor, whose specialization was bilingualism. she said that research evidence showed a strong likelihood that that we are natively multilingual rather than monolingual in terms of our mind’s capacity to learn languages.
There is a strong likelihood. Our English-only-centered curriculum creates a mental deficiency in our children compared to those who learned two or more languages from birth.
(Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it, you nationalists…)
Ha! Quite true. My grandson lives there and of course is becoming bilingual. His grandparents live in the same general region as Melania’s birth home though I haven’t checked how close. Barron is clearly bilingual although that will depend on him going forward. Another interesting comment that professor of bilingualism made was that contrary to the phrase, mother tongue, a child living in the father’s native lands is less likely to learn his mother’s tongue than vice versa. Barron would do well to spend some time in Slovenia. He’s very smart so his Slovenian will be fine.