Progressive Policy Institute's Rachel Canter on Mississippi’s Academic Gains

The Learning Curve Rachel Canter
Alisha Searcy: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Learning Curve Podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and I have a guest co-host on with me today. Very, very excited to have an old friend, an old colleague, but a friend in this work, Mary Tamer, founder and executive director of Mass Potential. Welcome, Mary.

Mary Tamer: Thank you, Alisha. It is always such a treat to get to do this podcast with you, and I am so excited for today’s guest.

Alisha Searcy: Me too. Very, very excited. And we usually have our time limit, so I hope that we don’t talk all day, because we absolutely could about- It’s gonna be tough … what I know is both of our favorite topics in education. So we’re excited. But before we do that, we of course have to talk about our articles that we’ve seen this week. So why don’t you go first? Anything you wanna share?

Mary Tamer: Sure. There’s been a lot of coverage in the last 24 hours, Alisha, over the most recent version of a scorecard that Tom Kane at Harvard University has been putting out since 2022, really looking at states and academic [00:01:00] performance since the pandemic ended. And what this report and prior reports really highlights is the fact that- students across the country have lost a lot of ground when it comes to how they’re performing, whether it’s in reading, whether it’s in math, and this report really sounds the alarm bells once again. I think now that we are several years removed from the pandemic, it- one of the quotes that really stood out to me in this piece, and again, there were several articles I read about the report, one was in The New York Times yesterday, and I believe it was the last quote in the story said something to the effect of, “We clearly know that this is not because of the pandemic.”

And in fact, scores have been going down for over 10 years now. And so for those of us that work in this space and do follow the data on an annual basis, many of us knew that it wasn’t the pandemic, [00:02:00] that there were troubling signs prior to the pandemic of what was happening or frankly not happening in our classrooms across the country, and to see how few states have recovered, and I think for those of us, again, who focus on, you know, the students who too often and historically have been left behind in our system of education, we see these widening gaps.

And so kids of higher socioeconomic levels not only recovered, but seemingly on an upward trajectory again. But for the kids at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, not only have they not recovered, but they’re continuing to lose ground. This should be deeply concerning for all of us, that we clearly have a lot of ground to make up for.

We have lost so many of the gains that had been made in the decades prior. And so I do believe we need to [00:03:00] take a closer look, and what the report highlights two things. One, a weakening of some of the provisions in No Child Left Behind in terms of accountability and- Mm-hmm … how that is sort of allowing these slides to happen without alarm bells being rung on a consistent level, and also screen time.

And I think for those of us that are moms or parents of children who have tried to limit the screen time, I admit every time I see a baby in a stroller with mom or dad’s cellphone in their hands, it freaks me out- Yeah … a little bit because I think that we’re using screens, and whether it’s in the stroller, whether it’s in the classroom, as we watch more and more states, you know, with cellphone bans, reducing screen time in classrooms, it’s something that we should all really take a closer look at because are- have we become so reliant on screens that we are missing the [00:04:00] foundational basics of education?

Alisha Searcy: Yeah, excellent points, and I have seen one of those articles as well, and there’s a lot to unpack there. But I think you summed it up very well. You know, this accountability piece, we don’t like to talk about it. For some reason, it’s become a bipartisan thing to be against accountability, which includes, you know, accepting the watering down of standards, and the list goes on.

And so to your point about kids who are on the low socioeconomic end of things, it’s like the challenges are compounded by what we’re also seeing just in terms of education challenges, right? Yes. Lower accountability, teacher retention issues. We’re not using the right curriculum. Implementation has been a challenge. So we have a lot of work to do, but- We do … you know, these kinds of reports are really important. And I’ll tell you what’s interesting, what’s been a learning point for me. I have been guilty of talking about learning loss in terms of the [00:05:00] pandemic, and almost ignoring, if you will, what was happening prior to.

And so I even have to change my language around how do we address learning loss? The issue is actually bigger than learning loss, right? Because it started- That’s right … before that. So very helpful. Thank you for sharing that. And again, it just speaks to the work that you do, the work that I do, and why it’s so important.

Mary Tamer: 100%, Alisha. I completely agree, and I’m so curious to hear about the story you chose this week.

Alisha Searcy: I found an article in The 74 by Bruno Manno, How Charter Schools Can Help Strengthen K-12 Public Education For The Future. So this, of course, got my attention. You know, it’s National Charter Schools Week. We’re talking about charters, and this first couple of sentences really what got my attention, Mary.

