An education revolution is underway across America.  A growing number of states have embraced school choice.  West Virginia and Arizona lead the way two years ago by giving families control over their children’s tax dollars. 

Arkansas, Iowa and North Carolina then followed. Leaders in Louisiana and Texas have been elected to do something similar.

I believe it is time for Mississippi to embrace Education Freedom, too.  Rather than being a laggard in the education revolution, Mississippi ought to be leading it. 

We need a plan to make the case for Arkansas-type reform in our state, persuading lawmakers and officials, and building a broad coalition for change. 

To kick start this campaign, we are hosting a meeting on November 15^th with Fox News contributor, Corey DeAngelis.  We will be joined by lawmakers from Arkansas that helped make school choice happen over there, and by PragerU.

What would Education Freedom mean in Mississippi in practice?

A few weeks ago, I went on a fact finding trip to Little Rock, Arkansas to learn how Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders made Education Freedom a reality. 

Under the so-called LEARNS Act, every child in Arkansas will be allowed an Education Freedom Account, with 90 percent of the prior year’s average per pupil spending paid into it.  To give you an idea, that could be about $10,000 per year controlled by each family per child.

In Arkansas, families will be free able to allocate that money from 2025 to pay for their child’s tuition, school fees, school supplies and even school transportation costs.  Moreover, the parents can chose to spend that money in a public school, or a private school, or even through home-schooling.

I believe that Education Freedom is the single most important thing that we need to do to improve Mississippi for the better.  While there has been some progress in education with the adoption of phonic teaching, I think everyone would agree that there are still far too many young Mississippians not proficient at math and English. 

Education Freedom is the key way to build on the improvements that there have been.  It is also the essential step needed to improve the overall performance of our state, since educational attainment is so critical for success in other areas.

If you would like to learn more about our campaign, please email me at [email protected]

Green energy – folly or the future?

Former White House energy adviser, Mark Mills, addressed at a packed lunch meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, at an event attended by key state policy makers and members of the public.

Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, talked about some of the implications of the rush to renewable energy.  In order to meet net zero carbon dioxide emissions targets, Mark Mills outlined the scale of infrastructure construction that would be required.

“Mark Mills has an encyclopaedic knowledge about energy policy.  He laid out some of the hard facts about what it would take to ditch our dependence on oil and gas.” said Douglas Carswell of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.   

“Mark Mills warned about making the same mistake that Germany has made.  Over there, politicians rushed into renewable energy, and in doing so pushed up the cost of energy.  This has now priced German industry out of the world market” Carswell added.

“If Mississippi wants to keep on attracting more industry, we need to ensure that we continue to have a plentiful supply of affordable energy”. 

“Transitioning to renewables might sound like a bright idea in Washington DC” Carswell added.  “Mark Mills showed that unless the federal government can change the laws of physics it is just not realistic.  America would need to install thousands of new giant wind turbines each week, cover a vast area in solar panels and build dozens of new nuclear plants each year.”

“Politicians might talk glibly about moving to electric vehicles” he added.  “Mark Mills pointed out that we would need hundreds of new charging stations, each one requiring the same amount of electricity as a steel mill.  The capacity and infrastructure simply won’t be there to achieve this rush to renewables”.

The event was hosted jointly by Bigger Pie Forum and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.  Several members of the state legislature and Public Service Commissioners attended and asked questions.

To watch Mark Mills, talk online, click here:

Mississippi could soon be surrounded on three sides by states that have school choice. Arkansas has already passed legislation establishing universal education freedom. Alabama and Louisiana may not be far behind.

Might we see something similar in Mississippi?

Speaking on SuperTalk the other day, Lieutenant Governor, Delbert Hosemann, sounded wonderfully upbeat about school choice. He said that he expected there to be “multiple school choice bills” presented during the 2024 state legislative session.

However, Mr Hosemann then suggested that any such reform may need to be restricted in its scope. Why? Because he said, under Mississippi’s constitution “you can’t put government money into private schools”.

The Lieutenant Governor raises an important point. As the case for universal school choice becomes increasingly difficult to ignore, we need to examine what Mississippi’s constitution actually says. Does our state constitution really preclude Mississippi from implementing Arkansas-type reform?

Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution states that:

“No religious or other sect or sects shall ever control any part of the school or other educational funds of this state; nor shall any funds be appropriated toward the support of any sectarian school, or to any school that at the time of receiving such appropriation is not conducted as a free school.”

It could not be clearer, opponents of school choice will say. No public money can be appropriated for private schools.

Except, of course, with Arkansas-type school choice, public money is not appropriated for private schools. It is appropriated to families, who receive 90 percent of the prior year’s net public school aid budget paid into their child’s Education Freedom Account. This they can then spend on a school of their choice, public, private or home school.

Claiming that under such a scheme money is being appropriated to private schools would be like claiming that part of your wages are being appropriated to Target, simply because you chose to spend some of your salary there.

Fortunately, it turns out that the argument that Mississippi’s constitution prevents universal school choice is not a slam dunk after all.

In his interview on SuperTalk, the Lieutenant Governor was also quite right to refer to a case currently before the courts concerning the use of pandemic relief funds paid to private schools.

During Covid, large sums of federal money were provided to states like Mississippi to distribute to eligible recipients for disaster relief and to spur economic recovery. The Mississippi legislature, in turn, authorized a state agency to distribute about $10 million of those federal funds to private schools for infrastructure improvements.

This prompted a legal challenge brought by the activist group Parents for Public Schools, who argued that Section 208 made such payments unconstitutional. A Hinds County chancellor agreed. The Mississippi Supreme Court is now reviewing the case on appeal.

What if the Supreme Court rules that it was unconstitutional to give $10 million of pandemic relief funds to private schools? Would that mean Arkansas-type school choice is now considered unconstitutional in our state, as Mr. Hosemann seemed to imply?

Not at all. In fact, MCPP’s legal arm, the Mississippi Justice Institute, recently addressed that very question in the pandemic relief litigation. Teaming up with our friends at the Institute for Justice, we filed a “friend of the court” brief with the Mississippi Supreme Court to ensure the point was clear.

Here is what we told the Court.

Even if the Court ruled that the provision of $10 million in federal relief funds to private schools was unconstitutional, that decision would not prevent Mississippi from enacting school choice programs, including those available to families using non-public schools.

Why not? Because the Mississippi Constitution only prohibits the appropriation of state education dollars for institutional aid to non-public schools. It does not prevent the state from providing individual aid to students who choose to use those funds for tuition at non-public schools. Indeed, to avoid future confusion on that point, we asked the Court to explicitly say so in its ruling.

Moreover, as our legal brief points out, it is not just the text of the Constitution on our side. Precedent from the Mississippi Supreme Court supports our view as well. Over 80 years ago, the Court decided Chance v. Mississippi State Textbook Rating & Purchasing Board, 200 So. 706 (Miss., 1941). In that case, the Court upheld a law that appropriated funds to purchase textbooks and distribute them to students, including those in non-public schools. Why? Because the program was designed to benefit the students, not the schools.

Far from precluding school choice, Mississippi’s constitutional law is favourable to it.

There are plenty of legitimate (if misguided) arguments against having universal school choice in Mississippi. Claiming that the Mississippi Constitution prevents it is not one of them.

In every single one of the half dozen US states that have now adopted school choice, there was a legal challenge to try to prevent it from happening. There will no doubt be legal challenges to school choice when – not if – it eventually happens here. The fact that such cases will be brought against universal school choice is not a case against passing legislation to allow it.

Mississippi’s top 50 public officials now cost the taxpayer over $10 million a year for the first time.  The state’s top 50 highest paid officials saw their salaries increase 5 percent from an average of $193,678 last year to $205,000 this year.

According to the 2023 Mississippi Fat Cat report, published by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Mississippi now has some of the highest paid public officials in America.

Mississippi’s State Superintendent for Public Education has made over $300,000 per year for a number of years now.  Mississippi also now has two local school superintendents each earning about a quarter of a million dollars a year.

Forty percent of those on the Fat Cat list are school superintendents, who enjoyed bumper pay rises.  Those school superintendents on the Fat Cat list received an average 14% pay increase, taking them to over $200,000 a year. 

