The Southern Surge Watershed

National interest in the Southern Surge has finally surged. Here's a sober look at the prospects for replication.

In February, I wrote about the Southern Surge, certain it was the most important trend in K-12 education.

Frankly, I was annoyed that the story was getting ignored. Individual states had received attention, especially Mississippi, yet I found the four-state trend to be most compelling. I hoped that my detailed account would offer a springboard for policy makers, advocates, and journalists.

The Southern Surge was a big hit in social media, but strangely slow to crack traditional media. Eventually, I wrote about that, too, lamenting sparse coverage.

For months, the story was broadly neglected, beyond conservative podcasters and education pundits.

Not any more, y’all.

Finally, the Southern Surge is getting its due.

The Watershed

In less than four weeks:

Kelsey Piper penned a viral column in The Argument, “Illiteracy is a policy choice,” full of eye-openers:

“Many people who aren’t too focused on education policy seem to imagine Mississippi has simply stopped underperforming, that they’re now doing about as well as everyone else.

This is not true. They haven’t just caught up to your state; they are now wildly outperforming it. If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools.”

Days later, a Boston Globe cover story proclaimed a “Northern Nosedive”. It didn’t mince words: “New England schools are failing… Our math and reading scores have been declining for a decade. The “Southern Surge” should be a wake-up call.”

Aspiring presidential candidate Rahm Emauel declared that “Democrats need an education reset,” observing that “several Southern states—most notably Mississippi—are bucking the [national] trend.” Such reforms “should be the meat and potatoes of Democrats’ education agenda.”

David Brooks cheered the “so-called Southern Surge” in the New York Times. “Schools in red states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, traditional laggards, are suddenly doing remarkably well.” Brooks praised Rahm Emauel for steering Democrats towards these reforms.

In The Atlantic, Idrees Kahloon explored the “low-expectations theory” for American educational declines. He cited the Southern Surge as an important counter factual. “This is a recent phenomenon. Some have called it the “Mississippi miracle” or—if you include relative outperformance in states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee—the “southern surge.”

These stories were all over social media and the education blogosphere. The interest is palpable.

Some Folks Missed the Memo

Alas, the news hasn’t reached everyone.

In a gubernatorial debate last week, Republican Jack Ciattarelli proposed that New Jersey “deploy high-impact curricula like Louisiana and Mississippi use.” His opponent Mikie Sherill shot back that they have “some of the worst schools in the entire nation.” Ironically, Sherill noted the importance of phonics and 3rd grade reading – pillars of Southern Surge reforms – in the same breath. Memo to political operatives: you gotta brief your candidates.

Chad Aldeman penned a fantastic response. When you break down performance data, Louisiana and Mississippi outperform and/or hold their own versus New Jersey, while spending far less per-pupil. His analysis illustrates the role of demographics in school performance – it’s truly a must-read.

The other notable contrarian was socialist Freddie DeBoer, who claimed that Mississippi’s gains must be a fraud. Kelsey Piper and I tag-teamed on a response, “Is Mississippi cooking its books?,” which should put doubts to rest.

Even Randi Weingarten was spotted in social media validating Mississippi’s story – pretty good evidence of bipartisan consensus.

At this point, the divide is between people who understand the Southern Surge and people who are still catching on, so the watershed is an important development. I predict that interest will only grow, now that it’s clear this isn’t a one-state story. Kelsey Piper was inspired by the replication angle, and I suspect she speaks for many.

Will the work replicate further? I see headwinds and tailwinds.

At the moment, two things give me pause: oversimplification of the reforms and overestimation of policy as a lever.

Beware of Oversimplification

My primary concern: the Southern Surge is getting oversimplified.

When the WSJ Editorial Board cheered that “California Learns From Mississippi on Phonics” by passing new reading legislation, it reduced the work to one silver bullet: phonics.

