In order to fix a problem, you first need to accept that you’ve got a problem. In order for families in our state to get the education their children deserve, we need state leaders to recognize that right now they aren't getting a good enough education.
Instead, what we get is propaganda about the Mississippi education ‘miracle’. The other week the Mississippi Department of Education published the results from the 2023-24 Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP). Relying on this data to tell you about education in Mississippi would be like leaving it to your child to mark their own homework.
Sure enough, having marked their own homework, the Mississippi education bureaucracy told us that “student achievement has reached an all-time high” in math, English and science. Just as you get inflation in the economy, you get grade inflation in the education system. MAAP scores are used to help rate schools and districts A-F. There has been a dramatic fall in the number of D and F rated districts in recent years. This is not because those districts are no longer failing, but because even failing districts get given better grades.
A more credible measure of student performance is the national benchmark, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This data tells a less flattering story.
- 4 in 10 fourth graders would struggle to read this sentence. In 2022, they could not reach even the basic reading standard.
- 82 percent of 8th grade kids in Mississippi were not proficient in math in 2022.
- 69 percent of 4th grade kids in Mississippi were not proficient in reading in 2022.
Education standards are bad - and they are not getting better! The claim by the Mississippi Department of Education that Mississippi “students have made faster progress than nearly every other state” is ridiculous. The truth is that during the COVID lockdowns, standards as measured by the NAEP plummeted in other states, but barely changed in ours. This meant our relative position rose, but without any significant improvement in outcomes.
Officials know all this, yet still present a misleading picture of what has happened in the belief that you will be impressed. Equally implausible is the idea that we should celebrate record high school graduation rates. One in four Mississippi public school students is chronically absent from school. Worse, the number of kids regularly not showing up to school has skyrocketed from 70,275 in 2016-17 to 108,310 in 2022-23.
Honesty about the true state of education matters because self-congratulatory propaganda is one reason things don't get fixed. Mississippi has been run by supposed conservatives for over a decade. In all that time, we have seen remarkably little progress towards the kind of big strategic changes we need. In 12 months, Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana made more progress towards school choice than Mississippi managed in 12 years. Why?
A lot of it is down to leadership. Politicians merely looking to progress along the conveyor belt don’t need any vision. They simply aim to “go along to get along”. Mississippi is now surrounded on three sides by states that have universal school choice. In every case, change took courage and vision, not self-congratulation. One of the reasons why Arkansas’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Texas’ Greg Abbott are regularly on Fox News and are emerging as conservative leaders with a national profile is because they have shown the tenacity to fight for school choice in their own states.
Another part of the problem is that too many have an interest in exaggerating the impact of those reforms that have happened. This may be understandable, but laws passed almost a decade ago are not enough to improve education outcomes today.
Our job at MCPP is to push forward conservative policies based on true conservative principles, not dubious press releases. We aim to ensure that conservative leaders in this state finally commit to universal school choice. We are on a mission to ensure that anyone telling you that there has been an education ‘miracle’ looks ridiculous. Only school choice will do.
Elections are underway for the Mississippi Supreme Court. Five candidates are competing for a seat in the Central District, some of whom I heard speak at the Neshoba County Fair recently. There’s a similar election taking place in south Mississippi. It’s easy to take it for granted that ordinary people are able to elect judges in our state.
Judges have to decide complex legal questions dispassionately. This sometimes encourages commentators to ask if we should allow ordinary voters to elect judges in the first place.
“Do voters know enough to elect Mississippi judges?” ran one headline last week. Given all the complexities and the fact that most voters have only a limited understanding of the law, surely it should be left to experts to decide who is best qualified to sit on the Mississippi Supreme Court?
If you want to know why ordinary people in Mississippi ought to retain the power to elect their judges, look across the Atlantic. On a brief visit to my native Britain, I was appalled at what’s been going on.
There have been widespread riots in towns and cities across England over the past couple of weeks following the murder of three young girls in Southport at a Taylor Swift dance class.