The $10.3 million cost salary of Mississippi’s 50 highest-paid public officials would be enough to pay the salaries of:

• 189 nurses (at $54,284 per year) 
• 178 State Troopers (at $57,680 per year) 
• 191 teachers (at $53,699 per year)
• 227 Mississippians receiving the median income ($45,180 per year) 

Mississippi’s 50 Fat Cats are paid more than America’s 50 state governors.  While the 50 Mississippi Fat Cats receive a combined total of $10.3 million a year, the combined salary of America’s 50 state governors is a mere $7.4 million.

The Humphreys County Superintendent, for example, with a mere 1,257 students, is paid more than the governor of Texas, with a population of 30 million.

The Jackson Public Schools Superintendent, who oversees a district with approximately 20,000 students, makes more than the Governor of Florida, which has a population of more than 21 million.

Fat Cat pay does not necessarily reflect public service performance.  Some of the highest-paid public officials preside over some of the worst education outcomes. 

The Fat Cat report acknowledges that some highly paid officials provide good value for money for the taxpayer, and that high salaries in the public sector are not necessarily a bad thing. 

However, the report also recommends changes to ensure that there is accountability when it comes to top public sector pay.  Suggestions include:

• Requiring a greater degree of oversight by the legislature when it comes to significant salary increases.

• Using a state-mandated formula to calculate the maximum allowable salary for school superintendents.

• Restricting the amount of education funding that can be spent on administration.

• Potentially amending Section 25-3-39 of the Mississippi code to remove many of the exemptions to restrictions on unapproved limits.

A link to the report can be found here.

Last week I was in Little Rock, Arkansas to learn about something called the LEARNS Act.  The brainchild of Arkansas 47^th governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, this bold new approach to education across the river is drawing a lot of national attention.

Under Arkansas’ LEARNS Act, every child is allowed an Education Freedom Account.  The state will then pay into that account 90 percent of the prior year’s average per pupil spending.  To give you an idea, that could be about $10,000 per year.

Mom and Dad in Arkansas will then be able to allocate that money to pay for their child’s tuition, school fees, school supplies and even school transportation costs.  Moreover, the parents can chose to spend that money in a public school, or a private school, or even through home-schooling.

Listening to some of the key architects of Arkansas’ LEARNS Act, I discovered that there is a lot more to it than school choice.  The new law puts great emphasis on improving standards in literacy and math.

Indeed, one lawmaker I was talking with explained how Arkansas has intentionally copied Mississippi, with an insistence on teaching kids to read using phonics.  Clearly Mississippi’s focus on phonics has not gone unnoticed in Little Rock.  The LEARNS Act also has an ambitious plan to improve math performance, too. 

Looking at some of the detail of the LEARNS Act, Arkansas seems to have followed Mississippi’s lead in combating Critical Race theory, too.  Under the LEARNS Act, teachers will not be required to attend training on this divisive ideology.  The Department of Education’s material will be reviewed to ensure it does not conflict with the idea of equal protection under the law.

As Mississippi did recently, Arkansas’ LEARNS Act gives teachers a substantial pay raise.  From 2025, the minimum teacher salary will be $50,000 a year.  Interestingly Arkansas has also implemented a merit-based teacher pay scheme.  Teachers across the river can now earn up to $10,000 a year bonuses. 

Under the LEARNS Act, school district superintendents in Arkansas are now required to have performance targets tied to student achievement.  The days of ignoring poor performance in remote school board districts are over. 

While Arkansas has clearly learned somethings off Mississippi, there are things that Mississippi could learn from our friends in Little Rock.

Arkansas and Mississippi share more than just a river.  Both states are of similar size and population.  Each state has a Delta, and neither state has a particularly large urban area.  If education freedom works in Arkansas, it will become much harder to keep resisting it over here. 

The most inspiring thing about my visit to the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock was not perhaps getting to see the bust of President Clinton (curiously someone had placed it behind the railings, making it look like Bill was behind bars).  What was most inspiring was having the chance to see Governor Sanders. 