Social media has been full of posts proclaiming “it’s phonics” or “it’s accountability” or “it’s 3rd grade retention,” when actually, it’s all of the above, and more.

Here’s why the oversimplification matters: since 2019, every state has either passed legislation or enacted state policies to bring the “science of reading” into schools. Yet most states are playing in the shallow end. Reducing the Southern Surge to magic bullets allows state leaders to point to their efforts as signs of progress – “Look, we passed a bill like Mississippi’s!” – when their outcomes are nowhere close. Progress is measured in student gains, not legislation enacted.

A case in point: many highlight the third grade retention policy in the Southern Surge states, presuming it’s THE success factor. In fact, 17 states and Washington DC have 3rd grade retention mandates. There are only 4 Southern Surge states. Simple math tells us that retention alone does not magically produce reading gains. A broader package of reforms, well-executed for years, produces gains.

Once more for those in the back, here’s that package in a nutshell (first published in my piece for The Argument):

“We must get straight on the plays in the Southern Surge playbook. Because, for the love of God, it’s not just phonics. There are four parts to the playbook:

1. Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing

2. Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools — for phonics and other aspects of literacy

3. Large-scale efforts to train teachers

4. Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade

Many focus on the retention policies. They are important and do seem to motivate adults to pull out all the stops. But kids cannot learn to read on retention mandates alone. Retention policies work because so much is done between Kindergarten and third grade to ensure all kids develop reading skills.

Before a student is retained, he or she will be screened 12 times across four grades, using a quality screening tool approved by the state. Well-trained teachers will have quality lesson materials, and they will know which students need extra support. It’s a system set up to work so that very few students need to be retained in third grade — which is exactly what happens.

One can debate the best order of operations. But one cannot reduce those multilayered reforms, which have been underway for 20+ years in Mississippi, 13 years in Louisiana, six years in Tennessee, and six years in Alabama, to “they just went back to basics with phonics.””

That’s the outline. Still, the devil is in the details.

Natalie Wexler reminded everyone that knowledge-building curricula, central to the efforts Louisiana and Tennessee, were getting lost in the story. I concur, and regularly lament that the entire Science of Reading era has overindexed on phonics, at the expense of a comprehensive look at reading issues. Reformers must keep steering conversation into the weeds of the actual teaching and learning.

Even if states get clear on the plays in the Southern Surge playbook, they still need to run them well. Implementation is where the magic happens – or where it stalls.

Beware Implementation Roadblocks

Policy can’t move needles alone, and our NAEP outcomes prove it:

Between 2019 and 2022, forty-five states passed reading legislation. By now, every state has passed legislation or enacted policies to bring the “science of reading” into schools. Yet there are only four Southern Surge states. That dichotomy should give everyone pause.

Implementation woes are rampant:

In Ohio, the state passed promising legislation, including a push to improve reading curriculum statewide. But the curriculum list in Ohio is a mess, as I wrote last year, dooming curriculum reform efforts. Update: this week, an article dropped exploring Ohio’s lackluster early performance. I spied a few questionable implementation details.

Nearly every state curriculum list has issues similar to Ohio’s, because most states are following a broken guidepost (widely-critiqued curriculum reviewer EdReports). Pennsylvania practically cloned Ohio’s list. Georgia’s list was a mess, and districts tended to adopt the weaker options.

Massachusetts is chasing curriculum reform with new legislation, but its curriculum list has some of those same flaws.

Wisconsin passed a promising reading law, and it even pioneered its own excellent curriculum list. However, progress has been stalled by the state’s own Department of Public Instruction.

My home state New York is the national laggard. Its main “reform” effort has been requiring districts to self-certify that their reading curricula are evidence-based. As if any district is going to say, “Actually, we just picked something shiny. No evidence here!” Worse, the state won’t even publish the results of its curriculum survey. On teacher training, Kathy Hochul announced $10M in funding to “train 20,000 teachers,” but all funds have gone to the state agency NYSUT to create its own training, which teachers are panning.