He says, “Charter schools are now an enduring part of American K-12 public education.” Here’s my favorite, “It’s time for policymakers and K-12 stakeholders to stop the foolish argument about whether [00:06:00] these schools should exist.” Mm. Love that. Um, I’m so tired of having these debates. You know, I’m doing some political work in some of the states that we work in, and having, still having to explain that charter schools are public schools is insane to me.
It is. Um, it is absolutely insane. But here’s what I appreciated about this particular article. He talks about ways in which the things we’ve learned from charter schools can be implemented into traditional public schools, and I think that was always a part of the goal, but we somehow have missed that.

But he talks about a couple things I wanna mention using charter authorizing process to learn how to renew faltering school districts. He even mentions an idea of what happens if you close persistently ineffective schools. Very controversial, I know. Mm-hmm. But how different would the conversations be right now?

There’s lots of school closures happening around the country. I’m certainly experiencing it in districts [00:07:00] near where I live. But how different the conversation would be if you knew that if you had a low-performing school, there would be a threat of it closing, and how different that accountability would look.

But he talks about how we should expand how school success is measured. Very, very important. I could go on about that- Mm … as a former charter network leader, and how I wish, again, our accountability was different and, and the things that were being measured were, yes, test scores, but let’s also talk about some other things that it takes to run highly effective schools and giving kids a high-quality education.

Third, talking about the need to create more career-connected schools. Fourth, learning from charters how to think differently about building and using school facilities. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And then focusing on more good public school strategy. And so this whole idea of like these are all public schools. How do you collaborate?

How do you create innovation zones? Having charter district collaboration compacts. [00:08:00] And so I just appreciated this perspective because there’s so much division still among public charters versus traditional. And if we just were to see public schools as public schools, as all of these are our kids, it doesn’t matter what kind of school they go to, can they just go to a great school? And can we learn the lessons that have come from being in this charter space for a while? I wonder how much more improved all of our public schools could be.

Mary Tamer: Yeah. Completely agree with everything you’ve said, Alisha. And I know, you know, even here in Massachusetts, it remains a toxic divide and a toxic conversation about district versus public charter schools.
And I remember years ago when I was working at the State Charter Association, and one of the most heartbreaking things I ever had to witness, and I was working specifically with the Boston Charter Schools and the Boston Charter School leaders, was we had to close down a, you know, relatively well-performing charter school [00:09:00] in Boston because of some financial issues.

The school had been on probation for some financial issues, but the truth of the matter was we had district schools in successive years of failure that were never under a threat of being closed down. But this charter school that was actually academically doing well by kids, there was just some, you know, again, some financial issues that hadn’t been dealt with in the way that they should have, and the school was closed, and we had to help the families to re-register for other schools for their children, which you know how disruptive and- Yes you know, unpleasant a process that is. And I sometimes wish we didn’t have this two-tiered system where one set of schools is frankly held to much higher standards than- Yes … the majority of schools are.

Alisha Searcy: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I could not agree with you more. I think our listeners will now know just how good this conversation is gonna be the rest of this episode.
So make sure you stay tuned. [00:10:00] When we come back, we’re going to have on with us Rachel Canter. She is the director of education policy for Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute and the founder of Mississippi First.

Rachel Canter is the director of education policy for the Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute. In 2008, she founded Mississippi First and served as its executive director for over 16 years. During her tenure, Canter was the lead advocate of multiple watershed public education initiatives in Mississippi, including the passage and expansion of the state’s pre-K law, the passage of the state’s charter school law, the adoption of new state education standards and assessments, the passage of the Winter Read Teacher Loan Repayment Program, the passage of the 2022 historic teacher pay raise, and the passage and funding of the 2024 student-centered public school funding formula, to name a few. She is a [00:11:00] 2004 Mississippi Delta alumnus of Teach For America, and from 2018 to 2023 served on the national board of the Policy Innovators in Education Network. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English and history from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Rachel, welcome to the show.

Rachel Canter: Thank you so much for having me.

Alisha Searcy: So you’ve had an accomplished career in K-12 public education in Mississippi, and founded Mississippi First in 2008, which has helped yield historic gains on NAEP. Would you share with our listeners some of your background, formative educational experiences, and just your overall educational philosophy?

Rachel Canter: Sure. I am originally from Mississippi. I grew up in a college town called Starkville, Mississippi. It’s where Mississippi State University is. I went to public school through the end of high school, and after I graduated, I went away to college, and that experience of going away from home for [00:12:00] school was really eye-opening to me in a lot of ways.

