Mississippi Teachers Face Pressure Amid Declining Literacy and Standardized Testing

It’s three weeks until Mississippi’s standardized test season begins, and Candace Hamberlin is feeling the pressure.

Evidence of what’s at stake hangs all around Jefferson County Middle School, where Hamberlin is in her first year teaching eighth-grade English. Inside her classroom, a large piece of black polyester with clear pouches labeled “Data Wall” shows the current reading level of each student. The school hallways are lined with posters listing schoolwide scores on an earlier practice test. One prominently displays the grade Mississippi would assign their school if that practice test had been the real thing: 175 out of 700 points, an F.

Jefferson County is one of the smallest in Mississippi; 6,800 people spread across 527 square miles along the Mississippi River. It’s also one of the poorest, with 32 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Fayette, where the only public elementary, middle, and high school are all based, is the only city in the county, home to about a dozen churches but not a single stoplight. The county is 13 percent white, but most of those families send their kids to private or parochial schools; 98 percent of the school district’s students are Black.

Inside Hamberlin’s classroom, it’s time for test-prep drills. This period has 20 eighth graders enrolled, but only 10 are present; six have been pulled out for remedial work with a consultant the district has hired to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.

Much of literacy instruction at Jefferson County Middle School now begins and ends with screens. In fact, Hamberlin doesn’t lecture at all on Wednesdays and Thursdays; students spend those class periods with StudySync and i-Ready, another adaptive software program, so each can focus where they need the most help.

Their teacher can’t blame them for being sick of these exercises. The students’ lives, and hers, are dominated by the looming Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP), the set of annual standardized exams that measure their progress in language arts as well as science and math. Test prep is a year-round activity. Her students must learn how to decode the meaning of unfamiliar words, make inferences, identify the central idea of a passage, analyze tone and point of view. Every Friday brings a practice test.

Before moving to eighth grade, Hamberlin logged 25 years as an elementary school teacher. Eighth grade appealed to her because it’s all about analyzing texts, not just consuming them. That’s her idea of a good time. She remembers reading the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book four times just to make sure she didn’t miss a single detail. As she talks a group of students through a reading passage by Sojourner Truth, her passion is palpable—for the material, but even more for the puzzle-solving that reading comprehension requires.

“A lot of them think they’re studying the story,” she says afterward. “You’re not studying the story, that’s just the sprinkles on top. It’s what was she thinking, why did she say it, how did she convey her message?”

Despite her clear talent and enthusiasm for teaching, though, Hamberlin has thus far failed to convince many of her students to care about reading. Earlier in the year, barely half of the eighth graders scored high enough to pass the all--important exam, and less than 15 percent are scoring “proficient.” If that F on the final schoolwide practice test had been the real thing, it would have been disastrous; Mississippi’s letter grading system comes with steep real-world consequences. Low-performing schools can face state monitoring, while their funding is more likely to come with “accountability” strings attached. State law allows students to attend out-of-district charter schools only when their home district is failing, so low scores can result in a decrease in funding because fewer students are enrolled. Superintendents and principals know that their jobs are tied to increasing scores or at least not allowing them to drop.

Across the country, reading performance has slid for 14 years, and the problem is most extreme in middle and high school. Even in Mississippi, where the improvement in elementary school test scores has become the stuff of legend, older students are struggling. No one can quite agree on why reading scores have dropped so far.

And that’s just what the tests measure. Hamberlin’s true fears are more existential. Hamberlin wants her students to pass the exam, but what she really wants is to build them into readers; adults who can interpret a complex set of instructions, power through a confusing block of text, and—hopefully, maybe, at least a few—actually read books. “It’s as simple as understanding a conversation. How many times have you talked to someone and you’re talking about two different things?” she says. “All those skills from reading just transfer to life completely.”

Plenty of her students are smart and capable, but she’s never encountered a group less interested in reading. And neither she nor anyone else seems to have any idea how to fix it.

Panicking over standardized test scores is an American tradition. In 1983, a Department of Education commission published A Nation at Risk, a 36-page report that would become the foundation of education policy discussions for decades. Until then, standardized tests were generally administered locally, with little weight attached to scores. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has since become “the nation’s report card,” had run trial exams in a small number of schools since 1969, but only for research purposes.

Citing a decline in SAT scores over the preceding two decades, A Nation at Risk’s authors framed their concerns in geo-political terms, warning that countries like Japan and South Korea were poised to overtake the US in global economic rankings if American students didn’t make significant gains. Their language was hyperbolic to the point of scare--mongering: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” the introduction read. “As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” One bullet point reported that one--quarter of Navy recruits could not read at a ninth-grade level, “the minimum needed simply to understand written safety instructions. Without remedial work they cannot even begin, much less complete, the sophisticated training essential in much of the modern military.”

In the four decades since, at least one of the authors of A Nation at Risk has backed away from its findings, saying the commission cherry-picked the data that best served their preexisting thesis that American schools were failing. They did accomplish their goals, though: The report called for the adoption of “more rigorous and measurable standards” in schools, and throughout the ’90s, states designed their own standardized tests to be administered across all school districts.

The march toward high-stakes testing crescendoed with President George W. Bush’s signature education reform program, No Child Left Behind, signed into law in 2002, which required standards-based exams in reading and math for every public school student in the country. Schools that didn’t meet standards risked state takeovers.

Detractors have long questioned the validity of test scores, pointing to built-in bias among other issues. Even so, state testing has become the most important measure of reading skills by a huge margin. NAEP reading scores did rise, modestly, in the first part of the 21st century (at least among elementary and middle schoolers; high school scores stayed largely flat). Scores for 13-year-olds moved from 259 to 263 on a 500-point scale between 1999 and 2012; 9-year-olds improved from 212 to 221. The narrative that American schools were failing faded from conventional wisdom.