Oregon has the right ideas, but poor accountability for what districts are actually doing with the state funds, so it’s a black box.

I could go on. These are the issues we know – and too often, we don’t know enough about state by state progress, because there is limited transparency and no clear watchdog.

Which states have curriculum lists, and what’s on those lists? I’ve never seen a national database.

Which curricula are used in schools? Most states don’t track and publish this info. (I wrote about that, with dismay.)

How do state training approaches vary? What share of teachers are trained in each state?

What are the early reading screeners in each state? Which states mandate reporting screening outcomes to the state? To parents?

The answers are straight out of a Nate Bargatze skit:

Despite the opacity, I feel comfortable asserting that most states are behind the Southern Surge pioneers, on policy depth and primarily on implementation. Which points to an important shortage in state capacity – especially at the leadership-level.

Don’t miss the role of leadership and human touch in these southern successes.

When state leaders pivot from local control norms, it isn’t popular. Former Louisiana chief John White said it straight: “State regulation of local entities is not a popular thing, so the states have become passive.”

State leaders need to nurture buy-in from districts, and everyone needs to bring teachers and principals along, which represents its own challenge.

Teachers alone represent around 2% of the American workforce¹. It’s a very human endeavor to change how that many people do their work when they shut the door of their classrooms. The quality of the teacher training matters. The curriculum and assessment tools need to be good, so teachers actually want to use them. Principals need to align school expectations with the changes.

When you talk with principals in Mississippi, they don’t talk about policy, they talk about the excellent state coaches who visited schools. When you talk with district leaders in Tennessee, they talk about state meetings in which they swapped notes with peers. People stuff.

To study the Southern Surge, zoom in on the implementation details. Therein you’ll find the success conditions – and the reasons 46 states are behind.

The Tailwinds

Weak understanding, shallow reforms, and implementation shortcomings are headwinds, but there are tailwinds, too.

The grassroots ‘Science of Reading’ movement – spawned by 2018 journalism and fueled by parent and teacher advocacy – has fertilized the soil for reformers.

Curriculum options are vastly better today than a decade ago, thanks to investments during the Common Core era. Tennessee and Louisiana have shown the playbook for getting teachers, who are often reluctant to use district-selected curriculum, onside for curriculum change.

It’s hard to say whether the headwinds or tailwinds are stronger, but both are real.

Neither Party is Crushing It

Finally, a word about politics.

As you can probably tell, I’m not overly bullish on policy as the true source of leverage. (It’s the leadership, implementation, and quality of resources and training, stupid.) None the less, the policy train will keep on chugging, so let’s talk politics.

My fellow Americans, this is the ultimate bipartisan cause. The national tsunami of reading reform, crossing every state with bipartisan support, proves it. The monthlong media watershed also has bipartisan vibes.

But in 2025 America, projecting political framing onto everything is our national sport. So here’s my own take: both parties are missing opportunities to advance the Southern Surge playbook.

The Southern Surge crosses four Republican-led states – although most of Louisiana’s efforts happened under Democrat Jon Bel Edwards. (Louisiana’s work started under a Republican, gained much of its steam under a Democrat, and more-or-less² continues under a Republican. How refreshing!)

Red states are ahead on reading reforms, though many are stalled in implementation. Yet today, most red state leaders seem more focused on advancing school choice than school improvement. Honestly, I even worry about Tennessee, where educator friends report that the state leaders are “less intentional” about literacy efforts following leadership transition.

Blue states aren’t all on the sidelines. The Massachusetts Department of Education pioneered a creative grant program designed to chase weak curriculum out of schools, and many districts jumped on it. Fresh legislation aims to give state leaders the power to mandate curriculum change, if it can overcome union opposition.

At the federal level, you would think leaders would be all over this opportunity. You’d be consistently wrong.

We are seven years into the ‘Science of Reading’ era. Mississippi has been a literacy darling roughly as long, and Louisiana emerged as a NAEP standout in 2022.