I saw all of the ways in which my public school experience had prepared me for a life beyond high school, and then all of the ways where it did not quite get there in preparation. And a lot of those ways that it didn’t quite get me there were academically. And I spent a lot of time when I was in college really thinking about this problem of I graduated at the top of my class, I went to a highly selective university, and I was struggling, and I thought about all of my other classmates who maybe hadn’t done as well as I had, and I wondered how they were faring.

And of course, at the same time, I was hearing a lot of negative things about Mississippi from my college classmates. We really had a terrible national reputation, especially when it came to education. People were very free to tell me to my face they thought I didn’t deserve to be there at that university.

Wow. And as I went through my [00:13:00] college experience, I began to think about, well, what if I was part of changing that narrative for the state of Mississippi? What if I became part of improving public schools in our state? And so after college, I went back to Mississippi. I joined Teach For America. And went and taught seventh grade English in Greenville, Mississippi, which is a town in the Delta on the river about two and a half hours directly due west of where I grew up.

And I was really shocked and frustrated by what I saw in that school system. The education that kids were getting there was light years behind the education I had gotten in Starkville, and I knew that my education in Starkville hadn’t quite met the mark for me in a lot of ways. And it really lit a fire in me that I need to figure out how to be part of generational change, not just the type of change that any one individual can do, no matter their position, but the type of [00:14:00] change that requires lots of people over a long period of time.

And that led me to the Kennedy School to get a master’s in public policy, and basically the reason I went there was that I was trying to figure out, how do you start a policy and advocacy organization that could kind of provide some of this, you know, generational change kind of momentum? And in 2008, I moved to Jackson to start Mississippi First as a policy and advocacy nonprofit.

And from 2008 to 2025, I was in that job leading the organization and being deeply involved in all of these education reform conversations that we had in that time period. I wouldn’t say that, you know… It’s funny because when I took my job as a seventh grade English teacher, a part of the application for the school district was that I was supposed to write down my educational philosophy.

And I don’t exactly remember what I wrote, but I know that it probably wasn’t what they were looking for. They [00:15:00] were looking for me to name some sort of educational philosopher like John Dewey or somebody like that as being, you know, the person that I most agreed with in terms of education. And the reality is that I have a very basic educational philosophy, which is that all kids can learn.

Mm. And that if we teach kids, they will learn what we teach them, and that we have to have high expectations for them and high expectations for ourselves. And I think that’s really my educational philosophy for Mississippi. I thought that we had low expectations for our kids and low expectations of ourselves, and that’s why we had been behind for so many decades. And it first took us believing that we could change the situation, that if we raised expectations for kids, that they would meet us there before we could really make progress.

Mary Tamer: Wow. Yeah. I love that all kids can learn and, and the importance of holding high expectations, and could not [00:16:00] agree more. And I hope I’m correct on the year, Rachel, but I believe it was in 2013 that Mississippi… well, 2013, I think, is when Mississippi made the switch to evidence-based instruction, but it was prior to that that the state’s fourth graders were reading more than a full grade level behind the national average on NAEP. And that by 2019, Mississippi’s fourth graders scored higher than the nation’s public school average in mathematics, tied the nation in reading, and were making the largest score gains. Could you share with us a little more about these achievements and the state leadership necessary to drive such dramatic improvement?

Rachel Canter: I’m glad that you pointed out our math scores, ’cause a lot of people focus exclusively on literacy, but actually, Mississippi’s educational turnaround was both literacy and math at fourth grade for both reading and math, and then at eighth grade for math, and we’ve gotten substantially [00:17:00] better at eighth grade reading as well.

And that turnaround took 20 years. It was not the product of some sort of overnight miracle. It was not the product of a single choice that the state made or a single policy. It took us 20 years of really hard work. It started with, yes, state policy around how do we raise expectations? How do we raise the rigor of how we assess on those expectations?

How can we be more transparent around how schools are actually doing for kids, and base our accountability model on things like actual grade level proficiency and growth from year to year towards proficiency, as opposed to the metrics we’ve used before, which were really intended to mostly hide performance rather than reveal it to communities.

And those were some of the foundational things that we had to do. We had to get the system pointed in the right direction and be honest with ourselves about actual student performance. And once we did [00:18:00] those things, which really started a shift around 2009, 2010, in came a new legislature in 2012, and this new legislature was really looking for an agenda across a number of things.

