Is a North Carolina education “miracle” on the horizon? | Opinion

The hottest story in education right now is coming from the unlikeliest place.

The state of Mississippi, long viewed as a barrel-bottom performer in its public schools, has become the national example of how to raise reading scores. In a few short years, the state has made sweeping gains in how well its children read by fourth grade — vaulting from the bottom of the list into the top 10.

This “Mississippi Miracle,” as it’s called, has been cited by governors, researchers, and policy wonks across the country. Everyone wants to know what Mississippi did right.

As I dug into how this miracle came about, I was quickly struck by how closely Mississippi’s plan mirrors what North Carolina has done over the past decade. So why hasn’t North Carolina seen the same results?

I put that question to Catherine Truitt, North Carolina’s former superintendent of public instruction. Her answer wasn’t that North Carolina missed out. It’s that we may simply be on a different part of the timeline.

In fact, Truitt’s view is that North Carolina has already planted the seeds of a miracle of its own. Now we’re waiting to see the harvest.

Two states, same structure

Mississippi passed its Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013. North Carolina passed Read to Achieve one year earlier, in 2012.

Both laws zeroed in on third grade as a critical benchmark for reading performance, recognizing that if a child can’t read by then, everything that comes after gets harder. Both emphasized early identification of reading difficulties. Both created summer reading camps and put pressure on districts to intervene before it was too late. Both made early literacy a statewide priority.

The difference came in the instruction itself. At the core of Mississippi’s gains was a clear shift in how reading was taught.

Its 2013 law implemented what’s come to be known as the “science of reading.” In effect, this means daily, dedicated time for reading instruction that teaches kids how to decode words through phonics. It’s grounded in decades of research on how children actually learn to read.

That was a shift from the older model known as “balanced literacy,” which emphasized context clues, independent reading, and exposure to books, but didn’t always give struggling readers the systematic instruction in letter-sound relationships that they need.

If this sounds familiar, too, it should. North Carolina has passed a “science of reading” law, but it didn’t do so until eight years after Mississippi did.

In 2021, state lawmakers passed the Excellent Public Schools Act, which put the science of reading at the center of North Carolina’s early literacy work. Truitt, then serving as state superintendent, helped design and champion the effort.

The law paid for every Pre-K through fifth-grade teacher, and one administrator per school, to complete a year-long training in the same program Mississippi had used. It funded a statewide reading screener to identify students who were falling behind. It required districts to align their instruction to the research.

It was, in Truitt’s words, “the most comprehensive and best funded” reading reform effort in the country at the time.

The difference is simply that it came later than Mississippi’s.

A harvest year

So why bring this up now? Because if Mississippi’s timeline is any guide, North Carolina could be on the cusp of its own breakthrough.

Mississippi began its work in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the first full cohort of students — those who had been taught under the new model from the beginning — showed up in fourth-grade reading results. That six-year window turned out to be the payoff period.

In North Carolina, the clock started in earnest in 2021, and early elementary teachers didn’t get trained until a year later. That means today’s fourth graders are the first class to benefit from this kind of instruction from the start.

And if the timeline holds, 2026 or 2027 could be when we begin to see the results.

Already, early literacy assessments are showing promising signs. State literacy screeners show North Carolina students outperforming national averages in K–3 reading skills. Does that mean a “North Carolina miracle” is on the horizon?

“Oh, I hope so,” Truitt told me. “We’re far away enough past the pandemic. We’ve had enough training. We have very, very rigorous accountability expectations. So I’m really hoping that we do see a big bump.”

If we do, it won’t be because we stumbled on a secret formula. It’ll be because we finally followed one, and gave it time to work.

Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.