12 years ago in 2013 Mississippi was ranked the 49th lowest state in fourth grade reading scores. Today in 2025, they are among the top ten in the nation. Prior to 2013 the majority of children in Mississippi were not meeting grade level reading requirements, but were still advancing to the next grades. This meant that their lack of literary skills only built up over time, as reading skills build off of each other, and these children were lacking a proper foundation to grow their skills from.
To combat this, Mississippi state officials came up with a solution, and on April 18th 2013 Mississippi passed Senate Bill 2347, more commonly known as the Literary Based Promotion Act. The Literary-Based Promotion Act, or LBPA, was designed to help children in public schools achieve grade level reading by the end of third grade, and had four major ways that it achieved this goal.
The majority of teachers responsible for teaching young children how to read do not actually have training in how to do so, but rather generalized training on how to teach. The first step in the LBPA program was to provide this specialized training, with a focus on teaching to read through phonetics based instruction. This form of reading education teaches children the relationship between letters and sounds and how to use these relationships to break down words.
It has been proven through federally supported research to be the most effective way to teach reading to children, unlike the common teaching method the whole language theory, which uses language immersion and sight word memorization. Due to the new teachers’ education on more effective instruction tools, the whole language theory was discarded in favor of more evidence based and proven methods.
Schools began to give triennial reading tests between kindergarten and third grade in order to look out for literacy problems early. When a child was found to have such problems, an Individual Reading Plan would be developed for them personally with assistance from both their teachers and parents.
Finally, it was mandated that all children who repeatedly fail the third grade reading test would not move forward into fourth grade. With some leniency for “Good Cause Exemptions” given to students in specific cases, such as children who are still in the process of learning English as a second language, or children with disabilities that affect them in a relevant way, all students who failed to meet the grade level reading standards provided by the tests would be held back and repeat the third grade in full.
When it first began, this program caused more students to be held back than before, but instead of this continuing to be the case students, parents, and schools took the necessary steps to improve the children’s reading skills, until significantly fewer students were being held back than in any previous years.
Mississippi’s improvement was both so unexpected, and so dramatic, that it is commonly referred to as “The Mississippi Miracle.” The success of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act elevated Mississippi’s reading scores to their current 9th ranked place in the nation, an incredible 40 places higher than when it was started in 2013.