She is so full of energy and enthusiasm.  When she talks about the need for change, she makes an overwhelming moral case.  Indeed, I was reminded of another strong, principled conservative leader I once knew called Margaret Thatcher.  Both of them have a steely determination, coupled with principled beliefs.  The 47^th Governor of Arkansas is going to go far. 

My visit to Little Rock, happened to coincide with Governor Sanders announcement of plans to dramatically reduce the state income tax.  When it comes to income tax reduction, Arkansas is doing what Mississippi has done already, which is wonderful to see. It is great to see good ideas moving both ways between our two states. 

I love hearing good news about Mississippi. When I read recently that there had been an improvement in education standards in our state, I was thrilled.

But then I looked at the data. The claims being made that there has been a ‘Mississippi miracle’ are not, sadly, substantiated by the facts.

Claims of a big improvement in literacy performance are based on National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores for 4th graders. These show that between 2019 and 2022, Mississippi moved up the national rankings, from 29th to 21st.

But when you look at the actual scores, the average reading score for a 4th grader in 2019 was 219. By 2022 the average reading score for a 4th grader had fallen slightly to 217. Far from improving, the scores went down.

The reason Mississippi appeared to rise up the rankings is because reading performance for 4th graders in other states fell even faster.

If you look more at the same data set, it turns out that only one in three 4th graders in 2022 were proficient in reading. A similar number are at or below basic level reading. I would not call that a ‘miracle’.

Those 4th graders tested in 2022 had had to endure almost two years of Covid lockdown disruptions, often having to be absent from the classroom. Despite that, the average score fell just 2 points. What does that say about the added value of being in a classroom?

As for the NAEP results for math, between 2019 and 2022, average 4th-grade scores in our state fell from 241 to 234. In other words, there was both an absolute and relative fall in performance. NAEP scores for 4th graders are only one way to measure education outcomes. Another benchmark is the ACT scores, which look at how students are performing at the end of 11th grade. The facts show falling proficiency, with an average ACT composite of 18.3 in Mississippi in 2016 falling to an average ACT composite of 17.4 in 2022. Again, these are the indisputable facts.

There are only four school board districts in the entire state in which the ACT composite score had not fallen over those six years.

Mississippi also uses state student performance scores from a variety of assessments to calculate reading and math proficiency. For the first time in more than two decades, the cumulative scores in 2022 for reading and math proficiency in Mississippi school districts appeared to show improvement. A sign of progress? Not really.

The apparent uptick in district proficiency scores between 2016 and 2022 in math and reading reflects the fact that in 2022 they stopped including end-of-course testing for seniors. The year before that change was made, there was no evidence of an improvement in standards.

The ‘progress’ in these state scores and consequential decline in the number of F-rated school districts is almost entirely a reflection of eliminating the end-of-course tests for seniors which raised proficiency percentages and increased the graduation rate.

If performance has not in fact improved, why might education bureaucrats and campaign organizations want us to believe that there had been progress? You only need to ask the question to answer it.

Doctoring data to sustain a fictitious narrative about improving education standards does our state a grave disservice.

Back in the old Soviet Union, local officials use to annually report record levels of agricultural output and an extraordinary increase in the number of tractors produced. Was this proof that the system was working? Quite the opposite. No one wanted to be the one not to report record rises. It did not pay to challenge the dodgy data.

The education system in Mississippi is not working either. It is deeply disingenuous to claim improvements in performance when the data shows a decline. Those making these claims must know the truth, but they chose to gloss over it. Mississippi deserves better than that.

Education progress is possible when the vested interests that run public education are no longer able to run the system in their interests. Progress will only come about when families in our state are given control over their child’s education tax dollars – as is about to happen in Arkansas.

The sooner people realize the truth about education standards in our state, the sooner they will demand parental power to put it right. The vested interests know that which is why they aren’t being honest with you.

With charter-school applications repeatedly being denied, it’s time to overhaul the approval process.

Last week, Mississippi’s Charter School Authorizer Board was doing what it does best: saying “no” to people applying to set up new charter schools. In the most recent batch, four out of five applications were rejected. This included, bizarrely, a request from an already successful school in Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta, to expand by opening a high school.

