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Education is the number one thing we need to improve in Mississippi.
That’s why MCPP just launched “Move Up, Mississippi”, a campaign aimed at changing our education system for the better.

Mississippi education is only going to improve if we accept the truth about how things really are:

Rather than getting better, the rate of chronic absenteeism in Mississippi schools has got worse.  
 
In 2022-23, over 100,000 students regularly skipped school, up from 70,000 in 2016-17.

So, what’s the solution?
 
What we need is school choice.  Mississippi is now surrounded by states that have school choice.  It is transforming education for the better.  Let’s not get left behind…..

School Choice would mean every family gets to decide where their share of the state education budget is spent.  It would mean that the values being taught in your child’s classroom would have to align with the values of Mississippi families.

To find out what school choice would mean for you and your family, visit moveupms.com

Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama have done more to improve education in 12 months than Mississippi has achieved in 12 years.  Sign up and join our movement if you believe it is time to change that!

Great news!  The University of Mississippi has just announced it will be closing its DEI department, the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement.  
 
The University’s DEI department has been the driving force behind “Pathways to Equity”, a five-year university wide strategic plan committed to equity and racial justice. 
 
Under “Pathways to Equity” everything at the university – including curriculum content – has been increasingly managed through the prism of intersectional ideology.

According to public records requests that MCPP submitted, Ole Miss is still spending millions on its various DEI initiatives.  The head of the Division of Diversity, Shawnboda Mead, alone is on $246,881 a year.
 
If Ole Miss really is going to dismantle the apparatus of woke ideology, great.  I fear, however, that what we have here is merely a rebrand.
 
Chancellor Glenn Boyce, who made the announcement about the name change in an email, must surely sense that the political climate is changing.    Alumni are increasingly reluctant to donate to what they perceive as ‘woke’ academics who despise their values. 

Boyce seems to be trying to head off anti DEI legislation.

Until now, Mississippi’s liberal Senate leadership has been able to block various bills that would tackle DEI in our public universities.  However, the Senate leadership is increasingly weak, if not yet a lame duck.

Mississippi’s weak Senate leadership failed to block school funding reform in the last session, despite every effort.  The weak Senate leadership will only grow weaker in 2025 and may not have the strength to keep blocking anti DEI law.

Boyce perhaps senses this, and has cooked up a deal with the good ole boys to try to head off the anti DEI legislation we need.

Governors in many nearby states have taken effective action against DEI ideology, issuing Executive Orders.  Curiously our Governor has chosen not to take any action against ‘woke’ ideology despite mountains of evidence action is needed.  This is puzzling.

I suspect this may change.  The urge to appear on Fox News or get noticed by Team Trump may soon exceed the desire to keep in with university bureaucrats. 

The rising generation of Republican leaders in our state, such as State Auditor, Shad White, are clear that they want to see an end to using public money to promote divisive, race-based DEI ideology. 
 
Chancellor Boyce’s move seems to me as much an attempt at deflection, as it is a serious effort to root out woke ideology.  What the university really wants is to head off legislation that would outlaw the promotion of an ideology that is increasingly commonplace among third rate academics in our public universities.  

University administrators across America have made a Faustian bargain with their ultra progressive faculty.  They tip toe around the cultural Marxists on campus, allowing them to promote extreme leftist ideology, in return for a quiet life.

University administrators have appeased the ‘woke’ monster in the hope that it might eat them last. 

This is why the Division of Diversity might be going, but it is to be replaced by a new Division of Access, Opportunity, and Community Engagement.  The new Division will be run, it has been reported, by the same head who ran the old one.  
 
Mediocre academics at the Department of English will, I suspect, continue to “embrace diversity, inclusion, and equity as central to the scholarly mission” while “recognizing the ongoing legacies of systemic inequity within the institutions of our academic field”. 
 
Nothing in Boyce’s announcement suggests he is about to get serious about rooting out ultra leftist academics that hold tenure.  If there is any new commitment to ensuring intellectual diversity at Ole Miss, I must have missed it.  Far easier to keep feeding the monster, rather than confront it. 

If Boyce was serious about ending DEI, he would commit to running the university on the principle of equality – treating every person equally – not equity – the idea that outcomes should be manipulated to tackle perceived or historic disadvantages.

What is encouraging is that Boyce and his team are not seeking to defend DEI from first principle. 
 
In just three years, DEI has become indefensible. 

Here at MCPP we will keep punching the bruise until this deeply divisive, extremist ideology is no longer being pushed on young minds using your tax dollars.  The moral case for discriminating against some of today’s students because of what happened before they were even born has collapsed. 

Mississippi’s weak Senate leadership might not appreciate our efforts to end DEI, but so what?   The values we teach the next generation of young people in America are vastly more important that the feelings on any ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians.