The UK authorities are now alarmed that a sizeable number of Brits are extremely agitated about mass (often illegal) immigration. Tens of thousands of illegal migrants have been allowed to flood into the country on small dinghies from France. 1 in 27 people now living in Britain arrived in the past two years. 4 in 10 foreign-born people in Britain have arrived in the past decade.
More ominously, perhaps, millions of Brits seem to have lost confidence in what many see as a “two tier” criminal justice system. There’s a widespread sense that the police and the judiciary in Britain routinely apply different standards to different groups, including Muslims.
When, for example, (non-Muslim) Roma immigrants rioted in the city of Leeds last month, the police seemed to stand back. A mere handful have been charged. Contrast that to the way police this week arrested and charged people for saying obnoxious things online. In Cheshire, the police arrested a woman for an inaccurate social media post.
The official in charge of public prosecutions in Britain declared that he has a team of “dedicated police officers scouring social media” to arrest people for posting things that are “insulting” or “abusive”. He even threatened to extradite people to the UK for sharing such material online.
Unable to police the streets against violent robbery, the clowns running Britain today are arresting people for being rude online. Having failed to keep illegal immigrants out, they are threatening to import foreigners into the country against their will for what they re-tweet.
How did Britain end up in such a sorry state? To a large extent it is a story about the corruption of Britain’s judiciary.
Mass immigration has become an explosive issue in Britain because judges have routinely thwarted attempts by successive governments to control it. In 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 the British people voted overwhelmingly to cut immigration to less than 100,000 a year. This has not happened because judges have systematically prevented elected governments from controlling the country’s borders.
British judges only ever seem to rule in favor of those who enter the country illegally being able to remain, ruling on the basis of what they think the law should be, not the laws Parliament has passed.
Britain, a once orderly, high-trust society, has become increasingly lawless because judges have routinely failed to apply sentences that ordinary Brits would regard as just. It is so commonplace for violent robbers and rapists to be given community sentences, rather than go to prison, it is seldom even reported anymore. Only last month, it was announced that even violent offenders would be released from prison after serving 40 percent of their sentences.
Why are British judges so awful? Because they are unaccountable to the public.
In Britain, judges are appointed, not elected. Until 2006, at least the appointments were made by an elected minister, meaning there was at least some degree of democratic oversight.
Since 2006, Britain’s judges have been appointed by the Judicial Appointments Commission, a body obsessed about diversity, equity and inclusion, rather than justice. Liberty and order in Britain are collapsing as a consequence.
Back in Neshoba, it was refreshing to watch wannabe judges having to connect with the people that they wanted to serve. They talked of their record of service. They gave the audience a good sense of their values. Watching the process of judicial elections, I realize it would be impossible for Mississippi, with elected judges, to end up in the absurd situation Britain is now in.
Keep it that way. Elect your judges to safeguard your liberties. Bar some very exceptional circumstances, such as when a city descends into dysfunction (Jackson?), elected judges are better than the alternatives.
On October 7 last year, ordinary civilians in Israel were the victims of extraordinary savagery. Hamas terrorists killed young people at a music festival, often in gruesome ways. Families were slaughtered in suburban homes. By any civilized moral standards, there ought to be overwhelming sympathy for a country subjected to such savagery.
Instead, throughout the Western world, we have witnessed endless anti- Israel protests. Why? Part of the reason is demographics. In Britain, for example, in 2001 there were one and half million Muslims. Today, there are almost four million.
That is not to say that every — or even most — British Muslims are anti- Israel. But it does explain the scale and size of some recent protests. So, too, on American university campuses. There have been frequent anti-Israel student protests, often at so-called elite universities. It is perhaps not a coincidence that there has also been a rapid rise in the number of students with Middle Eastern backgrounds at such universities.
Again, not every student from the Middle East is necessarily anti-Israel. But the reservoir of potential anti-Israel student protesters is certainly larger than before.
