How Mississippi Transformed Its Schools From Worst to Best

At East End Community School, teachers and administrators work to combat chronic absenteeism by building a “culture of attendance,” with celebratory ceremonies for students with high attendance, monthly attendance reports for parents, community dinners, students raffles, and individualized, shame-free check-ins for families struggling to get their students to school. The school’s rate of chronic absenteeism has dropped from 25% to 13%.

One prong of Mississippi's approach to improving literacy has been to retain, or hold back, third-grade students who don't meet reading benchmarks on state language arts assessments. The state has seen scores improve among younger students, but experts caution that retention should be combined with other interventions, such as improving the reading curriculum and providing more literacy training for teachers, to truly have an impact.

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is an approach to student behavior that focuses on how well students embody five standards — respect, responsibility, readiness, safety and pride — and awards points based on their behaviors that can be redeemed for rewards. PBIS offers an alternative to the “zero tolerance” student behavior policies that have been known to hurt academic achievement, particularly among students of color. Studies show that schools with a PBIS approach saw classroom removals decrease by 58% and out-of-school suspensions decreased by about half.

The Wonderland Gifted Girls Academy provides free education to girls in Oyo State, Nigeria, to increase educational opportunities for girls and give them a foundation to build their future on.

Part 1 of the "Equity or Bust: Are Ontario's Public Schools a Model for Pennsylvania" Series: Ontario has become widely lauded for its education system, celebrated for both high performance and relatively smaller achievement gaps between wealthy and poor students, thanks to the concept of "equity." This manifests, in essence, as more funding per-pupil to the school boards that serve students who face the greatest obstacles. The model contrasts starkly to the school system in Pennsylvania, regarded as "the most inequitable in the nation.”

Since implementing a “science of reading” curriculum, Sharswood school has seen its reading scores jump, with 43 percent of all students scoring proficient or advanced and and more than half of third grade students meeting the mark. Teachers says a big factor in the successful implementation has been the flexibility to tailor resources to each classroom and the support of an onsite literacy coach.

Small rural schools in New Hampshire achieved some of the state's highest reading scores by leveraging their size to create multi-grade classrooms, provide individualized support to all students, and build long-term student-teacher relationships. In result, these lower-income districts have outperformed expectations by the widest margins in the state.

By revamping curricula, ramping up tutoring for students and coaching for teachers, and implementing stronger accountability measures, such as school report cards, attendance plans, and testing requirements that lead to students being held back if not met, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana have managed to recover from pandemic learning losses at a time when other states are struggling to catch up.

To curb academic backsliding as students returned to the classroom following the COVID-19 pandemic, Boone County Schools tried various initiatives, such as encouraging teachers to keep students on track by not trying to catch them up on everything they missed during remote learning. This ensures students are learning the material relevant to their grade level, and has yielded significant improvements in academic performance.

The Teaching at the Right Level program, or TaRL, provides tailored lessons in reading and math to primary students in Borno, grouping them by their level rather than their grade or age for engaging activities designed to build their literacy and numeracy skills. When it was first piloted, the number of students able to read a simple paragraph grew from 14 percent to 45 percent, while the number of students able to complete subtraction problems grew from 11 percent to 59 percent.