How Mississippi Almost Abandoned Its Education Reforms

The little-known story of how backlash to Common Core nearly sank the policies that have turned the state into a national model.

Adapted from Rachel Canter’s PPI report.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Mississippi’s education reforms has been its durability. Unlike the policy churn familiar to education advocates in most of the country, the state has steadily built on its reform agenda for around 15 years to create a coherent and comprehensive policy framework — one that includes not only strong learning standards and rules that hold schools accountable for their results, but also evidence-based instructional practices like the science of reading and real support for implementation down to the classroom level. As I’ve written, it was this marathon approach that helped propel us to the top of the national leader board in reading and math, when adjusting for demographics, in 2024.

What some may not realize is that our ability to keep going wasn’t simply dumb luck. It was grit. By the time Mississippi began making efforts to dramatically improve learning, the national mood had already begun to sour on ideas like accountability and rigorous standards. The bipartisan consensus for reform was pulling apart at the seams, and states across the country were already starting to turn back, or water down, measures they had enthusiastically adopted only a few years before.

From the left, longstanding complaints about standardized testing found new purchase with the public after several years of No Child Left Behind, which used grade-level scores on exams as the exclusive measure of whether schools could be designated as “in need of improvement” and face consequences. When reformers began to advocate that tests be used to evaluate teachers, their unions saw an opportunity not only to cast the effort as an attack on educators but to delegitimize all standardized testing and the broader concept of school accountability. A 2008 Time Magazine cover of the first mayorally-appointed Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Michelle Rhee, holding a broom became emblematic not of reformers’ desire to clean up overly bureaucratic and ineffective school districts but of the teachers union’s accusation that reformers sought to fire their way to success.

On the right, the Common Core State Standards, adopted by most states in 2010, became the subject of evolving and increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories online and in conservative media. Reasonable critiques — ranging from concerns the standards didn’t emphasize phonics enough in the early grades to philosophical disagreements about whether the federal government should incentivize the adoption of particular state learning standards — were completely blown away by allegations that the standards were a sinister plot to indoctrinate children in left-wing ideologies. Conservatives dubbed the standards “Obamacore,” despite the entire effort preceding Obama’s presidency and having its genesis in a wholly state-driven process, because many states had rushed their adoption to be competitive in the first round of Race to the Top, the president’s signature education grant initiative.

In the lead-up to the 2014 midterm elections, popular conservative talk show host Glenn Beck made Common Core his chosen boogeyman, complete with a nationwide town hall event called “We Will Not Conform” that streamed live in 700 theaters. The anti-Common Core fervor gave rise to a conservative anti-testing movement, which found common cause with anti-test lefties, fueling movements to repeal the standards as well as opt out of aligned state testing.

The national toxicity came to a head in Mississippi in 2015, the year we were set to implement some of our key reforms for the first time. The state planned its inaugural administration of our first Common Core-aligned state assessment, the PARCC exam, which had been developed by a consortium of states to become a shared test. That same May, we would also debut our new policy of holding back students who couldn’t read proficiently by third grade. To top it off, 2015 was an election year for all statewide offices, including every state legislator — a fact that helped set the stage for an explosive legislative session.

Right-leaning media were running an anti-Common Core story every day to turn up the heat. School district leaders were bemoaning the challenges with the computerized PARCC assessment as well as predictions that 30% of third graders might fail the state’s reading benchmark and be retained. Governor Bryant, who was running for reelection, was leading a crusade to dump both Common Core and PARCC, and there were rumors our ed reform champion, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who was also running for reelection, would attract a primary challenger from the right if he didn’t follow along. Rank-and-file legislators who are mostly drawn into politically “safe” districts were suddenly looking over their shoulder at every turn, wondering if they, too, would draw a primary opponent. It was a mess.

