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Inside the Mississippi Marathon: How Mississippi Dramatically Improved Its Education System with Rachel Canter
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- [00:00]
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Rachel Kantor
So good, so good, so good.
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Rachel Kantor
welcome to the New Books Network
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Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Rachel Kantor, Director of Education Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute. In 2008, Rachel founded Mississippi first, an education nonprofit with the mission of improving educational outcomes for students across the state. Dating Back to the 1990s, Mississippi ranked near the very bottom on educational assessment metrics for reading and math. Today, Mississippi's elementary school students score above the national public average and the 8th graders have nearly reached the national public average. For nearly two decades, Rachel has been on the front lines fighting to improve reading and math outcomes for Mississippi's public school students. In the process, she has learned that there are no quick fixes, silver bullets, or magical solutions. Improving educational outcomes takes time, accountability, evidence, and institutional support. Rachel and PPI have produced a short research paper on this incredible improvement in outcomes titled Inside the Mississippi Marathon. This paper is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of education in America. Whether you're a researcher, policymaker, parent, or student, Inside the Mississippi Marathon charts a path for national improvement in education as well as Rachel, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
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Rachel Kantor
Happy to be here.
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Caleb Zakrin
It's really fantastic to talk with you in part because this is something that I had heard about. I'd read about it a little bit in the news, and I think it just had come up in conversation. I feel like people are always talking about education, especially now, lamenting the outcomes for students, especially since COVID People are looking at the decline in student test scores and students reading abilities, their math abilities, and they're really concerned, like, is this some kind of, you know, are we in a kind of a decline that we can't resolve? Or perhaps there are ways that we can improve after the COVID decline? And I really do think that you and your experience, like you have the answers in many ways for us. And as you relate in it, there's no magic solutions. There are many different aspects to improve education. It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It takes many, many people to make the outcomes. Pos but before talking about the Mississippi Marathon, I was wonder if you could just introduce yourself a little, tell us about yourself and how you first got interested in studying education.
- [03:56]
Rachel Kantor
Sure. Well, I'm Rachel Kanter. I'm the director of education policy at ppi. I grew up in Mississippi in a small town called Starkville, which is where Mississippi State University is. I went to public school, graduated, and went away to college. And that experience really gave me a perspective on the ways in which my public school education in Mississippi had prepared me for life after college and the ways that it had not. And one of the things that I struggled with was that folks from other states, whether they went to public school or private school, were far more prepared for the rigors of Penn than I was, even though I had graduated at the top of my class. And I decided after college to become a teacher and to go to the Mississippi Delta, which is on the other side of the state from my hometown, and try to understand more about how to improve public education. I taught for two years in Greenville through Teach for America in seventh grade English. And it was really obvious to me that the problem was not something that one individual teacher could solve. It was going to take a lot of people reforming the system, and that was bigger than any one person. And so I went to graduate school to try to figure out how do you use policy to try to make change for kids in schools? And also how do I start a nonprofit to do that? And so in 2008, I moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to start Mississippi first. And I kept working at it from 2008 until 2025, when I left to come to PPI. And I think that it is, you know, obviously a story that I tell in the report is one that's deeply personal to me because this is my life's work in some way and my life story.
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Caleb Zakrin
So let's start at the end, in a way, which is basically the really positive outcomes that Mississippi has seen for its students. What are the scores like now just compared to the national average for fourth graders and for eighth graders? Obviously, that's the focus of what the tests are in the studies, but also just more generally, what outcomes you're seeing for students in Mississippi.
- [06:14]
Rachel Kantor
Well, one of the big things that people talk about is that in 2019, Mississippi went from last in the country to the national average in fourth grade reading and math. And we substantially closed the gap between ourselves and the Nation in 8th grade reading and math. Then, of course, we had the pandemic. And like many states, Mississippi saw our scores fall, but we've now seen our scores go back up in fourth grade reading and math. And in eighth grade math, we sort of have stopped the bleeding in 8th grade reading, unlike the nation, which continues to decline. And we're hopeful that we'll see even more progress in 2026. But if you take those 2024 scores and you adjust them based on demographics, and essentially what we're trying to do is we're trying to make states comparable. If we say if every state had the same population of students, who would do well and who would not, And Mississippi actually does the best in the country. When you do that, we rank number one in fourth grade reading and math, and in eighth grade math, and we're fourth in eighth grade reading. And that's really shocking to a lot of people because they. The only thing they think about when they think of Mississippi is this historical reputation we've had. But a lot of hard work over a long period of time went into making that possible.
