Despite a longtime nationwide backslide in learning, a new report has found that Mississippi continues to outpace most of the country in post-pandemic recovery.
Mississippi ranks No. 7 out of 38 states in academic growth in math and No. 7 out of 35 states in reading between 2022 and 2025, according to an Education Scorecard analysis released Wednesday.
The Education Scorecard examines how students in third to eighth grades are recovering from learning losses, amid what researchers say is a national reading recession that predates the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruptions in schooling. Researchers from Harvard and Stanford universities and Dartmouth College analyzed students’ state test scores from more than 5,000 school districts in 38 states, allowing comparisons across districts and states.
What researchers found was sobering: Only five states plus the District of Columbia had meaningful growth in reading test scores from 2022 to 2025. Nationally, students remain nearly half a grade level behind pre-pandemic reading scores and only slightly better in math.
While schools have focused on catching students up academically since the pandemic, reading test scores were falling long before then — since 2013 for eighth graders and 2015 for fourth graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
“The pandemic was the mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion in achievement,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor who helped create the Education Scorecard.
Mississippi showed negligible growth in average reading scores during that time frame: 0.03 grade levels higher in reading in 2025 than in 2022. And the average student is performing 0.22 grade equivalents below 2019 levels.
In math, the average student in Mississippi performed 0.4 grade levels higher in 2025 compared with 2022, but 0.31 grade equivalents below 2019 levels.
Almost every state in the analysis saw improvements in math test scores from 2022 to 2025.
Across the country, the states that improved reading scores all had one thing in common: They ordered schools to teach with a phonics-based approach known as the “science of reading.”
For years, schools taught reading using approaches that de-emphasized phonics and encouraged strategies such as guessing words based on context clues. As reading scores tumbled over the past decade, parents, scholars and literacy advocates pushed for teaching methods that align with decades of research about how kids learn to read — largely by sounding out words.
The South was quick to adopt the approach. For the last decade, the region has led the way on education reforms, bucking an established trend of landing at the bottom of education rankings. Southern states were quick to change to research-based teaching methods, and states have paid to train and coach teachers.
According to the scorecard, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Kentucky all improved both math and reading test scores since 2022.
Mississippi adopted a law in 2013 requiring phonics-based instruction for elementary students and deploying reading coaches for teachers across the state and saw significant progress on NAEP scores for the following decade. This year, the Mississippi Legislature extended that reading initiative into higher grades in an attempt to extend those gains, and established a math act modeled after the reading act.
That said, “science of reading” reforms do not guarantee success, the researchers found. Some states, including Florida, Arizona and Nebraska, changed parts of their reading instruction but still saw test scores fall.
And even though absenteeism declined in most states, chronic absenteeism, or students missing more than 10% of the school year, remains a looming threat in Mississippi and other states. Chronic absenteeism hovers around 28% in Mississippi, almost 13% above pre-pandemic levels.
The report also found that federal pandemic relief to schools — which totaled about $2.52 billion or $5,700 per student in Mississippi — was tied to gains in high-poverty districts. Post-pandemic recovery has been U-shaped, the report’s authors said, with larger improvements among the highest-income and the lowest-income school districts in the country.
The report’s authors recommend that in light of dried up federal funding, Mississippi should focus dollars on middle- and high-poverty districts that trail their pre-pandemic achievement levels. They also recommend focusing efforts on lowering student absenteeism and pairing rising star districts with peers.
One such district in Mississippi is Starkville Oktibbeha Consolidated School District, which is outperforming its peers in both math and reading.
“Sustained progress doesn’t happen by chance — it comes from aligning strong instruction, empowered leadership, and intentional supports, so every student has the opportunity to succeed,” Starkville Oktibbeha Superintendent Tony McGee said in a press release about the Education Scorecard report.
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