You might think that a Charter School Authorizer Board would be in the business of approving at least some new applications. Not, it seems, in our state, where the board has been cheerfully rejecting new applications for years.

It is now over a decade since the Mississippi Center for Public Policy helped pass legislation to allow more charter schools. After all that time, we have only eight charter schools in the entire state. Georgia has more than ten times that number. South Carolina has more than 70. Neighboring Arkansas (whose population is about the same as Mississippi’s) has 50, and Louisiana has 143.

Is the quality of applications in our state that much worse than in those other states, or is the political self-interest of the public-education establishment more entrenched here?

In its own defense, the Charter School Authorizer Board might say that it has a duty to reject any suboptimal applications since that might mean allowing suboptimal charter schools to exist. To this one might reply by asking whether the board is aware of how suboptimal some existing non-charter schools are. To reject charter-school start-ups because they are not perfect is absurd.

Thanks to public-education protectionism in Mississippi, the board will not even consider applications for new schools unless they are from districts given a grade of F by the state department of education (which makes assessments based on such factors as test scores and graduation rates). Saying no to charter-school applications in districts consistently given low grades means consigning those children to poorly performing schools. Besides, shouldn’t it be up to parents to decide if a charter school is good enough? Right now, Mississippi’s eight charter schools are heavily oversubscribed, suggesting that parents vastly prefer charter schools to the existing public-school alternatives.

It has also become clear that the old education order in Mississippi is unwilling to allow more than a token number of charter schools in our state, and certainly not enough so that they might compete against the self-serving education bureaucracy.

What is to be done?

Changes around the edges won’t be enough. The role of the Authorizer Board needs to change.  First, the process for approving or rejecting needs to be done transparently, on the basis of objective, clearly stated criteria. Second, the Authorizer Board should be redirected to focus on granting broad approval to organizations wanting to set up and run charter schools; its approval should not be required for each individual proposal. And third, although it certainly should not be necessary to obtain the Authorizer Board’s approval for changes in the way existing charter schools are being run, as is currently the case, once the board gives would-be charter-school operators broad approval to set up and run the schools, those providers ought to be free to get on with doing so as, in effect, licensed charter-school operators in the state.

Perhaps even more radically, the Charter School Authorizer Board needs to lose its monopoly on approving applications. As has happened in other states, alternative institutions — such as public universities — ought to be granted the authority to approve them. Having multiple authorizers would prevent a public-sector monopoly from stifling innovation.

Charter schools in states that allow far more of them come in all shapes and sizes. Some are stand-alone schools; others are part of what is in effect a chain. The providers of charter-school education gain invaluable experience from running the schools. The Mississippi Authorizer Board, on the other hand, has none.

The Biden administration is seeking to “cancel” student debt by transferring what individual students owe to the American taxpayer.

Opponents question why Americans who never graduated from college, and had none of the attendant benefits of a degree, should pick up the tab for those who did. Defenders of the Biden order counter with the observation that tens of millions of young Americans are weighed down by debts they may never be able to repay.

What both sides ought to ask is why we are sending so many young Americans to take college degrees in the first place. If students really are struggling to pay off college debts, does that not raise some fundamental questions about the value of what they are being taught?

More and more young Americans are, it seems, questioning the value of a college degree. Today, only 42 percent of Americans aged 18-24 are enrolled in college or graduate school. That figure represents a significant drop since 2010 when the percentage attending college peaked.

More does not mean better when it comes to university, and if anyone in America is in doubt, he should look across the Atlantic at the British experience.

In my native Britain, a mere 15 percent of young Brits went to college or university in 1980. Since then, it has been the objective of every UK government to encourage more people to go to university.

By 1990, one in four were going to university. 20 years after Prime Minister Tony Blair set a target of having half of all young people attend, that target was reached in 2019. Today, almost 60 percent of young women in England pursue higher education.

Having so many studying at university sounds impressive. But the rapid expansion of higher learning has come at a price. It is often the students themselves who pay that price through large debts and degrees that don’t always add much value.