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Caleb Zakrin
So what's really interesting, too, is when you look at these charts that basically show the increases. It's not like there's any one year where maybe they implemented. Schools started implementing some new approach, and you saw a radical lift. It's really this steady gain, which in many ways is probably more reassuring, and it also probably shows, which I think is many of the points that you've made, is that it's not one thing. It's many different things that went into the sort of the solution. What are. When you first started working on this issue, what were you seeing as some of the debates or discussions about how education should be improved, what was just the general landscape? Obviously, no Child Left behind, there was other approaches to improving education. What was the debate like when you first began?
- [08:28]
Rachel Kantor
Well, I grew up in Mississippi, so I remember what public school was like in the 80s and 90s in Mississippi. It was sort of a very early era of people across the country thinking about what public schools really should do for kids beyond, you know, a minimum level of information, giving them a minimum level of information about, you know, reading and math. And when I started in the classroom in 2004, that was the no Child Left behind era. And no Child Left behind had been this big shift in the way that people were expected to what they were expected to do in schools. Schools were not only told, well, you need to teach kids reading and math, but we're going to measure that, and then we're going to hold you accountable to improving that performance. And there were a lot of people, I think, in that era who really believed that some kids were just cut out for learning and some kids were not, and that if those kids that were in your school were the kids that were not learning, then there was really nothing you could do. And I definitely saw that when I was a classroom teacher. There were some teachers who were really against this idea that no child should be left behind, that we should be attempting to educate every child. But that was never my philosophy. My philosophy was always, kids will learn what we teach them, and if we expect them to learn things and we try to teach them those things, they're going to rise to those expectations. And one of my beliefs about the system was that everywhere I looked in Mississippi, whether when I was a classroom teacher and then when I founded Mississippi first, I saw low expectations for basically everybody. I saw low expectations of kids. I saw low expectations of families and communities. I saw low expectations of teachers. I saw low expectations of leaders. And it was not shocking to me that our outcomes were so low when we basically expected nothing of anyone. And I thought, you know, the first thing we need to do is we need to raise our expectations, and we need to be really clear what are our goals, what are we trying to do? And that is that that's sort of the foundation in which we build the system, because I deeply believed kids will learn what we teach them.
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Caleb Zakrin
I think that that is a really important perspective to take when you're trying to reform a system, because obviously, I think people, sometimes they get very cynical. The education system, especially seeing, you know, the lack of change for decades, the Lack, especially with lacking resources and a host of other issues that just make it challenging to help students that might be at risk or needing some extra special attention. The first part of this paper is really going through the history of it. And you start by talking about the federal policy era, the era where Mississippi's education system was sort of, you know, similar to or like the. The other kind of national school system. So what was this era like, and how did it. How was it for Mississippi?
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Rachel Kantor
So I. The first date that I sort of pull out in the paper is 1982, which is when Mississippi passed the Education Reform act of 1982. And that if you talk to Mississippians, they'll tell you that was a significant moment in our history. It included, you know, our first state kindergarten program. We also had a big constitutional amendment that changed from an elected state superintendent to appointed state superintendent. And we. And we required. Began to require what we called a minimum competency test. And you may know that in 1983, there was this big report called A Nation at Risk that sort of called on the nation to wake up to the fact that kids were not learning enough and we were going to be less competitive as a nation. And between that time period and really no Child Left behind in 2001, I would say that Mississippi was mostly playing a game of just enough to get by. You know, there it was sort of a. We passed the Education Reform act of 1982 so that we didn't fall too far behind the conversation nationally. That was happening. And then the federal government started to pass a series of policies in the Clinton years to expect more of school districts and schools and states in order to receive federal dollars. But it wasn't really until no Child left behind in 2001 that those expectations had a lot of teeth to them. And that's why no Child Left behind felt like such an enormous, you know, shift in the education policy world. We weren't just saying, well, you've got to have learning. Expect some sort of learning expectations, and you've got to have some sort of measurement of those learning expectations. We were the. No Child Left behind says you have to have challenging learning expectations and aligned assessment. You have to measure student progress every year. You have to report that publicly. You have to report that by school, and then every school has to make a certain amount of progress, which at that point in time was called adequate yearly progress, in order not to end up on a consequences ladder that was set out in the law. That was a huge shift in what the federal government expected. And so, because of those expectations. And because Mississippi and every state in the country relies in part on federal funds, we passed policies and laws to bring ourselves into compliance with those federal laws. But I don't think it was really until around 2009 that Mississippi was really leading its own education policy instead of being sort of dragged along by, by federal law until we started really taking charge of our own destiny and saying, you know what? We could do better without somebody having to tell us to do better.
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Caleb Zakrin
And what did that look like? What did that look like, the state taking charge?