The rise in anti-Israel sentiment in the West clearly can’t only be about demographics. Many, if not most, of those protesting against Israel are not those with a Middle Eastern background, but those on the political Left.
Why then do those on the Left have such animus towards Israel? Why do they seem to suspend ordinary moral standards whenever Israel is involved? When it comes to Ukraine, for example, those on the political Left – correctly in my view – see Ukraine as a brave country, rightfully taking a stand against a vastly bigger aggressor.
So why don’t they see Israel that way? Israel wasn’t just attacked on October 7. From the Six Day War to the Yom Kippur War, Israel has been on the receiving end of relentless aggression. Israel, a country smaller than Vermont, is surrounded by larger foes intent on destroying her and eradicating her people, as Hamas showed us a few months ago.
Progressive opinion in America and Britain is of the view that the government of Ukraine must not try to accommodate Russia or make concessions. So why do they demand that Israel call a ceasefire? London, Washington and Berlin are full of leaders who want to supply Ukraine with weapons. Why then do many also demand that America and Europe stop giving Israel the tools to defend herself?
The last time there was unequivocal support for Israel in the West was during the Entebbe raid in Uganda in 1976. I remember the morning of the Entebbe raid well. A young child at the time, I happened to be living close by in Kampala. When Israel pulled off a daring rescue mission, freeing the trapped hostages from the hijacked Air France plane at Entebbe — where Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan lost his life — there was rejoicing across the political spectrum.
Today, when Israel attempts to rescue her hostages in Gaza she is treated by many media outlets with scorn. Look at how posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza have been torn down in cities throughout Europe and America.
As my friend Douglas Murray has pointed out, when a cat or dog goes missing in London or Paris or New York, people will often put up a poster about the missing pet. If we saw someone take down a poster about a missing pet, we would be offended. We’d know it was wrong. Where is the outrage against those removing posters of the Bibas kids?
One reason Israel is held to a different standard is anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a famously shape shifting virus. At one time, Jews were hated for their religion, then for their race. Today, it seems to me, it is for their nation. Israel is loathed by many progressives because as a country, Israel embodies the notion of national self-determination. For many centuries, Jewish families toasted each other at Passover with the phrase: “Next year in Jerusalem.”
And then in 1948, almost miraculously, it came true. National self-determination offends elite opinion formers. They revere supranationalism instead. They venerate the UN, the ICC and the EU. Progressives prefer laws made by international treaty over those passed by elected national legislatures. Progressives prefer fealty to rules made by the global community over obligations to an actual community.
Israel’s success offends the Left not only because she is a national state, but because she demonstrates the success of Western society. If all cultures were of equal worth, why then does a small state that could fit inside Vermont produce so much enterprise and innovation? If there is an equivalence between cultures, why has post 1948 Israel seen such success amid a sea of Middle Eastern failure and autocracy?
Those who loathe Israel don’t just hate the Jewish nation state, they despise all nation states – including another phenomenally successful Republic, started not in 1948 but in 1776. If they merely hate Israel, why do they burn the American flag? America and the Western way of life is their intended target. Whether we like it or not, those of us who love America, who see Western culture as a sublime human achievement, have no choice but to side with and support Israel, against those who seek to destroy us all.
Those who hate Israel hate us too.
Donald Trump wants school choice. The GOP adopted school choice as part of their 2024 platform. Most important of all, parents in Mississippi overwhelmingly support school choice.
So why do some Mississippi ‘conservatives’ oppose school choice?
Republicans have held the Governor’s mansion in this state since 2004. They have held the Senate since 2011 and the House since 2012. In all that time they have made remarkably little progress towards giving families control over their child’s share of education tax dollars. Why?
Firstly, too many lawmakers in our state have been unwilling to pick a fight with local education bureaucrats. Just as turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving, local education bureaucrats tend not to support the idea that families should have control of their tax dollars.
