The Southern Surge in Education
Frederick M. Hess, National Review
These four states have a lot to teach the country about teaching
It’s been a grim stretch for America’s schools. Reading and math achievement are in a decade-long swoon. This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) yielded the worst fourth-grade reading outcomes in 20 years, with 40 percent of students scoring below basic proficiency. For eighth-graders, reading scores hit a historic low — with 33 percent below basic. Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism is way up, as are grade inflation and misbehavior.
At this point, the nation’s most popular K–12 reform is the push to let families opt out and choose new schools. There is, however, one notable good-news story when it comes to school performance that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves: A handful of red states are making notable gains — and putting their big-spending peers to shame. Their success has come to be called the Southern surge.
On the new NAEP (better known as the Nation’s Report Card), just two states, Alabama and Louisiana, had math or reading scores higher than what they were in 2019, pre-Covid. When researchers at the left-leaning Urban Institute adjusted 2025 NAEP results based on state demographics, Mississippi fourth-graders topped the country in math and reading. Louisiana’s fourth-graders led the nation in reading growth for the past two NAEP cycles and rank fifth nationwide for math growth. In fact, the two states were in the top four in every category. These accomplishments have taken many by surprise, perhaps because of a habit of imagining the South as a cultural backwater
The Education Recovery Scorecard, a Harvard-Stanford research collaboration, tracks how well states are making up academic ground lost after 2019. The most recent results offer an eye-popping portrait of the Southern surge: Alabama was first in math recovery and third in reading recovery; Louisiana was second and first, Mississippi sixth and fourth, and Tennessee third and ninth. Chad Aldeman, a respected education analyst and old Obama hand, makes clear the extent of the “Mississippi miracle,” noting that Mississippi’s black students “rank third nationally, and its low-income kids outperform those in every other state.” Mississippi is the “only state to see gains across all performance levels over the last decade. Its average went up, but so did the scores of its highest and lowest performers.”
What’s driving these results? A commitment to basic skills, especially through phonics-based early-literacy instruction, and rigorous classroom materials.
During Carey Wright’s nine-year tenure as state superintendent, which started in 2013, Mississippi adopted a series of early-literacy reforms that drove its remarkable gains. Under the 2013 Literacy Based Promotion Act, Mississippi embraced phonics, held back third-graders who couldn’t read, adopted literacy training for teachers, and provided literacy coaches for its worst-performing elementary schools. In 2016, it began requiring new elementary school teachers to pass the Foundations of Reading assessment, while identifying struggling readers via a universal screener administered three times a year in grades K–3. Teachers also work with parents to create individual reading plans for each struggling student, diagnosing specific skill deficiencies and spelling out appropriate interventions.
In Louisiana, K–3 teachers and elementary school leaders are now required to complete training in the “science of reading,” an approach to early literacy that relies heavily on cognitive science research and emphasizes phonics, vocabulary, and oral reading fluency. Superintendent Cade Brumley notes, “We banned three-cueing systems, which is a reading approach that prompts students to draw on context instead of sounding words out.” Matthew Levey, a curricular expert, has reported that Louisiana’s knowledge-rich Bayou Bridges program “knits together history, geography, civics, and economics to build student knowledge and literacy skills in grades K–8 . . . [giving] students plenty of opportunities to learn complex vocabulary and ideas and use them in context.”
In Alabama, the 2019 Literacy Act required nine hours of science-of-reading training for K–6 teachers. Like Mississippi, Alabama mandated that K–3 teaching candidates pass the Foundations of Reading assessment. The act also required schools to develop intensive summer reading camps, which provide 60 hours of instruction to the lowest-performing students. Last year, more than 30,000 struggling readers attended, and half caught up to grade level by summer’s end. In 2022, the legislature moved to build on this success via the Numeracy Act, requiring math coaches in every elementary school while creating the machinery to vet math materials and improve teacher training.
Of course, it’s no coincidence that the Southern-surge states reopened schools during Covid even as blue-state schools remained tightly shuttered. By September 2020, most schools in Mississippi and Tennessee were open for in-person instruction, as were half of Louisiana’s schools. (When Louisiana schools chief Brumley was informed that the legislature wanted to keep schools closed in the fall of 2020, he walked out after telling them, “If you’re going to keep schools closed, you’re going to do it without me.”)
Leaders in these states show an admirable, dogged focus on results. When I asked Brumley about his state’s gains, he sounded more like a hard-bitten SEC coach than a high-flying education reformer. He said, “The results validate our work, but we know that too many students still can’t read on grade level, too many perform poorly in math, and too many are in schools that are failing them.” He added, “We can’t be arrogant when there is still too much work to do.”