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Rachel Kantor
It started really small at first, I would say. And in the report, I talk about a piece of legislation we passed in 2009 called the Children First act, which was an attempt by the state to do something about this ever growing list of the lowest performing schools in the state. So no Child Left behind had something called the school improvement list. And if you didn't make adequate yearly progress, you go on that list. And that list sort of ballooned, you know, over time, there were more schools going on the list than schools coming off the list. And Mississippi was really influenced by the fact that, you know, these alleged consequences that were in no Child Left behind didn't really actually improve student performance. And then over in our neighbor Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrina, of course, there was a lot of press about their recovery school district and how they were trying to turn around chronically low performing schools in the city of New Orleans. And we had always had a number of school districts that had just had very, very, very low performance, even in a state where the average performance was low and where expectations were low. I mean, very low graduation rates, very low levels of student proficiency, even with a low bar. Just education systems that were not doing much of anything for students. And state leadership said we should do something about this small sliver of schools. And they passed this Children first act to create a state takeover law. But as I say in the report, that was kind of an aberration at that point in time, because historically we had only really been reactive to federal policy and we. But we passed that law. And then in 2010, race to the Top came out and we adopted Common Core to be eligible for the money. We said we were going to upgrade our assessment to be eligible for the money, but those were sort of just like seeds. It wasn't really until we had a legislative shift in our 2012 legislative session that Mississippi had an actual agenda for education reform. And I talk about this in the report that we sort of, at that point in time, I had been in my role by 2012, but for four years, and I'd been sort of beating this drum, like there are things that we could do differently and it would make a difference for kids if we did them. And that message finally found fertile ground with the 2012 legislative term. And that's sort of how we got off to the races.
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Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. Can you talk about what those reforms looked like?
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Rachel Kantor
So to me, as I said, one of the fundamental problems was this issue of we had low expectations of everybody. Adopting Common Core and agreeing to join a national assessment consortium meant that we had sort of solved 2 of 3 sort of fundamental issues around expectations. And the third one was around something that we call an accountability system. Now, in education policy, when we call it an accountability system system, really we need a transparency system. It is a rating system for how we measure school and district performance. And Mississippi had this accountability system that really did more to hide performance than anything else. It was very opaque. It basically gave schools credit for less than grade level performance. It gave schools credit for whether or not kids met a predicted expectation of growth that was based on whether other kids liked them improved or not, which meant that you could meet that prediction if the prediction said, nobody's going to learn anything. Right. And that was how we measured growth. We also gave schools credit if kids did not graduate high school but got a ged. And of course, that gave incentives for school districts to say, we don't think you're going to get out of here in time. Why don't you go to the GED track instead of trying to get them to graduation? So there were all these problems with the system. And then it had, in the way that it calculated performance. And then we had these opaque labels, like one of them was high performing and another one was star. And then on the other end, we had something called academic watch, which was like, you're less than successful, but we're not really going to tell you what that means all the way down to failing. And one of the things that I thought was true was that until we could be honest with people about actual performance of kids, it would be very difficult to improve because we could be telling school districts and parents and communities, your school district is successful, when what that actually meant according to the accountability model meant less than grade level performance and GEDs instead of high school graduation. So we really had to change that. And that process started in 2012 with this, you know, this new legislature and some of these new ideas that were coming to fruition. And we ended up passing and codifying in 2013amuch more rigorous and much more transparent and predictable and straightforward accountability model that gave schools credit for things like you have to be on grade level or advanced and we're going to give you credit for growth only if you move from one year to the next, closer to grade level or beyond grade level. We're not going to give you credit for growth for anything else. And we're going to rate you with a letter grade that everybody immediately knows not just what that means, but how that means in relation to something else. So you know the difference between an A and a B and you know where those are on the scale. And that was sort of like the, the those fundamental things that we had to do first because that set the North Star for the state. Our North Star is going to be student performance that is meaningful across both proficiency as well as things like high school graduation and whether or not you're taking you're prepared for college or career and you know, through the taking a passage of like say AP courses, for example, or getting industry recognized credentials. And once that's the North Star, the question becomes what are we going to do to help schools meet that North Star? And that's where we start to get into the conversation about how do we change the way we teach reading? How do we do pre K to give kids an early start, a better start to school? What do we do about kids who are falling behind? How do we provide them interventions based on actual evidence to help them improve? All of those other conversations opened up in response to this big shift in expectations around what we were going to expect of students and adults.
