How can Michigan improve schools? Mississippi’s ex-superintendent has ideas

Mississippi’s K-12 students have shown steady growth after the state adopted major reforms covering early grades and the teaching of reading
Former state superintendent Carey Wright said those efforts succeeded because they focused on ‘science of reading,’ early intervention instruction and teacher training
The program also succeeded because the state did not change course and had the unified backing of policy makers, Wright said

Before Mississippi lawmakers passed sweeping education reforms in 2013 — including holding back third graders who couldn’t read and pouring money into pre-K learning — the state’s fourth graders routinely ranked last on national reading assessments.

The Mississippi board of education then hired Carey Wright to become state superintendent to implement those reforms.

Over the next decade, Wright worked across the state with administrators, teachers and parents to change education and how reading was taught in Mississippi.

Early on, as teachers learned how to use a new “science of reading” curriculum, thousands of students were held back. But that number fell every year as the reforms took root.

(Still, 6.3% of third graders were retained after the 2023-24 school year. If the same percentage were held back in Michigan, about 6,500 third-graders would repeat the grade, rather than the approximately 400 who were held back in 2023 before lawmakers repealed that law.)

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By year 3, the state started seeing gains, and by 2024, Mississippi’s fourth graders ranked 9th in the country in reading (Michigan was 44th) and 16th in math (Michigan: 34th).

Wright, now superintendent of schools in Maryland, was in Detroit Thursday to talk with the Business Leaders For Michigan about her reform efforts in Mississippi and now Maryland. Education has already become an issue in Michigan’s 2026 governor’s race.

Wright took time to answer questions from Bridge Michigan about Mississippi and what policymakers in Michigan could learn. What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation.

Q: When you were hired, did you have the full backing of the state board, the governor and the legislature?

I had. Yes, I do believe I did. I think that I was still the unknown quantity, obviously coming from Maryland down to Mississippi, but the state board was very clear on what they wanted done, which was to improve literacy, you know, and math across the state. The legislature was really the driver behind this, I believe.

Q: Did having unified support help?

Oh, absolutely. I think that because it wasn’t another battle I was having to fight… . Look, I knew it was going to be heavy work … lifting the state off the bottom, and so we wanted everybody rowing in the same direction. And we wanted everybody buying into what we were going to do. There was not a strategic plan that was in place, so we put the strategic plan in place; set very clear goals for that, and then proceeded to implement not just the legislation but all the other aspects that had really not even been included in legislation (but which) we felt needed to be done in order to change education in the state of Mississippi.

Q: What kind of pushback did you get, and what was the biggest hurdle?

I think there was angst over retention, and that was one of the reasons that I said to my team “we’re not going to talk about retention, we’re going to talk about prevention and intervention.” And so we took a totally different tact with that and identifying children early that needed help, and then identifying the kind of help they needed and then making sure that we had professional learning … for our teachers, that they knew how to implement the research-based interventions that were taking place. And more importantly, that they knew how to implement the science of reading because the science of reading is a very prescriptive way to go about teaching children how to read.

Q: You mentioned ‘angst.’ It seems if you are holding back 8,000 to 10,000 kids, it would be more than angst.

I think there was anxiety around holding children back, and so that’s one of the reasons that we didn’t focus on the retention aspect. I wanted to get to kids before retention was even a consideration, and so, when you’re looking at this, this is a K-3 strategy.

This isn’t just something we do with third graders, so we started kindergarten, first, second and third (grade) so that by the time the assessment is administered in third grade (they’re) not having to worry about it, or you know, retention, and you’re right. The numbers of kids that we retained dropped drastically.

Note: Wright said the law required districts to notify parents within the first 30 days of a school year if a child was struggling in reading, and districts had to list specific strategies to improve reading skills. More letters are required in subsequent months. “Parents were always kept in the loop,” she said.

Q: Success was not immediate. How did you convince administrators, teachers and parents to stay the course?

You start by highlighting where you are meeting success, and I think even when we first started incrementally, seeing that success, we started really broadcasting it high, and wide. But it took us at least three years to start seeing the first uptick. It was at least three, two to three years before we even saw the first uptick, but then it was every single year thereafter.

At that point, part of my talking points, to be quite honest with you: There’s not a metric, there’s not a piece of information we’re following that’s not heading in the right direction, and that was the truth.

I don’t care whether it was reading or math or graduation rates or dropout rates. Once we started seeing that improvement, that improvement just kept coming across the state.

Q: Michigan has talked about education reform for years. Do you have any advice for policymakers?

A: Well, you can’t do one thing one year and something else the next, and you’ve got to identify upfront what the variety of strategies that you’re going to be using and that they need to be research-based, and you need a plan, and you need a way to monitor that point in, and you need to have everybody rowing in the same direction. This can’t be, you know, the state (education) department’s plan and the governor’s got another plan and the Legislature’s got another plan.

I can tell you what worked in Mississippi, and I think what’s working in Maryland, is that we’re all on the same page about what needs to happen.

And we … implemented the same set of strategies year after year after year after year, and so it was not a one-and-done. There is no “silver bullet” to this war. There is no magic to this work. It is hard work, but you’ve got to lean in to help schools and teachers where this is concerned.

Q: States have different educational leaders and elect or appoint them differently. How important is it to use your position as the bully pulpit?

I think it’s important that you’re all on the same page, because to have conflicting views and conflicting ways to go about it just creates chaos. So if you’re going to put somebody in charge, then put somebody in charge and hold them accountable for getting the job done.

I tried to keep the politics out of it because I don’t think children are political creatures, they’re not red or blue. They’re children who want to come to school and learn to read.

In fact, I had somebody ask me at a big conference one day, “are you a Republican or a Democrat?” And I said, “Well, I wasn’t hired to be a
Republican or a Democrat. I was hired to be the state superintendent of schools.”

And I stuck to that line because I thought the moment that we make it political then it becomes something else entirely, and teaching children how to read is not political.