I am not convinced that rebranding the DEI department is going to be enough to stave off legislation. I doubt that all the free tickets to all the football games will be enough to prevent change.

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. 

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.

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. 

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:

How many Mississippi politicians would be willing to send their kids to a school with those standards? 

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. 

Mississippi’s Department of Education was quick to trumpet signs of an improvement in education standards.  According to a gushing press release they put out, Mississippi has risen up the national education rankings from 48th to 30th over the past decade.
 
“Great!” you might think.  “It’s wonderful to see an improvement in education standards in Mississippi”.  But has there really been an improvement? 
 
The Department of Education pronouncement was based on a recently released report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which itself used data from the US Department of Education’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). 

 
I took a closer look at the NAEP data behind what was being claimed, and it is clear that any improvements in Mississippi’s education ranking owe more to a decline in standards in other states, rather than to any substantive improvements in our own.

 
Between 2015 and 2022, Mississippi went from 46th for fourth grade reading to 18th. Progress, yes, but the average fourth grade NAEP score in reading only rose from 214 to 217.
 
In other words, the improvement in ranking in fourth grade reading scores since 2015 is almost entirely a reflection of the fact that standards fell in other states. 

The data also shows that while there has been an improvement in the percentage of fourth graders who are proficient in reading in Mississippi, the improvement happened before 2019.  It almost certainly reflects the enactment of a package of literacy laws in 2013, which shifted the way Mississippians teach reading towards phonics, rather than any change in policies since. 
 
There has not been progress in the past five years, and any change in our ranking reflects the fact that other states have just done worse than we have.
 

In 2022, Mississippi ranked 44th in eight grade NAEP math, compared to 46th in 2015.  Not only was there little relative improvement, the state’s average NAEP eighth grade math score actually fell from 271 in 2015 to 266 in 2022. 

It is profoundly misleading to present evidence of Mississippi’s relative improvement as evidence of any kind of absolute rise in standards. 
 
Here are some facts that the Department of Education could have included in their press release, but didn’t:

Instead of propaganda, the Department of Education could take a look at its own data which shows that almost one in four Mississippi students — 108,000 children — are chronically absent from school.
 
The rate of chronic absenteeism has in fact skyrocketed from 70,275 in 2016-17 to 108,310 in 2022-23.
 
“So what?” you might say.  “Of course, officials are going to present what they do in the most positive light”.
 
It matters deeply because until we have an honest conversation about the true state of education in our state, we aren’t going to see the changes Mississippi desperately needs. Mississippi is now surrounded on three sides by states that have embraced universal school choice.  In Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana, the money will follow the child.  Families in those states will get control over their child’s share of state education funds.

Change only came about because there was a recognition of reality, and realization that reform was urgent and essential. 
The reason there has been so little progress towards school choice in our state is because too many policy makers believe our education system is doing better than it actually is.

A school choice revolution is sweeping America.  Mississippi is now sandwiched on either side by states that give families control over their child’s share of state education dollars.


In Arkansas and Alabama, the state government will pay between $7,000 - $9,000 into a dedicated Education Savings Account for each individual child.  Mom & dad will then be able to allocate that money to a school that best meets the needs of their child. 

Almost of dozen states have done something similar, but not Mississippi.  Why?

Despite having a solid Republican majority for over a decade, Mississippi has made ridiculously little progress towards school choice.

Right now our state has a total of nine Charter Schools, less than 0.8 percent of the total, and fewer than one might find in a single suburb of New Orleans.  Our school choice program for Special Needs students has hardly grown at all. 

According to one of the leading figures of the school choice movement, Corey DeAngelis, whose new book “The Parent Revolution” has just been released, COVID lockdowns were the great catalyst for change in other states. 

Before COVID, many parents meekly assumed that education meant sending their kids to whichever government school people in their zip code were assigned.  Along came the lockdowns, and millions of Americans got to see how many government schools are run in the interests of teacher unions and school board bureaucrats, rather than their kids. 

Teacher Unions were quick to call for schools to be closed, and fought to keep things that way.  They attacked suggestions schools reopen as “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny”.  The vice president of the Chicago Teacher Union attacked proposals to return to in-person teaching - while on vacation in Puerto Rico!  

So why didn’t COVID lockdowns help shake things up in our state?  Lots of government schools in Mississippi were closed for extended periods.  How come that not led to more pressure for school choice in the Magnolia state? 

The biggest barrier to change in our state is that fact that not enough of our elected politicians see the need for change.  Many prefer to believe that standards in government schools are better than they are, and if things aren’t bad, they reason, why change? 

Advocates for school choice need to be prepared to present some uncomfortable facts about education standards in our state:

If you want to young Mississippians to get a better start in life than this, you need to support fully fledged school choice. 