And of course, I and other people like me were there at the time saying, “We need to do something about education, and here are the things that we think you need to do.” And this is where you start getting the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which is the law that shaped our literacy policies. We get state-funded pre-K.

Because of those things we started down and because of changing our standards, we started down a path of changing curriculum. The State Department of Education dramatically changed the way that they operate to become an organization that could provide expert capacity to local school districts that were really small.

Mississippi is a rural state- Many of our school districts have fewer than 10,000 children. They are not school districts that have [00:19:00] the capacity to have internally instructional coaches and professional development people. They have to find these things elsewhere. And for many years, the State Department of Education was not the place for that.

They were the people who came and told you if you had the correct number of librarians for a certain number of children, and they counted the kids that were in your classroom and said how many dollars you got. They did those kinds of things, but they weren’t really the place that you went looking for help if you needed help.

In the same time that we were raising our expectations around what kids would do in classrooms and what teachers would do with them in classrooms, we had to raise our expectations of the State Department of Education and what it would be able to provide. And so these things sort of cumulatively added up to those scores that you saw in 2019, where we had been doing a lot of different things really rigorously for quite some time in order to get those score gains.
And [00:20:00] a lot of people have noted post-pandemic, the country actually started to decline in performance before the pandemic, but it really accelerated after the pandemic, and Mississippi was able to… We had a couple of score declines in math that we’ve now, like, sort of bounced back from, and in reading we’ve been able to bounce back to where we were in 2019.

But if you adjust for demographics based on the 2024 scores, Mississippi is actually leading the nation in reading and math at fourth grade and in math at eighth grade and number four in reading at the eighth grade level. That means that we’re beating Massachusetts in three out of four of those categories.

If Massachusetts had the same number of poor kids that we have, we would be beating them, and I think that’s a remarkable accomplishment because Mississippi is a state that no one thought could ever be even in the same league as Massachusetts when I started my work in 2008.

Mary Tamer: That’s an excellent point, Rachel, and I, we, you know, we’re in the midst of trying to pass a literacy [00:21:00] bill here in Massachusetts that would mandate evidence-based instruction, and we have a slide in our PowerPoint that is actually comparing what’s happening in Massachusetts to Mississippi. And I always tell, whether it’s legislators or families, Mississippi has double the poverty rate that we do, and they spend almost a third of what we spend here in Massachusetts on per pupil expenditures, and the work is happening, and I think it’s a really great point. Thank you so much.

Alisha Searcy: And a great reminder, as Rachel has said, all kids can learn. In recent decades, American K12 students have struggled with basic reading, as reflected by NAEP reading scores being largely unchanged for many years. Could you talk about how we teach reading in this country, the strengths and weaknesses of whole language and phonics reading, and what we need to do to improve students’ enjoyment of and performance in reading?

Rachel Canter: Let me start with the way that Mississippi teaches reading now, which is what [00:22:00] we refer to as the science of reading. That’s what actually experts refer to it as, as the science of reading. And if you look historically at the different, especially in the last, I would say, 20 to 30 years, the way that people teach reading, in the ’90s we had something called the reading wars, where you had camps of people. One camp was a whole language camp, which was a reading philosophy that was not actually rooted in any evidence. It was just based on how people felt that we should be teaching reading, which was that we should allow students to see quality picture books, and that they would absorb words based on the context and based on the first letter, and that if they understood the beauty of language, that they would learn to read. And then there were other folks that said, “No, reading is actually a process, and it requires phonics in order to develop.” And what the science of reading [00:23:00] says is that, yeah, the whole language stuff is nonsense. But phonics is actually not the only thing you need to learn to read. It is one piece of the science of reading. Phonics helps students learn how to decode words, but they have to have language comprehension in order to understand those words. And in Mississippi, we set about to teach teachers what the brain science and the educational evidence and all of these things said about the way the brain learns to read and what instructional methods were best for how to get those outcomes in kids.

And in the elementary grades, one of the most important things that you do is that you work on something called decoding, and decoding is figuring out what words say. And to do decoding, you have to use phonics. And I think one of the ways that the media has gotten the story wrong about the science of reading is that they often shorthand the [00:24:00] science of reading as phonics, but actually the science of reading includes language comprehension, which includes things like vocabulary, background knowledge.