Despite all of the good news, the Southern surge remains unfamiliar to many. As Karen Vaites, a New York–based education advocate, observed this spring in the Phi Delta Kappan, “this year’s NAEP results were grim, and — predictably — every publication covered them.” But that coverage left something out. “By this point, I would have expected to see more stories about the Southern Surge,” she said, “but I’m not.”
Why haven’t you heard much about the Southern surge from advocates, academics, or the mainstream media?
For starters, the approach isn’t sexy. It’s about basic skills, hard work, and rigorous instruction. That doesn’t make for a great news hook. There’s also the reality that contempt for red states and the Deep South is perhaps one of the last acceptable forms of prejudice. The notion that Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama are the states where policymakers are fighting for poor kids or taking the science of learning seriously just doesn’t compute for cosmopolitan progressives or the education professoriate.
Moreover, to the consternation of so many advocates, academics, and union honchos, the Southern surge teaches an inconvenient lesson about school spending. In Louisiana, between the 2014–15 and 2023–24 school years, after-inflation spending increased 27 percent, to $17,500 per pupil. Spending was up 8 percent, to $12,500, in Mississippi; 5 percent, to $12,600, in Tennessee; and 14 percent, to $13,200, in Alabama. This is not a story of big bucks. Consider that in Illinois, per pupil spending was $21,700 in 2023–24, up 19 percent over the past decade. In Massachusetts, it was up 19 percent, to $26,100; 30 percent, to $19,000, in California; and 12 percent, to $31,514, in New York. For those convinced that the key to school improvement is always more money, the Southern surge is, shall we say, unhelpful.
Media disinterest is especially troubling because too many states are heading in the wrong direction. Crippled by the excesses of “equity”-minded reform, blue-state schools are abandoning even the pretense of educational rigor. Last fall, Massachusetts voted to eliminate the state’s graduation tests, dismantling three-decade-old legislation that had fueled a generation of academic achievement. Starting with the class of 2028, New York will no longer require high schoolers to pass Regents Examinations in English, math, science, or social studies to earn a diploma. Instead, students will complete projects to show that they’re creative innovators, critical thinkers, effective communicators, global citizens, and so on. California has moved to eliminate advanced math classes through tenth grade in the name of equity, while Oregon has done away with its graduation tests for the same reason. Blue states are not just lagging, they’re backpedaling.
For parents, educators, and public officials alike, the Southern surge offers several straightforward lessons.
First, it’s the fundamentals, stupid. Education is a field that has proven itself highly vulnerable to fads and grifters. Simple solutions that rely on discipline, rigor, demanding expectations, and hard work just don’t sing out to those who seek quick fixes or shortcuts. The emphasis needs to be on academics rather than on gauzy notions of “global citizenship” or “self-guided learning.” The Southern surge is a testament to the importance of taking literacy, numeracy, and evidence seriously.
Second, curriculum matters. Schooling frequently involves battalions of ill-equipped teachers making it up as they go along, with most reporting that they find a goodly chunk of their instructional materials online (via platforms like Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers). Wonder how something like the 1619 Project made its way into so many classrooms, even with few school systems officially adopting it? There’s your answer. Now, some amount of DIY lesson-planning is inevitable. But most teachers don’t have the requisite time, training, and experience to do a lot of it, or to do it well. Southern states are taking aggressive steps to support teachers and curate materials.
Third, strong school leadership is coherent and sustained. School reform often amounts to a constant churn of initiatives that educators deflect by closing their doors and telling one another, “This too shall pass.” In Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, you don’t see this. Instead, there’s a series of reinforcing policies and practices that point in the same direction. These states aren’t subjecting educators to the whiplash and fad-chasing that are the hallmarks of “reform.” Chaos turns out to be a lousy recipe for school improvement.
Finally, while conservatives have long struggled to connect with teachers, these red states offer an appealing model of professionalism. Teachers have more clarity about expectations, support for the work they do, and confidence that they’ll inherit students who are literate and numerate. Louisiana, which has rolled out a comprehensive education policy agenda called Let Teachers Teach, may be the best example. Devised with the input of a few dozen respected Louisiana teachers, the agenda calls for placing ungovernable students at alternative sites, abolishing antiquated lesson-planning requirements, reducing the burdens of mandated teacher trainings, and so forth. This is how states can drive school improvement while winning teachers’ trust.
More than a generation ago, a passel of Southern states led an earlier era of school improvement, spearheaded by governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Jim Hunt in North Carolina, Lamar Alexander in Tennessee, George W. Bush in Texas, and Jeb Bush in Florida. These efforts, featuring a commitment to accountability and school choice, gave rise to robust NAEP gains in the late 1990s and the first decade of this century that took academic achievement to new highs. Now, there’s another good-news story brewing down South. And this is one sequel that deserves our close attention.
This article appears as “The Southern Surge” in the October 2025 print edition of National Review.
FREDERICK M. HESS is the director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