At the time, I was the head of Mississippi First, the state’s first and only education reform advocacy group. I was sitting in Room 409 of the Capitol just before 9 a.m. one morning, when the Senate Education Committee was scheduled to hold its standing meeting. That moment, its chair, Sen. Gray Tollison, burst into the crammed committee room, radiating with angry energy and holding what appeared to be a bill. “You!” he pointed at me, “my office!” and stormed out.

Tollison had been the Senate’s leading champion of the state’s education reforms, including its accountability model, charter school bill, and literacy law. We’d worked together closely on a number of bills, and I knew him well enough at that point to realize he wasn’t angry with me. Nonetheless, my heart was pounding as I stumbled into the chairman’s office, wondering what could make him so furious.

He slammed a bill on his small conference table in front of me. “Fix this,” he commanded. I stared at the text for a few moments before it clicked — it was an act to repeal Common Core and replace it with God-knows-what designed entirely by a politically appointed panel. I calmly took out a red pen from my purse (keeping one handy was an old habit from my English teacher days) and began striking through text and writing amendments. I was moving as quickly as possible, but with every second that went by, Tollison was delaying the meeting.

He was still angrily pacing the room minutes later when the arm-twister-in-chief for the lieutenant governor burst through the door to demand why Tollison was holding the meeting. The question sparked a shouting match. Apparently, the right-most flank in the Senate had offered a deal to the lieutenant governor the night before: make concessions on Common Core, and we’ll stop attacking you. Tollison had not been invited to that meeting, it seemed, and until that morning had not seen the actual text, which was written by the anti-Common Core crusaders.

An obvious threat hung in the air. Tollison could go along or be removed as chair. But Tollison didn’t back down. “This is crazy shit, and I don’t do crazy shit,” Tollison told him. When the staffer realized he wasn’t getting anywhere with the senator, he turned his fire on me, “And who do you work for now?” Another obvious threat — he planned to call my boss and have me fired for aiding and abetting Tollison. “The same place I’ve always worked,” I told him, “Mississippi First.” He slammed the door when he left.

I went back to editing while Tollison juggled talking things through with me and taking edits to the drafting office for printing. Although neither of us was truly happy with the outcome, we had pulled together a substitute that prevented a wholesale rewrite of the standards by a politically motivated committee. It also gave the Mississippi Department of Education, which was then headed by a reformer named Carey Wright, more power to control the process, much to the dismay of the dealmaking Common Core antagonists on the committee.

After the meeting, Tollison went straight to the lieutenant governor’s office for an audience. He never told me exactly what happened, but he kept his chairmanship. Mississippi First put out a strong statement opposing the bill and went to work in the House to hamstring the effort further. The bill would ultimately pass two months later in a much watered-down form, so watered down, in fact, that in a great twist of irony, Governor Bryant would veto it because it didn’t do enough to destroy the standards.

In the end, we managed to hold on to most of our reforms, including the standards, the third-grade retention policy, the state accountability model (which depended on having aligned state assessments in grades 3-8 and in high school), and the integrity of the state department of education. But it required a price. Most notably, Mississippi backed out of the PARCC consortium, and the GOP-controlled legislature forbade the department from joining any other state testing consortium.

The state’s Department of Education immediately procured a replacement state assessment that would approximate PARCC in rigor and made as few tweaks as possible to the standards to satisfy the political fervor for burning the house down. We were exhausted, but we had held the line. Within months, politics had moved on to issues that would animate the 2016 presidential election, none of which had to do with K-12 education. Inside the education bubble, the focus turned to how to implement the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed in December 2015.

Had we given up at that moment, I doubt anyone would be talking about us now. But the reform muscle we had built over the preceding years, and the backbone our leaders had grown, didn’t fail us. Amid the misplaced outrage over “Obamacore,” it didn’t hurt that our champions remained equally as angry over the state’s continued underperformance on national rankings. Staying the course became as fundamental to our success as the agenda itself. Big change, even change that people know is needed and that they ask for, will inevitably inspire some level of backlash. Reformers need the stamina to endure it.