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Opinion | Michigan schools need more than Mississippi
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If you’ve read the news about schools in Michigan lately, you’ve probably seen two big claims. First, that too many Michigan fourth-graders can’t read well. And second, that if we want to fix this, we should do what Mississippi did.
It’s true that Michigan’s fourth-grade reading scores are low, and it’s also true that Mississippi has made big improvements over the past decade. And we can learn from those improvements. But just doing what Mississippi did — and stopping there — would be a mistake.
For years, Mississippi ranked near the bottom in national reading scores. Then, around 2015, things changed. After the state began a new literacy plan in 2013 — focused mostly on teaching phonics in the early grades — fourth-grade scores went up, and Mississippi now ranks ninth nationally in fourth grade reading.
It is certainly true that readers need to be able to “crack the code” using phonics and other foundational skills. But a closer look at Mississippi’s data makes it clear that students need far more than phonics instruction to become great readers.
The same Mississippi students who showed those early gains did not keep improving later. By eighth grade, Mississippi still ranks near the bottom in reading. In 2024, only 27% of Mississippi high-school juniors met the ACT reading benchmark, the second-lowest rate among states that test nearly all students. These students spent their whole school lives under Mississippi’s new literacy plan, yet nearly 3 in 4 still weren’t ready for college-level reading at the end of high school.
Reading is about much more than just sounding out words. To be a good reader means being able to analyze ideas, connect evidence and make meaning of text. Strong reading requires strategies to persist when a text is challenging. Excellent reading demands that readers ask questions of texts. These higher-level skills are not taught through phonics alone. That’s why improving early decoding isn’t enough to prepare kids for real-world reading and writing. And it is not enough to leave high school college- and career-ready.
It’s also not enough for young readers. In discussions around Mississippi’s improvements, we often forget that in every state in the country the share of fourth graders deemed “proficient” readers is disturbingly low, due in part to a lack of focus on developing comprehension skills in early-grade classrooms. Even the youngest children should be learning to read for meaning, to ask questions of texts, and to start making inferences. Word-level skills are essential, but if we equate phonics instruction with reading instruction, then we will fail to build the broader foundation children need to become great readers.
What does building this broader foundation look like? In practice, it means classrooms full of rich stories and nonfiction, not just short test passages. It means discussing ideas, forming opinions, and supporting those opinions with evidence from the text. If Michigan focuses only on test-driven word-level drills, our students might read words — but they won’t always understand or create meaning from them.
Our real goal should always stay focused on the long game — educating thoughtful, curious, and capable students who can succeed in high school, careers, college, and life. This means focusing on much more than simply decoding words by fourth grade.
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