- [21:22]
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Rachel Kantor
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- [23:18]
Caleb Zakrin
You've mentioned how a lot of the focus has been on this improvement in reading, especially, you know, new ways of teaching reading, more evidence based forms of teaching reading. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about for those who haven't heard this, heard about this, how the reading methods were changed and then also how math was also changed too in terms of how it was
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Rachel Kantor
taught for the last, I would say, I don't know, 40 years, maybe longer. Science has been sort of coming to a consensus around the way that kids learn to read, the way that the human brain learns to read, and what the best instructional methods are to get to that outcome. And we call this body of knowledge the science of reading. The science of reading has now become very popular because in part because Mississippi has been so successful at using it, in part because there's a lot of focus right now on the fact that kids don't know how to read. If you were around in the 90s, you may remember that we had something called the reading wars where people sort of align politically in different camps based on different theories of reading. But even at that point in time we had much stronger evidence for certain reading principles and instructional methods than others. But for whatever reason, this got very politicized and there was a camp of people who they may brand themselves in various ways, but one of the ways they brand themselves is their whole language enthusiasts that, you know, we should that phonics is boring and we shouldn't use that. We should use this other thing called Whole language, where you're looking at words and you're looking at pictures and you're guessing. And that's actually not the way the brain learns to read. The science of reading very clearly tells us that reading is sort of a complex brain process. It's pairing word recognition skills, which are like decoding skills, being able to look at letters and know what sounds they make and how those sounds add up to words, with language comprehension skills. So sometimes people talk about the science of reading as if it is only phonics, and that is not true. Also, phonics is a component of the science of reading. It is not the whole, the entirety of science of reading, but these two things. Word recognition and language comprehension, is how you get to reading comprehension. And that's what we really mean when we say, can you read? We mean reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is the product of word recognition and language comprehension. And people have known this for some time. This scientific consensus is not new. We're always, of course, learning things about the brain that we didn't know before. But this scientific consensus has been around for a while. And in the early 2000s, there was sort of a push to try to put phonics in schools. And because of a variety of reasons, people either didn't do it or, you know, it got very political. There have been a lot of schools that have just sort of persisted in this, in using methods like whole language and other discredited practices to teach reading. And what happens when you do that is that kids don't learn to read. And in a state like Mississippi, where kids need school to learn to read, what you do in the classroom is highly important. So Mississippi started sort of going down this road. There was an organization in Mississippi called the Barksdale Reading Institute that started with an investment from Jim Barksdale to the University of Mississippi in 2000 that whose purpose was to try to figure out, how do we get schools to adopt the science of reading? And so they were sort of out there working with schools, trying to figure it out. And then you had other folks who were at universities that were also doing reading projects. But really, from a state perspective, schools just did whatever they did. You know, there was no expectation from the state about how you should teach reading. Now, Mississippi did have what was called a reading first grant at some point in time, which was this federal effort to try to get people to use phonics. But of course, that went away when the politics shifted. And so if you went and looked in classrooms, you would have found a lot of people doing a lot of really bad things in terms of reading. And it wasn't because teachers did not want kids to learn to read, but they had not been taught this body of knowledge that we call the science of reading. And what changed was that in 2013 we passed a policy called the Literacy Based Promotion act that made sort of everybody sit up and go, okay, we gotta do something. Because if we don't teach kids to learn to read by the end of third grade, this law now says they are retained. And nobody wanted to hold kids back. We knew that if kids don't read by the end of third grade, it's not because of a child, it's because of the adults. It is the job of adults to teach kids to read. So we better do something different if we don't want all of these kids to be retained. And that's where we got the urgency around. What's most effective? Well, it's the science of reading. We better figure out how to make sure that every classroom in Mississippi is using the science of reading. And then we built a whole structure around that. The Department of Education built a whole structure around that. And it sort of. But it started and they drew on lessons from the Bark so Reading Institute and all these other in state experts. But it started, started with this urgency around. We cannot, we don't, do not want to retain kids. The law did some other important things too. It gave parents a level of transparency into their child's performance that they'd never had before. Because it required that every school district screen children for reading difficulties three times a year. And if they were flagged as being below the benchmark, which meant they were not on track to be on grade level by the end of the year, you had to send a letter home to the parents that said in no uncertain terms, your child is below grade level. And that letter had to go out three times a year from kindergarten to third grade, which meant it could not, it would not be a surprise. Right. We were not going to get to the end of third grade and a child not be able to pass the test and then have parents coming and going. I didn't know my child didn't know how to read. We were going to make it very transparent. And once you do that, you build urgency community wide for people in this cause of reading. And so those two things were clearly in the law or three really. The screening, the retention and the parent notification. And then the Mississippi Department of Education built this wonderful strategy around that. How do we make this possible that kids will learn to read?