UK universities have become big businesses, and their business model has been to borrow to expand. In order to accommodate the 2.6 million students now in higher education, there has been a sustained building boom around university campuses over the past couple of decades, with lots of gleaming new buildings.

The borrowing binge British universities have been on has seen vast debts run up against a flow of revenue that schools expect to receive from students taking out state-subsidized loans.

Almost £20 billion of these state-backed loans are made to students in England each year (the figure is even higher if students in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are included). The value of outstanding loans at the end of March 2022 reached £182 billion and is expected to be around £460 billion (at current prices) by the mid-2040s.

UK universities have expanded by taking on debts. These debts are themselves serviced by state-backed debts taken on by students. It’s a house of cards built on IOUs, and one that is so precarious that, according to a recent report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, a dozen or more British universities might soon find themselves insolvent.

As the cost of borrowing increases, it is only a matter of time before some British universities start to ask for the government to bail them out. I wonder if all those brand-new student accommodation buildings that have sprung up will be housing students in a decade or so.

In order to maximize revenues, many UK universities have resorted to trying to attract ever larger numbers of overseas students, whom they can charge higher fees. For some overseas students, paying those fees, almost irrespective of the quality of the education they get, is a price worth paying as a means of migration. American universities have seen a dramatic increase in overseas student numbers for similar reasons.

Dramatically expanding the number of universities in Britain has made many of them degree factories. Courses consist of modules, in which students are instructed on what to think, rather than necessarily how to think. Perhaps this is inevitable, given the sheer volume of students that universities now process.

The rise of degree factories has meant more standardization of higher education, not least the standardization of thought. The romantic notion of a university is that it is a community of free thinkers, cheerfully pursuing scientific and intellectual inquiry. Many British universities are very different from that.

Many UK universities have become cheerless institutions in which standardized thinking is rigorously enforced. In one British university recently, a feminist academic was driven from her post by the relentless hounding of balaclava-clad students who accused her of “transphobia.”

Leftist dogmas, prevalent among university faculty, have become long-established campus orthodoxies. Critical Race Theory and ideas about intersectionality influence how many liberal arts and humanities courses are taught.

It is not only in the humanities where standards have suffered. In some science departments at some British universities, scientific empiricism seems to have given way to what one might call “inductivism.” That is to say, observations are made, a general theory is formed, then more observations are made supposedly justifying that theory. The result has been an endless succession of university-backed “scientific” models, on everything from climate change and Covid to the economy and inflation, that proved to be spectacularly wrong.

A big part of the problem is that university expansion in Britain has not been accompanied by effective consumer choice. With state subsidies and state-backed loans, students are not paying the true cost of their education. The system lacks the discerning customers (students) needed to ensure that the suppliers (universities) deliver a quality product.

British universities, in common with most of their American counterparts, have a number of academics on tenure. This makes it almost impossible to remove them unless, of course, they transgress from campus orthodoxies. Worse still, perhaps, the system of accreditation focuses on processes rather than the value of degrees.

Many British universities have become state-subsidized degree factories, churning out mediocre credentials that do little to equip students for what comes next. Perhaps it would be no bad thing if the number of students enrolling in universities fell, in America as well as in Britain.

Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy and is a former Member of the British Parliament. 

Too many Mississippi kids are missing out on a good education. Our state has some of the worst outcomes in primary and secondary education in America.

Despite certain counter claims by those within the education bureaucracy that the outlook has been improving, if you measure the academic performance of Mississippi students in terms of ACT scores, things have not been getting better. In fact, the Covid crisis is likely to have made things even worse. 

So, what can we do about it? Quite a lot, actually.

Our new report out this week, Transforming Mississippi Public Education, proposes a series of key reforms that are needed if we are to give Mississippi students a better standard of education.

We all know that many Mississippi school districts have been underperforming for years. But until now, every time that this gets pointed out, the conversation moves on to money. If only there was more funding, we are constantly told, things would be better.

Our report shows that the problem is not a lack of funds. Over the past twenty years, real spending per student has increased by a quarter, and over the past thirty years, per student spending has risen about 60 percent. The trouble is that there has been nothing like a 60 percent improvement in standards.

The problem is not a lack of funding, but rather what the education system does with the money they have.