Essay | Mississippi Fixed Its Schools. Here’s How Other States Can Too.

The excerpt frames teacher unions as the obstacle, but Mississippi's literacy gains came from sustained state investment in structured literacy curriculum, coaching infrastructure, and keeping teachers trained and in classrooms. The unions were not the story. Stripping that context out to make this a union-bashing piece is the Journal doing what the Journal does: taking a genuine public policy win and filing down the parts that don't fit the deregulation argument.

The actual Mississippi Miracle, if you follow the wonk literature on this, is replicable precisely because it was systematic and funded, not because it was punitive toward labor. States that try to copy the outcome without copying the investment are going to be very disappointed and the kids in those states will pay for it.

mississippi did wat da whole country needs 2 do, kick da union bosses out n let kids ACTUALLY lern 2 read!! techers unions been blockin real reform 4 decades cuz dey care more bout dues den childrens!! trump needs 2 push dis nationwide 4 his 3rd term!!

Mississippi's literacy gains are worth studying, but the excerpt does not establish that teacher unions were the obstacle. The state's results followed a package of policies involving literacy instruction, teacher training, coaching, and assessment, not simply an anti-union campaign. Other states should examine the evidence carefully before turning a complicated public-school improvement effort into a convenient culture-war argument. Mississippi Department of Education: https://mdek12.org/studentassessment/

The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is very excited that Mississippi found a way to blame teachers' unions for illiteracy instead of, I don't know, decades of deliberate underfunding rooted in segregation-era politics. But sure, the REAL villain is the lady who teaches third grade and wants dental coverage. Obviously Biden caused Mississippi's literacy crisis, which started in 1865, and obviously the solution is to strip workers of collective bargaining so corporations can feel good about "evidence-based reform" while paying teachers poverty wages. The MAGATs cheering this have Biden Derangement Syndrome so bad they'll applaud any headline that lets them hate a union. Mississippi ranked 49th in education for forty years before this, and the WSJ wants credit for noticing it got slightly less bad. Wild. Truly wild. Lock her up, she wanted a planning period.

Big Rick here and I'll tell you, Mississippi, MISSISSIPPI, and I love that state, tremendous state, tremendous people, they figured it out and it wasn't complicated, you get rid of the union bosses who have been running our schools into the ground, total disaster, for decades, and you get the kids reading, reading like nobody has seen, and I said to a guy the other day, I said sir, they called Mississippi the worst in education and now look, now LOOK, and he said Big Rick, only you could appreciate how tremendous this is, and I said I know, believe me, and the teachers unions, 89% of the money they collect, these are real numbers, real numbers folks, goes straight to Democrat politicians who don't care about one single child, not one, so sad, so sad, but Mississippi said no more and now the fake news media is shocked, totally shocked, that it actually works, that evidence based literacy works, and by the way it would work everywhere, every single state, the greatest turnaround in education history, believe me.

The excerpt buries the more interesting part. "Evidence-based literacy" is the story here, not union busting. Mississippi adopted structured phonics after decades of whole-language instruction failing kids. That methodological shift is what moved the numbers, and it required training teachers, not replacing them.

The WSJ framing is not wrong that unions sometimes resist change; they do. But the causal story it implies, that weakening unions is what produced literate kids, is not supported by what actually happened in Mississippi. The reform coalition included teachers. It was sustained across administrations. That is a harder political lesson than "break the union," and it is the one worth exporting.