Once families in our state are given control of between $7,000 – $9,000 per child each year, those families will be able to allocate the money to a school of their choice. School superintendents, many of whom are paid more than the Governor, would lose the power to allocate that money the way they want.
If we are to overcome these kind of vested interests, Mississippi needs leaders who will lead on school choice.
Instead, many officials in our state prefer to indulge the myth of the Mississippi education ‘miracle’ – the fantasy that we are seeing spectacular gains in education outcomes.
We aren’t. One in four students in our state is routinely absent from the classroom. Four in ten fourth graders cannot read properly at even basic level. It is nonsense to pretend that there has been a dramatic improvement in education standards in our state.
The Mississippi education ‘miracle’ is a narrative born of convenience, not fact. It suits elected leaders who want us to believe that on their watch things are improving. It flatters those in the public policy space to imagine that this or that reform they helped implement years ago, before today’s fourth graders were even born, is somehow helping young people learn.
What the myth of the Mississippi education ‘miracle’ actually does is reduce the chance that we make the changes our state needs.
To be fair, many politicians pay lip service to school choice in various speeches. They like to cite their support for Charter Schools.
Although a law was passed a decade ago to allow Charter Schools, the administrative state in Jackson has done all it can to stifle the growth of Charter Schools. The Charter Authorizer Board has rejected 80 percent of new school applications. Fewer than 1 percent of schools in Mississippi are Charter Schools.
The question needs to be asked why officials have done so little to change this?
The only significant progress made recently was the 2024 school funding reform which gives every student a personalized education budget that reflects their needs (and in which MCPP was heavily involved). But what good is a personalized budget for students if they cannot spend it at a school of their choice?
Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have made more progress on school choice in the past 12 months than Mississippi has managed in the past 12 years. Our neighbors did so because their state leaders were honest about the true state of education, and the need for change.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas made school choice her priority, not just a name check item in her speeches. Louisiana managed to pass school choice legislation a few weeks ago despite only having had a Republican governor for a year.
Due to their honesty about the true scale of the task, all three neighboring states now have universal school choice programs that give mom and dad control over their child’s share to education funds.
Parents in Mississippi will start to notice once they see families in neighboring states using school choice.
Team Trump might start to notice those opposing school choice at a state level, too.
Failing to make progress on school choice won’t just harm the careers of Mississippi students. It could damage the careers of any ambitious local leaders wanting to find favor with a future Trump administration in Washington DC.
Real conservatives support school choice.
Had Donald Trump tilted his head the other way, the bullet that clipped his ear would have killed him. America was half an inch away from a major civil crisis.
We don’t yet know the full details of this assassination attempt, but it is clear that Donald J Trump has been demonized by his opponents for years.
Of course, in politics you sometimes say negative things about your opponents. But the rhetoric aimed at Trump has often gone far beyond normal political back-and-forth. Trump’s opponents have set out to delegitimize him.
After losing to Trump in 2016, Hilary Clinton described him an ‘illegitimate’ president. Spurious allegations emerged suggesting he was somehow a Russian agent. Every effort was made to undermine his administration, often from within.
When Trump began to re-emerge as the Republican frontrunner in this election cycle, a number of prosecutors suddenly started to bring cases against him. Odd, that.
It seems to me that as in a Banana Republic, he was being persecuted through the courts for political reasons, as much as he was being prosecuted for breaking the law.
Now comes an assassin’s bullet, which narrowly missed Trump but did kill a fifty year old father attending a political rally.
We don’t yet know what motivated Trump’s would-be assassin, but we do know enough to ask where this growth of political extremism comes from.
The decline of religion means that politics has become, for many, a substitute belief system.
“When men choose not to believe in God” my fellow Englishman, GK Chesteron, once observed, “they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
People need a sense of purpose, a framework that explains the world and their place in it. Without religion, many have adopted a belief system called climate change. Others a system called intersectionalism. Their place in the cosmos, they start to imagine, is defined in terms of where they sit in a hierarchy of victimhood.
