For decades, America has been told that the key to better schools is more money. Underperformance, the argument runs, is really a question of resources. Just give the teacher unions what they ask for, and good outcomes will follow.
Mississippi is starting to show that this simply is not true.
Over the past decade, Mississippi has made such progress in fourth-grade reading that people have taken to calling it the “Mississippi miracle.” Mississippi ranked 9th in the country for fourth-grade reading in 2024, up from 49th in 2013 — a 40-place climb in a decade, from near the bottom of the table into the top ten.
Mississippi’s fourth graders now read better than their peers in New York, Minnesota, and California — every one of them a state that spends a great deal more per child than we do. And here is the part the spend-more crowd would rather you did not dwell on. We get those better results for far less money.
Mississippi spends around $12,300 per pupil, one of the five lowest figures in America. New York spends $31,918 — more than two and a half times as much — and its children read less well for it. New York, in other words, buys more than two dollars of schooling for every one of ours, and ends up further behind.
Perhaps the starkest comparison of all is with California. A Black fourth grader in Mississippi is now somewhere between two and a half and three times more likely to read at grade level than a Black fourth grader in California — 19 percent reach proficiency here, against just 7 percent there — and California spends well over half as much again per pupil as we do. If money were the answer, those numbers would be the other way round.
There is no reliable relationship between what a school spends and what its children actually learn. Mississippi proves this point not only when you compare our results to other states, but when you examine what is happening inside Mississippi in granular detail.