Then reading performance began to drop again. Among 13-year-olds, scores fell to 260 by 2020, nearly erasing the previous gains. The pandemic made things worse. By 2025, 13-year-old scores had plunged to 256, just a point above where they were in 1971. (Math scores have seen a similar decline.) Scores ticked up slightly among 9-year-olds in 2026 and remained at the prior year’s levels among 13-year-olds. One-third of 13-year-olds score “below basic” on standardized reading tests, meaning they can’t identify the main idea in a passage.

Panic roared back. Secretary of education Linda McMahon said the national results in 2024 “confirm a devastating trend”; The Atlantic said the country was “sliding toward illiteracy”; New York magazine labeled the drift “The Big Fail.” Much of the uproar sounded straight out of A Nation at Risk: “If policy-makers and education leaders fail to act now, students—and employers—will feel the impact of declining skills and knowledge gaps as the global workforce becomes more and more competitive,” the chair of the National Assessment Governing Board said in a press release.

Everyone had a pet theory as to what had gone wrong: smartphones, bad teachers, bad textbooks, lazy students, lazy families. A 2022 podcast called Sold a Story, about the problematic rise of the “balanced literacy” teaching method in elementary schools, revealed a pedagogical issue in the US: Many teachers were, basically, asking kids to guess at sentences instead of making them sound the words out.

As in-school apps began incorporating generative artificial intelligence, the fears intensified. Many schools now introduce AI starting in kindergarten, saying kids have to be prepared for a future in which it’s the norm. Maybe using AI tools will improve standardized test scores; it’s too early to tell. But it’s more difficult to believe those tools will improve literacy in the truer sense, that students will fully develop the cognitive skills to do the work themselves when they don’t have to.

“There’s no question that the engagement’s gone,” says Kevin Smith, an education scholar who co-leads the Adolescent Literacy Alliance at Florida State University’s Florida Center for Reading Research. “I’m not saying they’re not reading, but they’re not reading books for the love of books. They’re reading probably more than they ever have, but it’s snippets.”

Earlier this year, a team of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth declared the US was in “a learning recession.” And suddenly, everyone was looking to Mississippi for the answers.

On the same small campus where Jefferson County’s eighth graders are scouring reading passages, the elementary school students are preparing for their own versions of the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program exams. State English Language Arts testing begins in third grade, and the first one is the most important. Under the state’s 2013 -Literacy-Based Promotion Act, any third grader who fails the test three times is automatically held back a year. (Students with documented learning disabilities, those who have already been held back twice, and students new to learning English are exempt from the policy.)

LaTasha Glass, 30, is in her first year teaching in Fayette after six years in her hometown of Natchez, a bigger, more touristy town on the river. With a daughter in fifth grade at Jefferson County Elementary, she brings a maternal air to class, providing warm encouragement and tough-love coaching in equal measure. She’s dressed for a day on her feet, in a lavender short-sleeved shirt over black stretchy pants and outdoorsy sandals, but her hair is stylishly braided, and silver bangles clink on her wrist. Glass started her career teaching second grade, but a previous principal convinced her she had what it took to get third graders over the test hurdle. That’s not an easy sell for many teachers; Jefferson County Elementary principal Shameka Woods says she’s asked the school district to pay third-grade teachers more because they’re so hard to hire. “No one wants to teach third grade!” Woods says. Glass pipes up, mostly joking but not entirely: “I asked her yesterday to put me back in second grade!”

Her first-block class makes clear why Glass is so valuable in the highest-stakes teaching role. From the time the bell rings, she has her students’ complete attention. The moment she senses she’s at risk of losing even a couple of them, she shouts out one of her bespoke call-and-response mantras that immediately brings them back:

Mac and cheese?

Everybody freeze!

Class class?

Ms. Glass!

Hocus pocus?

Everybody focus!

Ready set?

You bet!

Today’s lesson is about r-controlled vowels, a phonics concept about how the vowel sound in words like car or bird changes because of the r that follows it. Glass breaks down a few words on the smart whiteboard at the front of the classroom, but with plenty of pauses to ask for student contributions. To make things more fun, she plays a YouTube video from an education creator known as Mrs. Siravo, a parody of the Jonas Brothers song “Sucker” listing words shaped by this kind of “bossy r.”

Then it’s time for students to take turns coming to the board and diagramming their own words. “Circus,” a girl in a tie-dye fleece sweatshirt suggests, then writes it on the board as “curcus.” Glass lets the misspelling stand for the moment. The first task is to figure out the number of sounds in the word. Those who didn’t learn reading through phonics tend to assume the answer is two, but sounds are different from syllables. The actual answer is five: soft c, the growl of the r-controlled first vowel, hard c, “uh,” then s. The girl puts five dots under the word, and the whole class claps out the sounds. Now Glass returns to the spelling issue. Other r-controlled vowels can make that growling sound too, she reminds them. It must be an i, several students shout out. Their teacher grins, thrilled by their ability to sleuth out the correct answer.

She knows the test weighs on these 8- and 9-year-olds. She tries to praise them frequently, and makes corrections in a supportive way. “They have anxiety,” she says. “I let them know how much pressure it is, but I try to alleviate some of the pressure. When they make a mistake, I make sure they learn from it.” With just a couple weeks until the test, she’s feeling confident in her students: Only five of the 40 scored below a passing mark on the final benchmark exam.

This is what the “Mississippi Miracle” looks like in the classroom. In 2013, Mississippi ranked 49th out of 50 on the federally mandated NAEP tests, confirming the conventional wisdom about how poor, Republican-dominated states have weake