School choice advocacy organizations, like MCPP, have often made the case for change in terms of social justice.  School choice, we like to say, would give every American child opportunities that today only rich families have.  This isn’t enough.

Nor is it enough to keep publishing white papers nobody reads and drafting legislation that never gets passed. 

We need to demonstrate that school choice is the only effective response to the ‘woke’ takeover of government-run classrooms by the ideological left.

Many government schools in America have clearly been promoting Critical Race Theory, an off shoot of Marxist academic theory.  Often this has been done innocuously, under the banner of promoting equity, diversity or inclusion. 
 
Sometimes the mask slips.  We know, for example, that here in Republican-run Mississippi, our own Department of Education has recommended that teachers use social studies resources calling for the abolition of Christopher Columbus Day and the payment of racial reparations.  
 

There are no shortage of vested interests - teacher unions, education bureaucrats, federal officials - determined to do everything they can to keep your kids captive in government-run classrooms.

To overcome that opposition, we must first address the anti-school choice politicians who indulge them. 
 
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbot was a fully-throated champion of universal education savings accounts.  He threw his weight behind change, only to have a dozen or so “conservative” members of the legislature scupper the plan.
 
When Texas voters saw those anti-school choice “Republicans” vote to deny them school choice, they helped make these “Republican” lawmakers ex-lawmakers.  School choice, I suspect, will sail through the Texas legislature in the next session. 

Either you are a conservative and support school choice, or you aren’t. 

House Speaker, Jason White, addressed a packed lunch time meeting hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in Jackson.

Speaker White talked about what had been accomplished during his first session as House Speaker, and shared his priorities for the future.

Notably, under Speaker White’s leadership the House:

The Senate might have subsequently blocked the restoration of the ballot initiative and Certificate of Need reform, but both school funding reform and the SAFER Act have since passed into law.

“There was enormous interest in what Speaker White had to say” said Douglas Carswell, MCPP CEO.  “Rather than skating over subjects, the Speaker went into tremendous detail.”

“While praising public schools, Speaker White talked about the need to allow money to follow the student within the public school system.”

“He also talked about Certificate of Need laws and the need to review the impact of such laws of restricting access to health care in certain areas.”

“MCPP loves hosting conservatives, and there was real warmth towards Speaker White and what he had to say.”

Many university degrees produce a negative return on investment, according to a report out this week.  Data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows that the cost of many college degrees is not offset by increases in lifetime earnings.

This prompted me to take a look at some separate Mississippi-specific data from the State Workforce Investment Board on graduate earnings.  I discovered an extraordinary variance in the future earning potential of different degrees. 

Here are the earning averages for fifteen different degree types for Mississippi public universities:

So what?  Demand for engineers and insurance professionals is far greater than for actors and anthropologists.  Some degrees require more rigor than others.

But then I took a look at data on what happens to Mississippi high schoolers.  Approximately 6 in 10 of those that do complete public high school in Mississippi fail to either start any form of college education, or start but fail to complete any kind of college education.

Of those public high school graduates that do go into any kind of post-secondary education, about 1 in 3 drop out. 

Pointing out awkward facts about education in Mississippi can be a sensitive subject.  Much has been said about the relative improvements in Mississippi’s reading and writing scores in recent years.  To be fair, our state is no longer 49th out of 50, but 30-something-or-other.

Great, but the data also shows that only 31 percent of 4th graders were at or above proficiency in reading in 2022.  In other words, more than two in three Mississippi 4th graders were not proficient in reading.

The data also shows that a mere 32 percent of 4th graders were at or above math proficiency in 2022.  Forgive me if I don’t rush to celebrate a system that fails to produce proficiency for two thirds of public school 4th graders. 

In the worst school districts, a student has the odds of achieving proficiency overwhelmingly stacked against them.  But even in the best performing school districts – the ones they keep telling us are good – nearly 4 in 10 students are not proficient. 

These are the hard facts about public education in our state, and facts do not care about politicians’ feelings.  Neither should you if you want to improve the life chances of young people in our state.

Poor proficiency rates in primary education help explain why one in three public high school graduates are dropping out of college education later on.

The underperformance of our education system helps explain the low rate of workforce participation in our state.  Unless we acknowledge the underperformance of our education system and address it, we will see our state held back. 

If our private school system was producing these kind of outcomes, I suspect politicians would have acted yesterday.  Instead, the inconvenient facts are brushed under the carpet.

If we are to change Mississippi for the better, this has to change.  Policy makers must not keep going along to get along.  That is a recipe for yet more mediocrity. 

The time for taking false comfort in marginal improvements is over.  The implementation of phonics reading in primary schools might indeed have raised reading standards, but on its own, it is not the strategic change in education we need.

If we want an education system that prepares young people for the life they might live, we need action to ensure:

Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy

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