Once you think this way, those who share your world view seem virtuous. Those that don’t become the ‘deplorables’. Anyone who just happens to have a different point of view is suddenly a moral affront. Such people must be no platformed.
Instead of viewing elections a process for deciding who holds office, they are seen as a Manichaen struggle of good against evil. Once you think this way, the ends begin to justify the means, with calamitous consequences.
Too many Americans are willing to always think the worst of fellow Americans, and it’s not just progressives who look for the worst in conservatives.
Take what happened in the wake of the attempted assassination. Many commentators appeared to almost want to find evidence of incompetence, or worse, conspiracy.
An apparent hesitation by Secret Service marksmen in engaging the gunman was somehow sinister, it was suggested. Commentators without much experience of close personal protection were quick to inform us that the female Secret Service agents could not handle their weapons properly.
Really? Why assume the worst? Why not start from the position that what we witnessed were professionals under intense pressure, making life and death decisions, and doing the best they could?
I’m an immigrant that looks at America as an outsider. Born in Britain, and raised in Uganda, I came to America by choice (and good fortune).
I don’t look about me trying to find fault in my new home. I see instead an extraordinary country that it is a great privilege to be part of. I see the most hospitable, friendly, and innovative people on the planet all around me. I believe so strongly in the things that make America special so much, I even wrote a children’s book about it.
Each time I meet an American for the first time it never occurs to me to wonder if they vote Republican or Democrat. To me, they are just American, and all the better for it.
We need to stop looking at each other through the prism of politics. It’s not good for us, for our politics or for America.
America faces an axis of aggression. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are not only actively undermining US interests. They increasingly seem to be working together.
How should America respond?
According to a new report published by Mississippi Senator, Roger Wicker, America needs a new national defense strategy capable of responding to this “emerging axis of aggressors”. “21st Century Peace Through Strength: a generational investment in the US military” offers a serious analysis of US military capabilities and makes some important recommendations.
Wicker calls for an immediate $55 billion increase in military spending in 2025, on top of the almost $900 billion existing budget. The aim, he suggests, should be for the United States to spend around 5 percent of GDP on defense.
To put that in context, America today spends 3.4 GDP percent on defense, and has not spent more than 5 percent since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Reagan famously won the Cold War, facing down the Soviet threat by beefing up American strength. Wicker envisions a similar approach in “Peace through Strength”.
What is really interesting about Wicker’s proposal is not the call for more money for the military, but his suggestion that there should be a “dramatic increase in competition in the defense industrial base”. Senator Wicker is right. Often, we think of applying free market principles to education or healthcare. There is a very powerful argument for applying free market discipline to defense spending, too.
With the national debt growing, it is vital that America gets the maximum bang for every defense buck. Wicker puts forward ideas as to how to make this happen through far reaching “acquisition reform”. Allowing more market competition in the defense sector would help ensure that America avoided the sorry fate of my own native Britain.
The UK spends about $70 billion a year on defense. That might be less than a tenth of what America spends, but it still means that the UK has the sixth largest defense budget in the world, above Japan and roughly on a parr with Russia.
Unfortunately, Britain has not been effective at converting what she is able to spend on defense into military muscle. Despite spending all that money, British aircraft carriers seldom seem to carry many aircraft. Indeed, the expensive new carriers don’t always seem to be able to spend much time at sea. The less said about British tanks the better.
UK defense acquisition has been a series of costly disasters because the defense budget is often spent in the interests of various favored suppliers, rather than the military.
I first became aware of quite how bad British defense acquisition was on a visit to Afghanistan as a Member of the British Parliament. Troops in Helmand complained about a shortage of helicopters, yet I noticed rows of American Black Hawk helicopters on the runway back in Kandahar.