- [30:12]
Caleb Zakrin
I feel like what's so important also for just reading, advancing reading skills. It's not just the classroom reading experience. It's, you know, reading with your parents, you know, during bedtime or, you know, just having a general, you know, being exposed to really great children's books or things like that. And I do feel like that's. That does seem like a good way to motivate parents to think like, oh, I should really be a bit more engaged in teaching my kid to read. Did you see that? That sending these letters home would motivate the parents more?
- [30:40]
Rachel Kantor
Well, there were a couple of things that I think happened at the same time as we passed this law. The first is that we passed a pre K law in the same year. And I was deeply involved in writing that law and passing it. And one of the things we talked about with pre K was we need to. In helping kids be ready for school. A lot of this is about building early literacy skills. And when I said the science of reading says you need word recognition skills and you need language comprehension, when you're talking about children that young, language comprehension means things like building their vocabulary and knowledge of the world so that when you start to teach them to decode words, they're going to be able to attach meaning to those words. And one of the things that we know about kids in poverty, say, versus other kids is their vocabularies are a lot smaller. They have a lot less background knowledge about the world, and we have to be intentional about teaching that. And so when you're talking about parents reading at home with kids, one of the things that that does is build that background knowledge and build that language comprehension, those vocabularies, you know, concepts of print, all of those things that actually build up to reading comprehension. And Mississippi, when we started going down this road and we sent the letters home, obviously that gave parents more transparency and more information to demand better for their kids. And under the law, they had a right to say, well, what services are you going to provide to my child now that they have been identified as having reading difficulties? But we also passed an amendment a couple of years after that original law to require something called an individualized reading plan. And a component of that was called a read at home plan. So the school would have to send home to the parents a list of here are the things you can do at home with your child to help your child better learn to read. But I think there was no question in our minds that a big part of the problem was actually not parents. It was that we were not doing the things that the science reading says we should be doing during the school day, and we were not helping kids learn how to decode. We were not intentionally building background knowledge and vocabulary, and all of those things made a huge difference.
- [32:56]
Caleb Zakrin
What about for math? How did math improve? Because so much of the focus has been on reading.
- [33:01]
Rachel Kantor
But yeah, yeah, I love that you asked this, because people do. I think when they think of Mississippi, they think of literacy, and they don't often look at the fact that our math scores are just as good, if not more impressive than our literacy scores. First, I would say with math, because we didn't have quite as much of a statewide focus on math as we did on literacy. But some of the same things that we did with literacy translated to math. So, first of all, when we changed our standards, we were radically raising our expectations for what math kids knew, to what level and at what grades. So when I was in high school or even before in elementary school, the math that I learned, say, in fourth grade is, you know, now they would learn that math in third grade, you know, they would learn that those math skills would be taught earlier and at a much greater depth than before. And what that ends up meaning for children is that they know more math. This should not be a surprise, that if we teach kids more math, they know more math. But that is essentially what happened in the state of Mississippi. We expected teachers to teach more math at a greater depth than ever before. And it shows up in the scores, in how much kids know and how well they do on the assessments. Certainly raising reading. There's evidence to show that raising reading scores will have an impact on math. But you can't know more math content if you've never been taught that math content. And this was a big shift in mistakes. Mississippi. We also really changed the way that we approached difficulties across reading and math. So I talked about the screeners. Even though the Literacy Based Promotion act only required that letter to go home for literacy, we actually had a law in the books that said, yeah, you have to do screeners, but the Literacy Based Promotion act and these new structures around it gave that law more sort of teeth. And the Mississippi Department of Education said, you're going to do a literacy and a math screener. So suddenly we have all this new information about children's knowledge in math and their progress in math three times a year, just like we do with literacy. And then we have this structure called the multi tiered system of supports. But essentially what that means is if you don't understand something after you've been taught in a regular classroom environment. We're going to keep providing you more and more intensive interventions until you make progress, until we figure out what works for you. And we're going to do that in a very logical, step by step, transparent way. We're going to give you an intervention, we're going to see if it works. We're going to keep going. That's what we refer to it. And we call that ntss. That process was not just for literacy, it was also for math. So now we have a way that we are identifying kids who don't quite get the content. We're giving them more one on one support or small group support. We're giving them supplemental curriculum and we're trying again and seeing, okay, has this gotten them there or not? There's just so much more intentionality around and so much more transparency and measurement around how kids are doing and a feeling of responsibility to get them from point A to point B. Mississippi did start a pilot program a couple years ago to do coaching for math the same way we do coaching for literacy. And it actually, we passed a law in 2026 to start a big statewide math initiative in the same way. And I think this is part of the Mississippi's new commitment to continuously improving. We've made tremendous progress in math. We've made even in some ways more progress in math than in reading, but that's not good enough because we know there are still kids who are not at grade level in math and they
- [36:52]
Caleb Zakrin
obviously, you know, these are averages. So there's always room for improvement for, for students. You know, there are always students in any environment that could use extra support, extra, extra help to get to, you know, to get to a proficient level. Something that I find really interesting in this is you, is you talk about working with politicians, and these are politicians across the aisle, Democrats, Republicans. It really struck me how, you know, in the course of your time working in Mississippi, there have been, there's been a shift from more Democratic dominated state legislatures to a more Republican dominated legislature. And I was wondering if you talk about what it's like for you as a person working in policy, talking to Democrats, talking to Republicans, trying to basically put education and children above partisan politics. Obviously not everyone's going to see eye to eye on every issue, but one would hope or one would think that everyone can agree that we should improve reading and math.
