A few weeks ago, I was watching the Pennsylvania governors’ debate in Kemp Family Commons. My disposition is a liberal one, so I was naturally partial to most of the arguments presented by Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate and incumbent governor of the state. However, I was genuinely impressed with Stacy Garrity, who outperformed my — admittedly low — expectations.
The issue that really got me thinking critically about our current governor was that of education. Garrity pointed out that, despite ever-increasing spending, the system continues to fail students. Only 30.5% of Pennsylvania children test as “proficient and above” in math by the eighth grade, according to the most recent statistics released by the government of Pennsylvania for the 2024-2025 school year.
What was Garrity’s proposed solution? The Republican gubernatorial candidate believes that “we need to put some gates in place.” In Garrity’s PA, these so-called “gates” would be found at the end of the third and eighth grades, at which point children would be required to demonstrate certain skills in order to move to the next grade level. By third grade, students would be expected to be proficient in reading. They would be required to perform at grade-level in reading and math by the end of the eighth grade. She then goes on to talk about school choice and the need to subsidize private education, a proposal which I won’t waste words defending. However, this idea does not invalidate the first part of her solution.
One need only look at the state of Mississippi and its miraculous improvements over the last decade to see such a policy in action and the astonishing results that come with it. In 2013, Mississippi’s Republican governor, Phil Bryant, passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, placing a “gate” on procession to the fourth grade — quite similar to Garrity’s proposal. This new standard was paired with increased support (including the education of teachers in the science of reading and the reintroduction of phonics) so that those retained in the third grade weren’t simply abandoned.
The results of this policy have been called a “miracle” by many, as Mississippi went from being the 49th-ranked state in the U.S. for fourth grade reading in 2013 to the ninth-ranked state by 2024. According to the Urban Institute, Mississippi’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test, which measures academic performance across states, are even better when adjusted for the state’s relative poverty. When considering such factors, they placed Mississippi’s 2024 scores as nation-leading in Fourth Grade Reading, Fourth Grade Math and Eighth Grade Math. They placed it fourth in the U.S. in Eighth Grade Reading. What a disappointment!
That is not the whole story. The main criticism levelled at those who see the results from Mississippi and vote Republican, believing that a “gate” at the end of the third grade and maybe one at the end of middle school too will magically save American literacy, is that this ignores a critical part of the “Mississippi Miracle.” Namely, that it isn’t just about the gates; what accompanies them and how these supports are implemented are highly important.
Kymyona Burk, Ed.D, headed the state’s reform of its literacy education as the State Literacy Director at the Mississippi Department of Education, where she led the implementation of Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act. In a 2022 essay for the George W. Bush Institute, Burk describes how “effective implementation is key to ensuring the law is successful.” This meant providing support to those retained in the third grade and building the infrastructure necessary to make a real change in literacy rates. To focus simply on a policy of retention, without a plan to actively support students’ proficiency, would not be constructive. In fact, it would be punitive and would likely disenfranchise those without the means to support their children’s literacy at home.
To make a “gate” effective, the state of Mississippi trained all of its K-3 educators in the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) framework and brought in reading coaches to help in the worst-performing schools. These coaches “supported educators” who were still adjusting to the new model. The results, as I have shown, were exceptional and are a result of the combination of the policy of retention and the increased funding and support for reading education.
Researchers do disagree about how much credit belongs to retention itself versus the coaching, curriculum, and phonics changes, and critics note that holding back lower-scoring students can lift fourth grade averages on its own. The fact that Mississippi students fall back below the national average in reading and math by the eighth grade would lead me to think that the implementation of a further “gate” at this point, as suggested by Garrity, would make sense.
The current popularity of the LETRS model is derived from its high-profile success in Mississippi. As Beth Anderson explained to Education Week in 2022, LETRS has exploded in popularity, as Departments of Education across the country saw it as a “silver bullet.” This kind of mass movement in one direction or the other is common in the education space, as seen in the adoption of devices in classrooms worldwide following the COVID pandemic.
Though highly effective in Mississippi, the results are far from consistent. Returning to Burk and her experience leading the charge against the literacy crisis in Mississippi, the effectiveness of the legislation was dependent on proper implementation and the creation of infrastructure around the basic principles of retention and LETRS. According to Education Week, another reason that Mississippi saw such amazing results was the “system of coaching to support [teachers] in applying” what they learned and the changes made to the curriculum.
Even though LETRS has been introduced in many other states since 2013, the results have been inconsistent. These real-world results could’ve been predicted if policy makers had read the 2011 study “First-Grade Teachers’ Response to Three Models of Professional Development in Reading” by researchers Joanne F. Carlisle, Kai Schnabel Cortina and Lauren A. Katz. This study found “that extensive support for teachers in their schools and classrooms is most likely to lead to changes in their practices.” Therefore, it isn’t just about the model used by the Mississippi Department of Education, but also the infrastructure put in place to implement it. Also important to note is the exorbitant cost of LETRS, with Michigan putting $75 million towards LETRS training in their 2027 budget, according to Bridge Michigan.
In Pennsylvania, “each school entity professional development plan must include training in structured literacy and each teacher preparation program must include training based on PDE developed reading literacy skill standards,” as mandated by Act 55 of 2022, an omnibus of amendments to the state Public School Code. LETRS is one option among many that fulfill this requirement. So what does Mississippi have that Pennsylvania has missed? As pointed out by Stacy Garrity, there is no policy of retention here and the curriculum hasn’t been substantially changed around the training reforms brought in in 2022. Furthermore, the state has not invested in the standardization of the teaching of English, or in reading coaches to support struggling educators.
My conclusion is that it’s complicated. I know that this isn’t a satisfying answer, but it’s the truth. To pretend that holding kids back in the third grade is the answer is — as I have established — silly without the support necessary to help them graduate the next year. At the same time, these supports are more difficult to implement than just training teachers a certain way. To help them implement the frameworks that they learn, Mississippi gave teachers expert reading coaches and adjusted the curriculum to fit the model.
With Pennsylvania performing worse than Mississippi in fourth grade reading and only slightly better in fourth grade math, despite spending more than 75% more per student on average, there is clearly room for improvement. However, that does not mean that the implementation of a “gate” after the third and eighth grades will act as a panacea. As always, it’s much more complex than that. So the question to put to any candidate is not whether they favor “gates,” but rather what coaches, curriculum and funding come with them, because it is this combination that matters.
