What's Really Behind the "Southern Surge"?

Improved reading scores in states like Louisiana are due to far more than “phonics” or “accountability.”

Photo by Matt Paul Catalano on Unsplash

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Education advocate Karen Vaites appears to have coined the term “Southern Surge” to describe recent improvements in reading scores in four Southern states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama. Shortly after scores on national reading tests for fourth and eighth graders came out early this year, she wrote a couple of pieces pointing out that these states had shown remarkable progress.

Mississippi used to be reliably at or near the bottom when compared to other states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Now it’s soared to ninth in the nation for fourth grade reading.

Between 2019 and 2024, Louisiana moved up from 50th place in that category to 16th, leading the nation in reading growth for the second consecutive cycle.

Tennessee, according to Vaites, “topped the country for growth of its eighth graders,” and Alabama was one of only two states to show growth in fourth grade since 2019.

When adjusted for demographics, these states look even better. Seen through that lens, Mississippi and Louisiana are currently in the first and second spots in fourth-grade reading. In 2019, Alabama was 49^th for low-income fourth-graders; now it’s tied for 31^st. “We need a LOT more coverage of these success stories,” Vaites urged.

She seems to be getting her wish—sort of. While Vaites’s pieces were thorough and nuanced, the coverage that has ensued has vastly oversimplified the situation, reducing the success stories to “more phonics” and “more test-based accountability.” If people take that coverage at face value—and use misleading information to try to replicate the formula for success—we’re likely to see continued widespread failure.

Parts of Vaites’s message appear to have come through—the part about teacher training being important, the part about curriculum being important too, and maybe even the part about the importance of grounding teacher training in a specific curriculum. But other crucial points have gotten lost.

Phonics Only Gets You So Far

Let’s start with the “more phonics” oversimplification. Phonics instruction is important, but it only gets you so far.

Phonics-focused reforms can boost state test scores in the elementary grades, but those gains fade out by middle school. That’s largely because as grade levels go up, reading proficiency increasingly depends not just on the ability to decipher, or decode, individual words but also on the ability to understand complex text. The fade-out suggests that something is missing from comprehension instruction.

It’s been widely reported that typical decoding instruction doesn’t align with scientific evidence. But there’s been little coverage of the fact that typical reading comprehension instruction, which focuses on practice in non-transferable skills like “making inferences,” also doesn’t align with evidence.

Comprehension depends far less on abstract skill than on knowledge—knowledge of the topic, or academic knowledge and vocabulary in general. This is the kind of knowledge that schools are failing to build during the many hours spent on reading comprehension, year after year. But you’d be hard pressed to find that point made in the tsunami of coverage of the “reading crisis” in recent years.

Even before the spate of articles on the Southern Surge in the past few weeks, there were plenty of stories about the “Mississippi Miracle,” all of them focusing on phonics instruction. Still, Kelsey Piper, writing in The Argument in late September, noted that most parents she talks to haven’t heard of that “miracle” and called for more coverage.

Piper also urges more attention to the three other states that Vaites spotlighted, saying they’ve all “adopted the same strategies.” Not really.

Knowledge-Building Literacy Curricula

As Vaites detailed in her original piece, Louisiana and Tennessee have been much more focused on encouraging the adoption of knowledge-building literacy curricula than the other two states. That makes a big difference—or will, as students progress through higher grades. In states that limit their reading reforms to phonics, students may be able to decode increasingly complex text in middle and high school but lack the background knowledge to understand it, especially if they come from less highly educated families.¹

Others have also missed this crucial difference between the approaches in the four Southern states. A recent Boston Globe article by Christopher Huffaker attributed the rise in all four to a focus on the “science of reading,” which he—like most other education journalists—described as a “phonics-focused methodology,” as though the only science related to reading is about phonics. Both Louisiana and Mississippi, Huffaker continued, have “a focus on the basics, such as phonics.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Democratic politico Rahm Emanuel similarly argued that Southern states like Mississippi owe their success to “discarding ‘whole language’ literacy methods,” which are generally defined in terms of an aversion to phonics. Both Emanuel and Huffaker took Northern, largely Democratic states to task for being slow to require phonics instruction, without suggesting they might need to do anything more.

Louisiana’s own PR hasn’t helped. A press release on the website of its Department of Education declares that the state’s academic progress reflects its “emphasis on foundational skills” and its “literacy plan rooted in phonics,” characterizing its approach as “back to the basics.”²

What Louisiana Really Did

But for over a decade, beginning under a different administration (a Democratic one, by the way), Louisiana has been doing far more than promoting phonics. The state has also educated its teacher workforce about the crucial role of knowledge in comprehension; developed a rating and incentive system that nudged districts to adopt literacy curricula that built both foundational reading skills and knowledge effectively; helped districts find professional development for educators focused on the specifics of those curricula; and even created its own knowledge-building literacy curriculum, as well as a decent social studies curriculum. It’s also helped make teachers aware of the importance of explicit writing instruction, which can boost both reading comprehension and learning in general.

Enabling students to become proficient readers requires far more than providing the “basics.” Reading comprehension is a product of everything students are able to learn, including in subjects like social studies, science, and the arts.

