The Mississippi Marathon and the Problem with Education “Miracles”

What a new paper reveals about how school improvement actually happens

I’ve said it for years about education: Show me a miracle and I’ll show you a scandal.

That’s not cynicism, it’s pattern recognition. Nearly two decades ago, Atlanta’s public schools were hailed as a model of dramatic urban school improvement. Then school superintendent Beverly Hall, named National Superintendent of the Year in 2009, was indicted along with 35 others in a massive cheating scandal just four years later. She was facing 45 years in prison when she died of breast cancer before her case went to trial. Whether it’s manipulated graduation rates, misleading credit recovery schemes, or outright cheating and fraud, we have a long history of suspending credulity and mistaking inflated or illusory results for genuine progress.

Worse, “miracle” stories are not a corrective to education’s fad-driven culture, they are symptomatic of it. Both depend on the premise that success lies not in the slow work of building systems, but in the one magical lever we have somehow failed to discover and pull.

For the past several years, education has been captivated by yet another “miracle” story. Mississippi, persistently among the lowest-performing states in the nation, has posted some of the strongest gains in the country, especially in early literacy. In a new paper and a companion essay in The Atlantic, Rachel Canter of the Progressive Policy Institute urges us to retire that language. Mississippi’s gains, she argues, are better understood not as a miracle, but a marathon: 26.2 miles, run step by step, over years and even decades. No shortcuts, no charismatic visionary rattling the china, no breakthrough moment. Just sustained effort, aligned policy, and a surprising degree of disciplined follow-through.

It’s a bracing and necessary corrective. Education has always had a weakness for miracle stories. We want to believe that somewhere, someone has discovered the right program or policy, the right idea that can be lifted out of one locale and parachuted into another. In this telling, decades become moments, complicated enterprises become transferable “programs,” and sustained effort is mere magic.

The popular version of the Mississippi story is by now familiar and reductive: The state embraced the “science of reading,” overhauled its literacy instruction, implemented third-grade retention, and saw dramatic gains. There’s truth in that account, but it’s incomplete in ways that matter. Canter is well-positioned to paint a fuller picture. Before decamping for PPI and think-tank world, she was the founder of Mississippi First, a policy and advocacy organization that played a key role in advancing and sustaining the state’s reforms.

Her paper fills in the missing context. Mississippi’s progress rests on four interlocking elements: clear standards and assessments; real consequences for failure; a shift toward evidence-based instruction; and sustained support for implementation. Just as important, these elements did not arrive all at once. Canter’s timeline shows that Mississippi’s accountability infrastructure predates its literacy reforms—a sequencing that suggests these gains were not the product of a single policy shift, but of a system built over time.

These questions—what mattered most, what came first, and what can be replicated—are exactly what we’ll be exploring in an AEI event later this month, titled What Can We Learn from the “Mississippi Marathon”?, featuring Canter along with Kymyona Burk of ExcelinEd and Kelly Butler of Reading Universe, both leading figures in Mississippi’s education scene.

The goal of that conversation is not to celebrate Mississippi, nor to offer a simple replication guide. It’s to wrestle with a harder problem: how to interpret success in a field that is notoriously prone to overinterpretation and confirmation bias: If you favor phonics, that’s how you explain Mississippi’s success. If you favor HQIM, you see curriculum as the critical factor. If you favor accountability, you see accountability, and so on. If you’re skeptical of reform at large, you see noise—particularly if you find it hard to believe that a red, Deep South state has anything to teach us about improving outcomes for kids.

I’ve seen this dynamic up close. Not long ago, on a local NPR talk show, I mentioned Mississippi’s emergence as one of the nation’s leading states in early literacy. The response from the other guests was not surprise, curiosity, or even skepticism but laughter. Literal, out-loud laughter. The idea that we might have something to learn from a Deep South state struck them as absurd.

Indeed, calling Mississippi a “miracle” is a kind of dismissal. It allows us to marvel at the outcome without taking seriously the conditions that produced it. Miracles, after all, are not meant to be replicated. That’s why they’re miracles.

Canter’s description of Mississippi’s achievement presents a challenge for me as well. I’ve long been skeptical of accountability as a reform lever—not because I oppose accountability, but because it often assumes a level of system capability and competence that simply isn’t there. Setting expectations and attaching consequences is one thing; ensuring that schools have the knowledge, materials, and support to meet those expectations is another.

Mississippi uncomfortably challenges my priors because is it suggests something I’d prefer not to concede so easily: that accountability, under the right conditions, may not just measure performance—it may help create it. When it’s part of a coherent system aligned with instruction, support, and clear expectations, it may play a more constructive role than its critics, myself included, sometimes imagine.

In sum, the real lesson of Mississippi is not that we’ve found The Answer. It’s that there may not be an answer, only a process: Coherence. Persistence. Political will and durability. The unglamorous work of aligning what schools are asked to do with what they are actually equipped to do—and then sticking with it long enough for the system to learn how to do it well. That’s not a miracle, but in Canter’s apt framing, a marathon.

A marathon is not inspiring because it is miraculous. It’s inspiring because it is repeatable—and because so few of us have the discipline to run one.

-30-

A quick note: I have a new piece out in Education Next, co-authored with Annika Hernandez, titled “The Battle Hymn of the Refugee Teacher.” It looks at a small but telling migration underway in education: teachers who are leaving traditional district schools and finding their way into classical charter and private schools. What’s striking is that many of these teachers don’t describe the move as a career change so much as a homecoming. They are not switching professions—they are reclaiming the job they thought they were hired to do in the first place.

The piece explores what’s drawing them: classrooms organized around shared content, coherent curricula, and a clearer sense of purpose. Whatever one makes of classical education’s broader claims, it is increasingly functioning as a refuge for teachers who want to teach—and who feel they finally can. Check it out.