- [37:48]
Rachel Kantor
Yes. So, you know, politics in Mississippi have, they have shifted in my lifetime. When I was younger, we were just as likely to have a Democratic governor as we were a Republican governor. And in the last 15 years, Mississippi has become very, very red Republicans in basically every statewide elected office to chambers that have a super majority of Republican leadership in both chambers. And that does make, you know, in some ways the politics are different than when I was growing up. But education has always had a bipartisan feel to it. You know, education and public schools matter to communities whether they vote for one president of one party or another president of another party, because kids are. Kids are everywhere and they go to public school schools everywhere. And does it mean that sometimes the messaging may be different, there may be different ways of talking to a politician to speak the language as they understand? Yes. But that doesn't change the policies that are right for kids. It just changes the way that you navigate the politics. And I think what I had to do when I started Mississippi first, because we were not a partisan, and that made us very different from other advocacy organizations in the state that were very ideological or partisan or, you know, represented stakeholders. And we did not. It was like we just sort of deputized ourselves to be for the kids of Mississippi and to say, we're going to try to figure out what's going to work for kids. And so we didn't sort of have a built in team or a built in, like built in backers. We were out there trying to speak about what the science might say or what evidence might say about what would work and trying to find the people that that resonated with. And obviously when you work in a Republican dominated legislature, you have to find people in power that will listen to that message. And so I worked with a lot of Republican leaders because they were in power in the state of Mississippi, but that didn't mean that the message was a Republican only message. I also worked with Democrats. You know, it really just depended. And I think I tried to find folks that would think about the issue beyond partisanship, you know, would think about the issue of all kids can learn. We have all kinds of kids in the state of Mississippi, but all of our kids have to learn. What are we going to do to do something different for them.
- [40:26]
Caleb Zakrin
And so often today it feels like politics is defined by gridlock, by, you know, mutual hatred depending on whichever side you're on. And I mean, there's a regional component to it as well. Part of what you say is there is this inherent bias that a lot of people have towards Mississippi or certain sense that of course, that Mississippi wouldn't be able to improve its standards. And I think so much of the work that you've done. And the way in which you've approached it has shown that when you kind of put that stuff aside, when you put the biases aside and when you put the politics aside and you focus on the goals and you do it in a really practical way, that you can have incredible outcomes. And I think that's what's so remarkable in this entire paper is kind of how you show the way in which that can be achieved. And I want to turn a little bit to the national story, because obviously everyone is wondering or asking, okay, how can our state, how can our other states replicate what Mississippi has done? Obviously, there are state, even for states like, you know, like Massachusetts that already score really well, I'm, you know, they could always do better. Every state could do better, even. Even the states that do really well. And sometimes the story is what, you know, the lessons that people try and draw, like you pointed out, is, oh, we just need to change how we do reading. Oh, we just need to put more money into. Into the school system. If you were advising other politicians in other states how they can take the lessons that you have learned, what would you first say to them? Obviously, they should read your paper, but what are the first things that you would say to them?