You also have to have oral language development. Like, there are these other things that go into a child over time really becoming a strong reader. And I think in the US, we sometimes will pick on the easiest thing the easiest thing or, or we want to turn everything into, like, a us versus them And the reality is that whole language, it just doesn’t work.

Why would we be doing something with kids that just doesn’t work, that actually sets them up to fail and to ingrain practices that will turn them into bad readers? The evidence says it’s the science of reading. It begins with phonics, but also we have to teach them actual knowledge about the world so that when they decode a word, it has meaning to them- Mm-hmm because that’s what develops that reading comprehension over time. And I think that that [00:25:00] is the message that the science of reading folks are trying to get everybody across the country to understand, and this is not about a pendulum swing. It’s about trying to understand evidence about what will be best for kids. I’ve talked to some states where they say, “Oh, well, we believe in local control, and we have, you know, 150 something school districts, and we let them decide.” And I’m like, “But there’s not 150 something school districts’ ways of teaching kids how to read.” Yeah. There’s one way. It’s the science of reading, and we all need to be doing it.

Mary Tamer: Well said. Yes, indeed. And speaking of well said, we’re gonna… It’s not every day I get to quote William Faulkner, but since he is indeed a proud son of Mississippi, I think it was when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, he said, “Man is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
The [00:26:00] poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things.” So Mississippi was home to 20th century America’s greatest writers and blues musicians, including Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, as well as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, to name only a few. Would you talk about the role that appreciating great literature and music plays in the state’s K to 12 school systems?

Rachel Canter: So I grew up in a place that really appreciated great storytellers.

Alisha Searcy: Mm.
Rachel Canter: And I have become a person who really appreciates great storytellers. Mississippi has this beautiful tradition of arts and letters, of great writers, of great musicians. One of the nicknames for Mississippi is the birthplace of American music because if you look at all the American music traditions, you can trace their roots back to Mississippi, several of them to the Mississippi Delta. I think it was this real [00:27:00] sense of, you know, the contradiction between how much culturally Mississippi has contributed to the country, including a lot of those musicians you named are Black musicians. Some of our best writers are Black writers. How much Mississippi has contributed to the American cultural tradition and canon of literature, and yet our own students had such low levels of skills that they could not read Faulkner- To appreciate it.

We also have, like, a contemporary writer is Jesmyn Ward. Would they be able to read a Jesmyn Ward book and understand it? These sorts of things, I think, weighed heavily on some of us who are doing this work, that in order to be full participants in the world and to carry on this tradition of having outsized cultural influence for the size of our state, we need to be preparing kids to be able to write their own stories and to tell their own stories through, [00:28:00] through music, through poems, through books, through fiction, through nonfiction.

And I was an English major in college, and it was really, at times it could be really ironic to me that I was sitting in classes with people who thought I didn’t deserve to be there reading books by Mississippi authors. You know, I think that that proud literary tradition and the musical tradition are really important to the culture- Mm-hmm in the state of Mississippi, and something that we’re, we’re really proud of. And we can now add to that educational progress to be proud of, too.

Mary Tamer: Amazing.

Alisha Searcy: It is. Rachel, I served in the legislature during the time of Race to the Top and Common Core, and felt like we were doing the right thing. But even before the massive learning loss during COVID and NAEP, we’ve seen now after a decade that reading and math results in more than two-thirds of states have sharply declined, except for places like the Department of Defense Education Activity Department, [00:29:00] DC, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana.
But it also includes some declines in places like Massachusetts and New Jersey and New Hampshire. Why is it that only a couple of low-performing states saw any improvement under Common Core in ELA and math?

Rachel Canter: So I think this is less a Common Core problem and more of an accountability problem. We gave up on the idea as a country that measuring student performance and holding ourselves accountable for that performance was important. For Mississippi, Common Core was transformational. We now call our standards the Mississippi College and Career Ready Standards. They are based on Common Core. We tweaked the standards very slightly. That was actually a huge controversy in our legislature because, as I’m sure you recall, around 2015, there was an enormous backlash across the country around Common Core, the [00:30:00] Common Core Assessment Consortia, as well as a lot of these other things that had come through Race to the Top, including things like teacher evaluation. Mm-hmm. And a lot of states watered down their standards, or they got rid of Common Core, or they watered down their assessment. And then along came ESSA, and ESSA basically said You don’t have to continue to hold people accountable for student performance anymore. You can decide on your own what that looks like. And there was a lot of toxicity in the air at that point in time. I think that ed reform as a movement made a huge mistake in trying to lead with teacher evaluation instead of things like actual rigorous teacher training and teacher support. And that decreased the appetite people had for a lot of other reforms.