Tennessee, like Louisiana, started with curriculum reform, promulgating a list of approved offerings that were designed to build knowledge as well as teach phonics, and tying teacher training to those curricula. Not all the curricula on the state list are truly knowledge-building, but according to Vaites, most districts have selected the better ones.

On the other hand, so far Mississippi and Alabama have focused their efforts almost entirely on phonics. Unless they extend those efforts to include building knowledge, most of their students are likely to hit a wall as they reach higher grades.

Test-Based Accountability

The other story line popping up in “Southern Surge” coverage is this: States that have made progress hold schools accountable for improving reading test scores while other states—particularly blue ones—have backed off from that tactic.

Both Piper in The Argument and Huffaker in The Globe made that point, with Piper opining that standardized tests and “rankings of schools on performance” may be “no fun” but are nevertheless “badly needed.”

While not tying his comments to developments in Southern states, commentator Matt Yglesias made similar observations in a piece that appeared both on his “Slow Boring” Substack newsletter and in The 74.

According to Yglesias, the No Child Left Behind era of high-stakes reading and math tests led to improvements among all groups of students by focusing on the students who scored lowest. “When you hold schools accountable for results at the bottom,” he argued, “they have no choice but to pay attention to instruction methods that work, which has positive results for basically all students.”

Maybe that’s true for math, where scores did rise after NCLB was enacted. But it’s not at all clear that NCLB boosted reading scores. By 2010, after about eight years of test-based accountability, NAEP reading scores were flat for fourth graders and only slightly higher for eighth graders. True, at that point low-scorers were making a little progress, but test-based accountability will probably never significantly boost reading outcomes for those students—at least, not under the current testing regime.

That’s because holding schools accountable for scores on state reading comprehension tests distorts teaching in ways that have their most negative impact on students at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the same students who typically score low on tests. Schools that are under pressure to raise reading scores pattern their instruction on the test format: brief texts or excerpts followed by reading comprehension questions that focus on the skills that appear to be measured by the tests.

That approach won’t raise test scores—because those skills aren’t transferable—and it often means reducing or eliminating time for social studies and science. The theory is that spending more time on reading will boost reading scores, but in fact those schools are shooting themselves in the foot. Science and especially social studies appear to have the most potential to build the academic knowledge and vocabulary that fuel reading comprehension—and learning in general.

Kids from more highly educated families are better able to pick up that kind of knowledge at home. The other kids, who are likely to attend schools that are under pressure to raise reading scores, get a steady diet of abstract, and therefore largely useless, comprehension skills. The more pressure to raise reading scores, the less knowledge those kids are likely to acquire.

I’m not against the concept of test-based accountability per se. If the tests are related to what kids have been taught in school—the literature they’ve read, the history or science they’ve learned—they can help ensure that all students are getting a meaningful education. But our system tests students on what they have not been taught. If you don’t have enough background knowledge to understand a test passage at least at a superficial level, no amount of practice in “finding the main idea” will help you.³ In that kind of system, test-based accountability only magnifies existing social inequities.

We Need to Get This Right

I understand why commentators and journalists have seized on the “phonics” and “accountability” explanations for the Southern Surge. Those concepts are more familiar and easier to understand than all this other stuff. The knowledge-building piece is complicated—not to mention the other essential factors in reading proficiency, like familiarity with complex sentence structure. People are busy. They need quick answers.

But if we don’t get this story straight and include more nuance, we risk not only failing to replicate the success of a state like Louisiana but even reversing progress that’s been made in other states. The “phonics” message has already led to an overemphasis on that aspect of reading, with some schools reportedly spending an hour or more a day on it. That prevents teachers from spending time on things like knowledge-building read-alouds and discussion, which are not only crucial for reading proficiency but far more engaging than phonics drills.

Phonics skeptics have long argued that phonics instruction prevents students from discovering the joy of reading. The hole in that argument is that if you can’t decode words, reading is unlikely to be a joyful experience. Still, if schools go overboard and drill kids in phonics for two hours or more a day, a lot of people—teachers, students, and parents—will buy into the “drill and kill” argument.

And if students arrive at higher grade levels able to decode complex texts but unable to make sense of them, phonics skeptics may say, as they have in the past, “You see? Phonics doesn’t work.”

Let’s not live through that again. If we want all students to be able to realize their full potential, we need to look more closely at what is actually driving the Southern Surge—or some of it—before trying to replicate it elsewhere.

1. Piper stressed that these Southern states are “wildly outperforming” states like hers—California. “If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education,” she wrote, “you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools.” But here’s another complication: While California has certainly not been in the vanguard on state-level literacy reform, Oakland actually uses what is considered to be a “high-quality” curriculum for both phonics and knowledge-building, EL Education. That suggests that simply adopting a good curriculum isn’t enough to ensure good results—but that’s a whole other story.

2. Vaites and Piper have just teamed up to write another piece in The Argument, which notes—among other things—that “we must get straight on the plays in the Southern Surge playbook. Because, for the love of God, it’s not just phonics.”

3. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has called reading comprehension tests “knowledge tests in disguise.”