- [42:11]
Rachel Kantor
Well, I first want to reiterate a point that you made at the beginning of this, which is that right now, children in America are doing worse on our assessments, our national assessments of reading and math than they've done in a decade and in some grades and subjects than they've done in two decades. We are not making progress as a country for kids, and that is really dangerous. And it's a problem that we can do something about, but we have to be focused on it to do something about. And I think one of the reasons that this story has resonated with people is that there are a lot of people out there who know that this is a problem. They want to do something, and they're not quite sure what would work. And this story of how Mississippi went from the bottom of the country to leading the country is one that's very compelling because it provides this playbook, and I do think it is a playbook that every state in the country can do. They're going to have to, you know, if your political landscape is different than ours in Mississippi, obviously you're going to have to navigate that. That may look different for you. But again, policies that work for kids are not different regardless of if you are in a red or a bl. And so when I tell. When I. And I'm Doing this a lot. I'm talking to people all over the country right now. One of the things that I say to them is that you should get rid of this mindset that you are selling. You know, you're campaigning on one thing or one thing or one thing or one thing. You should be thinking about how you're building a system that is going to support kids and support learning. Because one of the things that Mississippi had to do is that instead of chasing the newest fad or the thing that's in the news or whatever, we were thinking about a system. We had to reset a North Star for what our kids were doing. We had to make sure we were measuring that and being transparent. And then we had to look about all of the different types of instructional policies we were adopting to support that. And we had to redesign our state department of education to be able to support that implementation from the top all the way down into the classroom. And so I tell them, like, you have to build a system. You need to get rid of this mindset that you're just looking for a magic bullet or you're looking for one thing. And then next year you're going to have a new thing, because politicians love new things. I also tell them that they cannot assume that the fundamentals of their system are sound. So a lot of states adopted new standards about, you know, around 2010, the same time that we did, and because of backlash for a variety of political reasons, they got rid of them, or they poked holes in them, or even if they're sort of mostly okay, you know, they lowered their standards on their assessment. But the one that I think is most sort of poisonous is that they gave up on transparently measuring how kids were doing and reporting that to people. If you go and try to find out how kids in your community are doing according to state measures, in most states, it's very difficult to find that information. And then if you find it, it may not make any sense to you because we have, you know, just like Mississippi used to have, they have a system that hides performance more than anything else. And I tell people it's very difficult to improve if you cannot be honest about where you are starting. Change starts with honesty. That's one of the number one things that you have to do. And in Mississippi, it was painful. You know, it was painful to be last in the country, to have people, people always telling you you're last and your worst. And we didn't want to have to say that to ourselves, but that was the truth. And we, in order to Improve. We had to look at our data and tell the truth. And then I think, then you start, once you start building a system, you start thinking about, okay, if you're going to, if you're going to do these things, how are you going to know if they're going to work and who's going to be responsible if they don't? And a lot of states struggle with those two questions because when the point is to pass a messaging bill and not a bill that's going to make change, like it shifts how you think about things. And I think that what we, one of the things we didn't write in Mississippi was that it was not just about a political win, it was about making change for kids in classrooms.
- [46:33]
Caleb Zakrin
I'm curious how you respond to people that are skeptics. And I'm specifically thinking about people that are just general testic test skeptics. You know, obviously the type of testing that evidence that you're looking at, it's not necessarily the type of testing that's going to decide whether, whether or not someone gets into college or not. It's really looking at these like baseline skills that are essential, you know, whether or not you go to college or not. Having literacy skills, having basic math skills is just a necessity for, for life. And, and I can almost imagine people saying like, well, it's demoralizing, like we shouldn't test because it's demoralizing. And then if people are demoralized, then they'll perform even worse. And but of course it's, you know, that's like going to the doctor and telling your doctor like, hey, don't tell me if there's anything wrong because I don't want to be demoralizing. Demoralized. Nobody wants to, nobody wants to hear bad news. But I'm wondering, you know, if people brought that point up like, oh, well, if we test then it's not going to lead to improvements. We're just going to feel sad about it and then it's going to be even worse.
- [47:31]
Rachel Kantor
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a, it's, it goes to, and there was a lot of backlash in this country around the time that we were doing these things around things like standardized testing. People who wanted to get rid of state, states who passed opt out policies to allow parents to just take their kids out of the state test. We really convinced people, we being, you know, the culture really convinced a lot of parents that tests were just evil. But the reality is that a state standardized test is the most efficient manner of assessing of Figuring out whether what kids learn. Is it the only measure of what kids learn? No. Is it just a measure at one point in time? Yes. But if you, if you have to figure, if you have to, you know, if your goal is to improve learning, how are you going to do that if you don't know where kids start? And we can't really use grades for that because every teacher grades differently. Their assignments may be different. They may have different, you know, more rigorous or less rigorous standards. We can't even compare teachers within the same school all the time, let alone every different school. The standardized tests are there to give us a sense of whether or not we are moving in the right direction, how much kids know and are we moving in the right direction? They're not going to be. That state standardized test is not necessarily useful at the end of the year, is not necessarily useful to a teacher because it happens at the end of the year. It's a measure of did you know, how well did kids learn this year? It's not necessarily going to help them change their practice. Screeners are better for that because they come throughout the year, or interim assessments are better for that. But for the state and for state policymakers, we don't have a better measure than standardized assessments that happen once a year. And that's kind of the reality of our system. You cannot make progress without measurement and without knowing where you start and how, you know, how much growth you've had. There are some pilots going on in other states across the country to try to figure out, well, instead of doing one assessment at the end of the year, could we have smaller assessments throughout the year that roll up into a big assessment? We have some assessment pilots on that, and I think they're worth watching. But at this moment in time, assessments are the best that we have have there. I don't think it does children any good to lie to them. And if we're not honest with kids about what they know, it's not going to change that. They don't know anything. It's just going to make it harder for them to be successful as they move on.