Despite these tailwinds, Trump’s first education secretary Betsy Devos and Biden’s secretary Miguel Cardona both passed on making state literacy reform a Thing.

Both administrations offered Comprehensive State Literacy Grants, awarding funding to 22 states and Washington DC for “evidence-based” practices in reading and writing, but states set their own agendas. Once again, sprinkling money into states without clear mandates didn’t move the needle.

So far, the second Trump administration is a disappointment.

Literacy advocates had high hopes because Penny Schwinn, the former Tennessee commissioner (2019-23) who led the state’s reading reforms – yes, the work that raised reading outcomes! – was due to serve as Linda McMahon’s top deputy. Yet Schwinn’s appointment met resistance from the far right. Her recent departure leaves McMahon without her strongest asset in shepherding state leaders towards the Southern Surge playbook. Remember, state leaders are a lynchpin, so the loss of Schwinn is a real blow.

McMahon sings Mississippi’s praises in speeches, but otherwise, her early tenure is underwhelming. Her department announced plans to publish a literacy “toolkit,” but critically, it will include recommendations, not mandates. She seems poised to enable the status quo because her “power back to the states” principles are inconsistent with forcing anyone to follow the leaders.

I’m encouraged by Rahm Emanuel’s embrace of these reforms on the Dem side. Could an energized presidential field turn the Southern Surge playbook into Abundance for Education³? One can hope.

But today’s kindergarteners don’t have time to wait, so I hope this watershed moment yields public pressure in red and blue states alike, at the state and school board level, because for now, states and districts hold the reins.

The best thing for America’s children would be a race among state and district leaders to implement this proven playbook most effectively.

Red states and blue states, start your engines.

1. Really, around 2% of American workers are public school teachers.

NCES reports 3.2M full-time teachers compared to 168.8M in the US workforce (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics). That’s 1.9% of the workforce. There are another 500K private school teachers that I haven’t included in my calculations, but I could; public schools have no monopoly on poor reading instruction, noting the historic popularity of Lucy Calkins in private schools.

If you use NCES stats for full- and part-time public schoolteachers, it’s 3.8M teachers, or 2.3% of the US workforce.

No matter how you slice it, there are a LOT of teachers in America, and they make up a large share of the workforce. Most received crummy training on how kids learn to read in American universities, which is its own poorly-addressed layer of the problem.

People are always shocked when I cite these statistics, but they are the heart of the challenges with education reform. You try changing the beliefs and professional practices of 2% of American workers. I bet it won’t be easy – or swift.

2. Louisiana districts seem committed to their successful work with knowledge-building curriculum, but there are questions about current state leadership. Education chief Cade Brumley tends to assert that “the comprehensive education reform we’ve implemented over the last five years is working,” which is an odd way to talk about work that’s 13 years old. I don’t recall seeing him mention knowledge or curriculum in public comments.

Also, Louisiana had been conducting an important pilot of assessment designed around this approach to curriculum, and it was killed by Brumley’s team – another downer.

Brumley should do more to promote and deepen Louisiana’s pioneering work with knowledge-building curriculum, even if it began before his tenure.

3. Many have wondered aloud about the absence of K-12 education from Abundance, the much-discussed book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I haven’t seen them comment on this choice, but I have wondered myself.

Did they leave K-12 education out of the book because it didn’t fit the thesis that removing regulations could unlock growth? (In K-12, it’s he opposite, you’d need more regulation of the curriculum and teaching approaches in schools.)

Or because it’s a thorny systemic and human capital problem (eg. teachers have been poorly prepared to teach reading by higher ed professors who have the “academic freedom” to keep promoting outdated ideas), and those are hard to solve across 2% of the US workforce?

Or did they *gulp* leave it out because they don’t know what to do to improve schooling in America? In any case, I hope the Southern Surge pushes their thinking.