The ‘Mississippi Miracle’ should be the start, not the endgame, former high school student says
By Abigail Presley | Originally published by Mississippi Today
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When I was a sophomore at a small rural high school in Mississippi, I took the ACT for the first time on a Tuesday morning in the school auditorium. There was no prep course, no college counselor explaining the score, let alone what to aim for.
My school had no advanced placement classes, and the number of foundational classes outweighed the number of honors classes. I never thought this was unusual. It was just how school works.
I have reflected on this memory more often as Mississippi officials and national education reporters have celebrated what they are calling the “Mississippi Miracle,” the dramatic climb from 49th in the nation in reading and language to genuinely competing with the national average – an extraordinary achievement by one of the poorest states in the country.
Early literacy policy, phonics instruction and high standards in primary school worked. That much is provable, and it deserves recognition.
But a phenomenon that ends in fourth-grade classrooms isn’t a miracle. It is a head start that we keep failing to build on.
The current media coverage continues to dismiss that by the time Mississippi high school students reach graduation, the numbers tell a very different story. Mississippi’s ACT composite average for the graduating class of 2023 was 17.6 out of a possible 36 points, compared to the national average of 19.5. The ACT’s college-readiness benchmarks – scores that indicate a reasonable chance of passing an introductory college course – require around a 22 in most subjects.
Out of 240 public high schools in Mississippi, only one school graduated a majority of seniors who indicated college readiness in all four tested subject areas. That school is the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS), a selective public academy. For everybody else, the picture remains far less miraculous.
The NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) is an excellent measure of what an 8- or 9-year-old has learned to do. It does not measure a 17-year-old’s ability to form a college essay, understand a loan document or pass a statistics course. When we continue to conflate a fourth-grade test score with educational prowess, we are reframing the beginning of an educational journey as the final destination.
The gap between these two things is exactly where I grew up.
My high school offered no AP courses. This wasn’t neglect from any of my teachers, many of whom I cherish. It was a problem of resources. It compounds in rural districts where there aren’t enough high-performing students to justify the addition of an AP chemistry course, not enough trained staff available to teach it and nowhere near the amount of funds to pursue it realistically.
I did not see this as a disadvantage until I arrived at college and found myself in introductory courses alongside students who had covered a semester of material a year, or even two, prior. Many of my former classmates never made it to these types of rooms at all.
The absence of college counseling compounds this further. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of no more than 250 students per counselor — yet Mississippi’s average has consistently exceeded 400:1, far above that recommendation. When a single counselor is responsible for hundreds of students, college planning becomes an afterthought. Students cannot pursue opportunities they have never been told exist.
The gap in expectation and access is dire. Mississippi is one of only 13 states to mandate the ACT, yet it has no requirement or curriculum for ACT preparation. The result is a system that administers a college-readiness exam without committing to the students taking it. Access to preparatory materials varies greatly across the state, and the distinction falls predictably along lines of wealth and geography.
None of this negates the state’s accomplishments in early literacy. The Literacy-Based Promotion Act was a serious, evidence-based intervention, and its effects are tangible. When adjusting for student demographics, Mississippi fourth graders scored among the highest in the nation for reading and math.
But credit is not synonymous with completion. A state that has learned to teach children to read must still guide them on what to do with that skill. Access to advanced coursework, college counseling, ACT preparation and career pathways is not a luxury, but a necessity. Right now, this scaffolding is distributed unequally, and students in rural and underfunded districts are the ones left reaching for rungs that aren’t there.
Mississippi is a state where roughly 36% of its young people move out-of-state. Part of what drives that migration is the sense that opportunity lives elsewhere – and they’re typically correct.
The “miracle” narrative feels good because Mississippi has spent so long garnering negative attention. But the students who will leave this state, or continue to struggle within it, deserve more than a feel-good spin.
The real miracle is one that could follow them all the way to graduation – and beyond.
Abigail Presley attends Columbia University in the city of New York as a rising sophomore and John W. Kluge Scholar majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology. She is a native of Grenada, Mississippi, and a 2025 graduate of Grenada High School.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
