Rachel Canter is co-founder and executive director of Mississippi First, a 10-year-old advocacy organization dedicated to improving education in her home state. The group has helped pass two major pieces of education legislation, one for charter school expansion and another for state-funded pre-K.

Historically, Mississippi hovers at the bottom of national rankings for education quality and student achievement. For students in the Delta — home to the state’s very poorest, most rural communities — the outcomes data is especially dire. The reality of these conditions has made equity a core value for Mississippi First that, according to Canter, “guides the policies we choose to work on and how we work on them, making sure the advocacy we’re doing doesn’t widen the gap between the educational haves and have-nots.”

It’s not hard to imagine that the application of an equity lens to any education policy can yield plenty of debate around issues like transparency, quality and funding. But what is surprising and, perhaps, less obvious is how ignorance and, sometimes, bias and privilege have shaped perceptions about education in Mississippi, especially among decision-makers, impeding equity and opportunity.

Canter tells of an oft-heard refrain, “Well, if we just got rid of the Delta, we would be in the middle of the pack among states across the U.S.” Her candid retort lays bare the irony of this notion and the depth of the education challenge statewide. To those who share judgements about the condition of education in the Delta she says, “Do you realize that people in the rest of the country say, ‘If we just got rid of Mississippi…?’”

Undeterred, Mississippi First has waged an information campaign persistently providing facts about the realities of education for students in Delta communities and elsewhere, to help change the conversation and, ultimately, policy. Canter says the state is making progress, albeit uneven. For example, the adoption of the Mississippi College and Career Readiness Standards, the state’s own version of Common Core, has been a positive, with the state making great strides in improving National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, the national report card for math and reading proficiency among fourth- and eighth-graders.

According to the Mississippi Department of Education, NAEP results show the state has grown faster than the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math over the last 10 years. During that period, there were several bright spots, including improvement in eighth-grade reading. In 2017, the state saw a four-point improvement in eighth-grade reading levels. But overall, Mississippi continues to lag behind the rest of the nation. With the exception of Latinos, subgroups of students that includes those with disabilities, African-Americans, girls and economically disadvantaged children remained flat since 2015. And according to the Mississippi Department of Education’s annual Mississippi Academic Assessment Program scores, students in the Delta are doing worse than their peers in other parts of the state.

It’s not hard to point to poverty as a root cause for Mississippi’s achievement gaps. The state’s child poverty rate stands at 31.1 percent according to the 2018 Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. About 69 percent of all students qualify for free lunch with most students hitting that mark in Mississippi’s many rural communities with concentrated poverty. Nationally, 22 million students received free or reduced-price lunch last year. In 2017, students who were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch had an average score that was 30 points lower than students who were not eligible.

In a winter 2016 research paper from the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy, the authors suggest that the impact of poverty varies according to community. They write “being poor in a relatively well-off community with good infrastructure and schools is different from being poor in a place where poverty rates have been high for generations, where economic investment in schools and infrastructure is negligible, and where pathways to success are few. The hurdles are even higher in rural areas, where low population density, physical isolation, and the broad spatial distribution of the poor make service delivery and exposure to innovative programs more challenging.”

But Canter contends there are districts with high rates of low-income children that are making progress. She attributes their success to “embracing the Mississippi College and Career Readiness standards, new curriculum and new teaching methods.” She also credits education policy and state-funded, pre-K programs with boosting achievement.

Evelyn Jossell, Ed.D., is superintendent of Quitman County School District in the northwestern part of the state and the heart of the Delta. In the 2017-2018 school year, the district served 1,049 students from across the county in its elementary and middle schools, a technical education center and a high school. Nearly all of Quitman’s students are African-American and receive free lunch. The Mississippi Department of Education gave Quitman a “D” rating in 2017, up from “F” since Jossell took office in January 2016.

True education transformation takes time but is possible. We must learn from bright spots in our communities — those who have proven that it can be done — for the sake of our students and our country’s future.

For example, Quitman has partnered with a community-based organization out of Oxford, Mississippi, called Reclaimed Project. The group typically works to build schools in Africa and other impoverished places but in the spring of 2016 told Jossell they wanted to help at a local level. Jossell expressed the many challenges of drawing more teachers to the district including the housing dilemma. Reclaimed responded by purchasing and renovating an 8,000-square-foot building that has now become a rent-free living space for seven teachers. For their part, the teachers must agree to perform community service that benefits youth, such as tutoring or working with the football league. Incentives like sign-on bonuses and extra pay for teaching math, science and language arts also are offered.

There’s been an effort to grow talent from within, too, by identifying teaching assistants and support staff who may have a proclivity for teaching. The district will pay for those individuals to go back to school to earn a bachelor’s degree and teacher’s license. Jossell similarly has resources in place to sponsor teachers to become National Board-certified along with retooling the district’s approach to professional development to give teachers more confidence about using the new state standards.

“Key to our success in keeping teachers here and, at the same time, meeting Mississippi’s new expectations for achievement has been making sure teachers are proficient in using the new standards and providing a level of instructional rigor that drives student success,” