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Childhood And Education #17: Is Our Children Reading
TL;DR
Mississippi didn’t just catch up — it now beats much of the country on reading — The video argues Mississippi, along with Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee, used a blunt but effective playbook around phonics, teacher training, and accountability, to the point that black students in Mississippi are reading at rates comparable to Massachusetts despite far lower median black household income ($37,900 vs. $67,000).
The winning formula is boringly clear: phonics, training, accountability, and third-grade retention — Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act, Louisiana’s 55-hour science-of-reading training for all K-3 teachers, literacy coaches, dyslexia screening, and parent notification are presented as the practical mechanics behind the gains, not vague good intentions.
The speaker’s big claim is that illiteracy is now a policy choice — He says states already know what works, and that failures like California or Wisconsin come less from underfunding than from continuing to use debunked methods like whole language and three-cueing instead of enforcing high-quality phonics-based curricula.
The ‘Mississippi miracle is just retention gaming’ critique gets hammered as sloppy — The transcript highlights Kelsey Piper’s rebuttal that retained students don’t disappear from testing, that gains showed up across percentiles including the 90th, and that one viral argument was undermined by a glaring factual error claiming Mississippi ranked 50th in 4th-grade math when it actually ranked 16th.
The gains fade by 8th grade, but not nearly enough to dismiss them — Mississippi’s 8th-grade reading improvement is smaller than the 4th-grade jump, yet the state still moved from roughly 50th to 41st and closed about two-thirds of the gap with the average state, which the speaker treats as meaningful rather than miraculous.
The video ends by widening the complaint from literacy instruction to a broader culture war against reading — It links anti-phonics ideology, attacks on gifted education, and the collapse of leisure reading among teens (from about 35% reading daily in 1985 to 14% in 2022) into one picture: schools and culture are often making strong readers weaker instead of building more of them.
The Breakdown
Mississippi’s Reading Turnaround Is Bigger Than People Realize
The opening argument is aggressive and simple: reading is the foundation of education, phonics works, and states that refuse to use it are choosing failure. The speaker says Mississippi hasn’t merely stopped being bad — it’s now “wildly outperforming” many states, to the point that if you’re stuck with public schools in Oakland, California, you should seriously consider moving to Mississippi.
What Mississippi and Louisiana Actually Changed
He walks through the now-familiar southern playbook: adopt research-backed curricula, reject whole language and three-cueing, train teachers on the actual curriculum, and build hard accountability around schools, districts, educators, students, and parents. The specifics matter here: Louisiana required all K-3 teachers to complete at least 55 hours of science-of-reading training, while Mississippi pushed literacy coaches into low-performing schools two to three days a week and got 80% of districts onto one of six approved K-5 curricula by 2024.
“Spies in Every Classroom” and the Politics of Enforcement
The speaker mocks the idea that implementation is some impossible mystery. When Matthew Yglesias says you can’t realistically put spies in every classroom, he snaps back that the students already are the spies — just ask them whether teachers are using phonics or telling kids to guess from pictures. His point is that this is less a technical problem than a willingness problem: if principals resist, “they can quit.”
The Fight Over Whether Retention Is Just Inflating Scores
A big chunk is spent on rebutting the viral claim that Mississippi’s gains are mostly a statistical artifact from holding back weak readers in third grade. He leans on Kelsey Piper’s argument that retained students don’t vanish; they take the test later, and the score gains showed up across the distribution, including the 90th percentile, not just through lopping off the bottom.
Retention Might Help, But the Research Is Messy
He’s open to retention being part of the answer, especially because it creates real stakes for families and schools, but he gets skeptical when studies claim huge long-run harms like a 19% earnings drop by age 26. That effect size feels implausibly large to him, and he suggests that if there is real damage, it may be because school is already failing these kids so badly that an extra year just delays work, apprenticeships, or more intensive help.
The 8th-Grade Fadeout Doesn’t Kill the Story
He admits the cleanest objection: fourth-grade reading gains are huge, eighth-grade gains are much smaller. Still, moving from about 50th to 41st and shrinking the gap with the average state by roughly two-thirds is, in his telling, not fake and not trivial — just less cinematic than “49th to 9th.”
England, Mastery Learning, and the Same Pattern Reappearing
The video then zooms out: England also climbed after mandating phonics, shifting to a knowledge-centered curriculum, and adding early phonics and math checks. From there he generalizes to mastery learning — drill the fundamentals, don’t move on until kids actually know them — and frames the education establishment’s resistance as part ideology, part bad incentives, not lack of evidence.
From Teaching Reading to Killing the Desire to Read
The last stretch gets more cultural and more emotional. He argues that schools in some blue areas don’t just fail to teach reading; they actively flatten advanced readers by dismantling gifted programs, and he includes Hannah Frankman Hood’s vivid story of the 5-year-old chapter-book reader who starts school excited and ends up bored, mocked, and alienated. He closes on a broader lament: leisure reading among teens has cratered, colleges are assigning fewer full books, and “the students don’t read” meme now seems uncomfortably real.
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