But Mississippi kept going when a lot of people gave up. We kept going with our standards. We kept going with our [00:31:00] assessment. We left the PARCC Consortium, but we got another assessment that was a lot better than what we had had before. We kept going with ideas around accountability. We changed our accountability system to be very clearly focused, like I said, on grade-level performance and on growth towards proficiency from year to year.
We give schools credit if they move kids from being proficient to being advanced. We give them double credit if they move their lowest 25% closer to proficiency from year to year. We give our schools credit for a four-year graduation rate, and we used to, it used to be based on a five-year graduation rate, and you would get partial credit if you got kids through a GED program.

But the reality is the meaningful measure of success for kids in high school is high school graduation in four years. So we had to rethink our system around those things. And when the rest of the country sort of said, “It’s been too much, too fast. [00:32:00] We’re mad at you about teacher evaluation, and now we don’t want to do assessments and hold ourselves accountable for anything at all,” we said, “Actually, we’re gonna keep going.”

And in reality, when you look at it, a lot of the playbook that we used is straight from Massachusetts in the ’90s. Hmm. But at the time when Massachusetts was giving up on it, we were doubling down, and we added to that playbook All of these things around support for implementation, training for teachers, coaching for teachers, evidence-based instructional policies.

We were adding to the playbook of standards and accountability these other things ’cause what we wanted to say to teachers and to schools was, “Yeah, we want you to do things you’ve never done before, but we are gonna be right there with you to help you.” Mm-hmm. “It’s going to be something that we can do together.”

And I think that’s really that marriage of high expectations and support is really what made the difference for Mississippi [00:33:00] because we looked at it and we said, “We’re not gonna assume that you know how to do this on your own or that you have the resources to do this on your own. This is a state problem.

It’s all of our responsibility to do something about it. Every single one of us is gonna have to work harder,” and that’s what we did. And I think that that is what really was new because, like, a lot of these things as individual policies are not new. You know? Mm-hmm. The science of reading has been around for 20 years.

Alisha Searcy: Mm-hmm.

Rachel Canter: Right? Accountability has been around since the ’90s. Like, there are all these things, but we said, “You have to do them all together. You can’t just- Mm-hmm … pick and choose and do one or the other. It has to be a coherent system, and we’ve all gotta work harder for it.”

Mary Tamer: Amen. So during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Mississippi had more than its fair share of pain when it came to segregation, violence, [00:34:00] poverty, and racial inequality.
And as the nation continues debating civics education and race, could you share with us the importance of taking lessons from the 1955 murder of Emmett Till as well as from the heroism of civil rights icons such as Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer?

Rachel Canter: So Mississippi civil rights history is a history that we’re really proud of the heroes and the progress, and I think that we also have to really be honest and humble about the reality that led to that heroism.
I was teaching in the classroom on the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till’s death, for example, in the Delta, and it happened not far from where I taught. And I remember trying to show newspaper articles to my seventh graders about it, and they didn’t know about it. Wow. And one of the things that was really shocking to me is that I said to [00:35:00] them, “Well, you know,” it was MLK Day that year.

We always have MLK Day out, but in the run-up to MLK Day, I remember having a conversation with my students about, you know, what MLK had done for the country or, you know, what his work was. And they said to me, “Oh, yeah, we know him. He freed the slaves.” And it was this, this eye-opening moment about if we don’t teach our history to our kids, then we’re not doing the job.

And I did a whole unit after that about how there was 100 years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, and that that 100 years was something called Jim Crow, and that all of these things had happened, and this was their history. This was our history as a state.

And that, you know, one of the things, when we talk about literacy, we’re also talking about knowledge of the world. And so we’re talking about things like social studies, and we’re talking about [00:36:00] things like the Civil Rights Movement. And I felt that one of the effects of poverty was that kids had such little knowledge of the world around them and, and their own history.

And I think that Mississippi has… It’s something that we are constantly in conversation about, is our history, and our history affects everything that we do. Sometimes there’s mistrust that persists today that leads to conversations around, are we doing this because it’s really best for kids? Are we doing this because there’s some sort of secret conspiracy to take us back to the times of yore?