Why, I wanted to know, didn’t we Brits just buy Black Hawks from the American company that made them? I soon discovered that British defense acquisition is viewed by some as a giant job creation scheme. Or else it is about filling the order books of well-connected companies, not giving the military what they need.
America needs acquisition reform to avoid defense dollars being spent by various vested interests, rather than on the best interests of the US military. Some will say that America cannot afford to increase defense spending. I worry that America cannot afford not to.
Years of federal deficits mean than the US national debt is soaring. There will be enormous pressures on federal spending. All the more reason to ensure that the US gets maximum value for every defense dollar.
Let’s hope Wicker’s reforms are acted upon whoever is in the White House.
So often politics focuses on trivia. What Wicker has done is produce a serious study to address important geo political questions that the United States is going to have to deal with.
Putting America first does not mean ignoring what is happening on the other side of the world. Merely wishing away anything outside the Western hemisphere does not make the United States more secure. It ultimately means that the world’s problems will show up at the US border.
Putting America first means investing in defense. Wicker shows how we might do that.
Mississippi is almost surrounded by states that have school choice. Why don’t we?
Last week Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed into law the Gator Scholarship program. From 2025, Louisiana families can receive state funds to pay for educational expenses to meet their child’s individual needs.
Alabama passed similar legislation a few months ago. Arkansas did something similar in 2023.
In Mississippi, nothing. Why?
It is not as if Mississippi doesn’t have a conservative majority. Conservatives have been in charge of the Mississippi House, Senate and Governor's mansion since 2012.
Conservatives in Alabama and Arkansas have had control for about the same length of time as in our state. Somehow, they seem to have done something with it.
Louisiana conservatives have achieved more school choice in 12 months than Mississippi conservatives have managed in 12 years. Gov Landry only won back the Governor’s Mansion last year and he signed school choice into law last week.
A major part of the problem is that many leaders in Mississippi refuse to see the need for reform. They want to believe that education standards are improving and that there’s just not much need to change.
Here’s why they are wrong:
- 1 in 4 school children in our state are chronically absent. That’s 108,310 children in 2022-23, up dramatically from 70,275 in 2016-17. If Mississippi education is as good as they say it is, why are so many kids not showing up?
- 8 out of 10 eighth grade kids in Mississippi were not proficient in math in 2022.
- Almost 7 in 10 fourth grade kids in Mississippi were not proficient in reading in 2022.
How many Mississippi politicians would be willing to send their kids to a school with those standards?
- Almost 4 in 10 fourth graders in 2022 did not even reach the basic reading standard. Let’s quit pretending things are fine when our current system is unable to teach ten year olds the basics of reading.
Reform is difficult. If you are a conservative, overhauling anything involving the public sector means stirring up a hornet’s nest of opposition. It’s easier to buddy up to the absurdly misnamed “Parent’s Campaign” and defend the status quo. I get all that.
Here’s why Mississippi conservatives absolutely have to use the majority they have to achieve school choice.
Over the past thirty years, we have seen the ideological takeover of much of America by the far left. If you had told me at the time of the Iraq war or even when Obama was in the White House that American students would be protesting in support of Hamas in 2024, I would not have believed you. Today it happens frequently.
A generation ago, corporate America did not demand to know your preferred pronouns. Today you can hardly apply for a job at a big firm without doing so. Where do you think this ideological extremism came from? It has been made possible by the influence of critical theory ideologues on our education system.
Of course, not every school is a hotbed of ‘woke’ intersectional ideology. But the only way to stop the advance of ‘woke’ ideology in America is to give parents back control over their child’s education.
The lesson of the past 30 years is that unless conservative America has a plan to take back control of the education system, the left will win. It is not enough to run for office as a conservative because you happen to hunt or have the right bumper stickers on your truck.
Conservatives in office who do nothing to advance school choice are assisting, however unwittingly, the radical left in their capture of this country.
We cannot afford another decade of wasted opportunities to achieve school choice.