Can Mississippi’s Literacy Playbook Fix Pennsylvania Classrooms?
Only 30.5 percent of Pennsylvania children test as proficient or above in math by the eighth grade, according to government statistics released for the 2024-2025 school year. That stubborn baseline is driving a sharp political debate over whether the commonwealth should import a controversial education reform model from the Deep South.
During a gubernatorial debate at the Kemp Family Commons, Republican candidate Stacy Garrity pointed to those lagging achievement numbers to argue that ever-increasing state spending has failed to fix the underlying system. Her proposed remedy leans heavily on structural accountability: establishing academic “gates” at the end of the third and eighth grades where students must demonstrate grade-level proficiency before moving forward. To justify the approach, policymakers often point south, where a similar policy transformed Mississippi from a perennial laggard into a national reading success story.
The Architecture of the Mississippi Miracle
In 2013, then-Mississippi Republican Governor Phil Bryant signed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, creating a strict promotion gate at the fourth-grade threshold. The results reshaped national education debates. Mississippi climbed from 49th in the United States for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to ninth by 2024.
When adjusted for relative poverty, Urban Institute evaluations of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores place Mississippi’s 2024 academic performance at the top nationally for fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade math, and eighth-grade math, while ranking fourth for eighth-grade reading. But education analysts warn that attributing this turnaround solely to the threat of student retention misses the vital support systems that accompanied the legislation.
The Hidden Infrastructure Behind the Gates
Kymyona Burk, who led the state’s literacy reform as the State Literacy Director at the Mississippi Department of Education, emphasized in a 2022 essay for the George W. Bush Institute that effective implementation is what makes retention work. Without active intervention and targeted support for students held back, a retention-only policy risks becoming merely punitive for families lacking external resources.
To make the model work, Mississippi trained all of its kindergarten through third-grade educators in the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) framework and deployed expert reading coaches into struggling schools. That intensive professional development mirrors findings from a 2011 study by researchers Joanne F. Carlisle, Kai Schnabel Cortina, and Lauren A. Katz, which demonstrated that extensive, school-based support for teachers is essential to altering classroom instructional practices.
What Pennsylvania Has Done and What Remains Missing
Pennsylvania has already taken steps toward structured literacy mandates. Under Act 55 of 2022, school entity professional development plans must include structured literacy training, and teacher preparation programs must incorporate standards developed by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Yet, unlike Mississippi’s comprehensive rollout, Pennsylvania has not instituted a statewide retention policy, extensively overhauled curricula around those specific training models, or funded a robust network of reading coaches.
The financial commitment required for true replication is steep. In Michigan, lawmakers dedicated $75 million toward LETRS training in their 2027 budget, illustrating the immense cost of scaling teacher frameworks. Critics who look at Mississippi’s outcomes and support Republican proposals—assuming that adding a third-grade promotion gate and perhaps another at the end of middle school will magically rescue American literacy—frequently overlook the fact that this perspective ignores an essential element of the Mississippi Miracle.
Whether Pennsylvania chooses to adopt academic gates will depend less on the slogan of retention and more on the accompanying investment in curriculum, coaching, and student support.
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