You know, we are always thinking about it. But I, I do think that when you look at the data, Mississippi is, kids, especially Black kids in Mississippi, do better than Black kids almost anywhere else in the country. That’s great. And I think part of that is putting a real focus and being willing to talk about it constantly, because these are our kids and these are our communities.

The [00:37:00] social studies standards in Mississippi, I have a lot of criticisms about, and I did a deep dive on American history in the last several years on our social studies standards because this was sort of like a, a long-term thing for me. That experience that I had in the classroom with my own kids not knowing their own history stayed with me, and I thought, “We need to do better about how we teach it.” It wasn’t that we were not teaching it, but that I thought we could teach more and in a more coherent way. But one of the things that I wish for the rest of the country is that people were as aware that this is a problem and that this is an ongoing, living thing, that it’s not really past as of yet, that we’re still living through America’s history and Mississippi’s history, and that if we were honest about that, that we could be making more progress.

Mary Tamer: Absolutely.

Alisha Searcy: Yes. So well said, and thank you for making it clear that when we talk about [00:38:00] whether it’s the Civil Rights Movement or the murder of Emmett Till, that this is our history, right- Mm-hmm … as a country, not just one group of people. It’s so important, and I think when you see it through that lens, it changes what we think kids ought to know and how important it is. So thank you for that. I wanna talk about what it means to be a good reader. We hear teachers and parents talk about that often. Can you talk about the different kinds of reading that young people should be doing? Things like high-quality fables, poems, myths, fiction, novels, history, and biographies that help give them the language, the vocabulary, and knowledge to become, quote-unquote, “good readers.” Why decade after decades do American K-12 education and teacher prep programs seem to struggle with basic academic quality in ELA, STEM, and Civics?

Rachel Canter: I mean, I think being a good reader requires that you have, according to the science of reading, [00:39:00] you know, you have to have these foundational skills to be able to code words, and then you also have to have language comprehension. You have to have a broad vocabulary. You have to have the ability to have background knowledge, because what we know from studies is if you are knowledgeable about the topic you’re reading about, it will help your reading comprehension of that text. So when we talk about kids reading different types of written material, we do have to broaden kids’ perspectives.

There’s sort of a strain of thinking that says, well, the way that you build the joy of reading is you just let kids read whatever they want. And the reality is that a lotta kids, if you just told them they could read whatever they want, they’re gonna read all the same thing. And it’s the job of the classroom, actually, to broaden their horizons and help them read lots of different things. We also know that kids don’t like to do things that they’re not very good at, and so if we haven’t given them those foundational skills, they’re not gonna [00:40:00] like reading enough to choose to read broadly and to read all sorts of different types of things that you see. There’s a conversation going on right now about whether or not we’ve taken novels out of classrooms, and whether or not standards or accountability or whatever is responsible for that.

I think that it’s less about that and more about the fact that you can do all of these things. You can teach the standards, you can teach background knowledge and all these things if you have longer texts in your classroom. It’s gotta be a priority for you as a school district. You know, we don’t have evidence to say there’s a single curriculum out there for ELA that does everything that we want it to do, and that’s the only one that people should be using, ’cause a curriculum is very different from the science of reading, which is an instructional method, their principles and practices.

There are lots of different curriculums, and some of them are much better than others, but if we want to build kids- [00:41:00] Knowledge, and we want to prepare them for the world. We need to be looking for curriculums that teach all those things in the standards, and also expose them to lots of different type of texts and texts about lots of different topics. And this is also why science and social studies have to be part of the conversation when we’re talking about building reading comprehension, because that knowledge of the world, a lot of it is gonna come through science and social studies class and not in your ELA class.

Mary Tamer: Well said. Thank you. Well, I’m sad that we’re down to our last question here, but again, for me, in Massachusetts, and knowing that our literacy bill is hopefully gonna be crossing the finish line soon, I’m very eager to hear your answer to this question, given that you’ve been working in public policy for decades and had high-level positions in nonprofits and with policy advocacy. What would you like to see governors, state legislators, local officials, and [00:42:00] parents do to dramatically improve academic outcomes for America’s children? Not an easy question but definitely an important one.

Rachel Canter: So it’s not just one thing. I would say the first thing is that we need to be honest about the problem. There’s lots of things that we can point to at any given time that are on fire in our politics- Correct … or in our lives. And all those things are important, but we’ve gotta be honest about the fact that our kids today, nationally, have lost so much ground in their knowledge of reading and mathematics that at some grade levels and subjects, they’re back to where we started 20 years ago- Mm-hmm when we first started measuring it. That has to be a priority problem for every person in state government. It is a priority problem for every parent, and state government and elected officials and policymakers need to act like it’s as [00:43:00] much as, of a problem for them as it is for every parent. We also need to act like this is a problem we can do something about.