- [50:18]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I do think that it's good to overcome. This is also a good way for people to just overcome the fear of assessment. I think sometimes we want to hide because it feels easier that way, but then we end up harming ourselves in the long run. And I remember, actually, one of my earliest memories was being. I think it was in first grade. It was the worst reader in my class in first grade. And I remember learning this and Feeling very sort of upset about it. But it motivated me between first and second grade to read as much as possible. And then I came back in second grade and I was much better reader than a lot of the kids in the class. And it was good to know that. I think if I hadn't known that, if nobody had told me, hey, you know, your peers can read the sentence and you can't, then I probably wouldn't have had that motivation even as a, you know, six or seven year old.
- [51:10]
Rachel Kantor
Yeah. And it's, and it's the responsibility of adults to put tests in perspective for kids. Like, this is information that's useful for us so that we can help you learn more. You know, it doesn't say anything about your character. It tells us, do you know how to read and do math? What do we need to do differently?
- [51:29]
Caleb Zakrin
I think everything that you've done in this work is in this, in this paper is really fascinating. You know, there's a lot more that we, you know, didn't even get a chance to talk about, but I think in broad strokes, like we were able to cover a lot of the really interesting ideas and experience that you had. I think what's really fascinating is just, just seeing the experience that you had pushing this through not just as a study that you, that you do at one point in time, but like actively responding to new evidence as you went, changing your approach, not only in terms of your research approach and the types of solutions that you're recommending, but also changing her approach and how to just deal with the people that are going to implement these solutions. And it's really interesting to see that. And I think it's a useful roadmap for anyone who's thinking about policy implementation, not just in education, but in any, in any area where you want to try and change a policy or improve an outcome. So, yeah. Rachel, I'm wondering, you know, this just came out, you know, last month. You're obviously still working on education policy. What are you looking at now? What's your hope? What's your goal, having put this out?
- [52:36]
Rachel Kantor
Well, even though I'm sort of in this national role now and I'm not doing the day to day work that I was doing before when I was head of Mississippi first. I think what motivates me now is the idea that I can talk to folks in other parts of the country who were in very much the same place that I was and say, yeah, there's hope. Here is what we did that was successful. Can I help you figure out what that looks like for you. And that's what's very motivating to me right now, because I do think improving education and improving public schools is a possible thing here in the United States of America. And it's not just a possible thing. It's something we have to do. We have to do it for the future of kids in this country. And I'm just not on the. I don't like the idea that we should just throw up our hands and say, well, I guess parents, it's your problem now. Go figure it out. No, this is all of our problem, and it's one that we can solve.
- [53:38]
Caleb Zakrin
So this paper is available for anyone. It's on the website, the progressivepolicy.org website. Is there anywhere else or any other place that you would like to point people to if they've listened to this conversation and they're interested not only in reading the paper, but also just in learning more, how they can get involved, how they can make use of the resources that you've helped put together or even get in contact with you?
- [54:04]
Rachel Kantor
Well, you can get in contact with me if you go to the PPI website. I did have an essay in the Atlantic that ran the same day that the paper was out. The essay is not a summary of the paper. It is a conversation about one aspect of the paper, which is the role that accountability played in our transformation. I think right now I'm also working on some new things that maybe will be out in the next couple of months. But right now, I think the most important thing is if you're interested in education in your state, is looking for organizations like Mississippi first that are in your state and figuring out how you can support them.
- [54:41]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, I think that's fantastic advice. And, you know, hopefully, hopefully there will be people that listen to this conversation and feel some motivation or some inspiration, you know, that. That it is possible to like, go from last to first or, you know, to almost first. It's probably, you know, in due time. Like. Like, it is remarkable to see, like, there's been fall off in a lot of states for, you know, because of COVID and Mississippi rebounded quite quickly, a lot of the outcomes. So, you know, it's a really fascinating story. It's a really incredible, incredible story too, of just like how policy, how good, effective policy can actually improve people's lives. So, Rachel, thank you so much for being a guest on the New Books Network. It was really wonderful to get a chance to speak with you.
- [55:24]
Rachel Kantor
Yeah, thank you.