It’s driven me bananas in the last year that I’ve been in this national role, that whenever I go talk to people, and I mean policymakers when I say this, I talk to a lot of policymakers who feel very, you know, “Well, I’m not sure what to do about it,” or, “If I knew what to do about it, it’s too scary to actually have to do those things.”

And it drives me a little crazy because I’m like, what could be more important to the future of your state, to the future of a child’s life, than whether or not they have skills? Especially at a time when we are in a real time of change- Economically, where every one of us is questioning what’s gonna happen with AI, what’s it really gonna mean for me? What’s it gonna mean for my child? One of the things we know is that the more skills you have, the less likely you [00:44:00] are to be, you know, written out of the universe by AI, and the more likely you are to maybe be able to use it beneficially for yourself. Because right now we’ve got some emerging evidence to show that kids who try to use AI as a shortcut, it really significantly impacts their cognitive development.

And I think we have to treat these problems as not separate problems. The problem of education is an urgent problem, and it should be problem number one. I also think that we need to act not just with some urgency and not just that we can do something about it, but we need to act with some courage. There were a lot of times when I was advocating at my state capital where I knew I wasn’t making friends by some of the claims that I was supporting and saying and doing. But at the end of the day, it was more important to me that we made progress for kids than whether or not I got invited to somebody’s social [00:45:00] event.

And there are a whole lot of people in our politics who are kind of okay with going along to get along, not rocking the boat, because they’d rather have, you know, wear the legislative pin, or they’d rather, you know, be invited to the birthday party of the so-and-so than they would say the thing that they know is right. And this moment requires courage. It requires courage on the part of all of our leaders. Mm-hmm. And what you find out when you start using some of that courage is that actually you didn’t need quite as much of it as you thought. When you start making progress, that speaks for itself.

Alisha Searcy: Yeah. Absolutely. Great. Rachel, thank you so much. I think that it’s safe to say thank you On behalf of a lot of us, I mean, I know that obviously you didn’t do this work alone in Mississippi and there were a number of people who were a part of this. But thank you for your courage and [00:46:00] for believing in the kids of Mississippi and helping to create a proof point that all kids can learn, helping us, I think, in this country to understand to a point that you made earlier that it’s many things at one time. You have to stick to it, right? We’re quick to abandon things, but you guys had the courage and it took a lot of people, right? The leaders, the advocates, the state superintendent, the DOE, and lots of teachers who had to buy in to this vision over the long haul. So thank you for your courage and your very hard work, and I think doing things that people didn’t think were possible.
We are having a conversation where we’re saying Massachusetts is learning from Mississippi. That’s right. I don’t think we would’ve said that, you know, 10 years ago. Kudos to you and all of the folks in Mississippi who are showing that what is possible for all kids in this country. Thank you. Well, Mary, just as we expected, that was a fantastic interview. Rachel is incredible. She’s done, I think, groundbreaking work [00:47:00] that will impact the lives of, I would say, millions of students across this country. So, so great to have her.

Mary Tamer: I completely agree. And again, yet another reason to watch what’s happening in Mississippi and the fact that even here in Massachusetts, we’re trying to follow their lead, and so many other states that really are trying to make a tremendous difference for children in schools.

Alisha Searcy: Yeah. And that’s just crazy. That says it all. When Massachusetts says they’re following what Mississippi is doing, times have changed, right?

Mary Tamer: That’s right. That’s right.

Alisha Searcy: Excellent. Well, before we go, wanna give us the tweet of the week. It comes from Education Next and it says, quote, “A 2024 survey by the National Education Association found that 90% of teachers favor banning cell phones during class and 83% support stricter bell to bell restrictions.” I’m not going to add my little opinion there, but we know there’s lots of conversations about cell phones in classrooms, so make sure you check that [00:48:00] out. Mary, as always, great to hang out with you today. Great conversation. Thanks so much for joining as our guest co-host.

Mary Tamer: Oh, such a pleasure, Alisha. And anytime you need me, you just call.

Alisha Searcy: You know we will. And make sure you join us next week where we will have Andrew Hadfield. He is the professor of English at the University of Sussex, a fellow of the British Academy, and author of Edmund Spenser: A Life. See you next week.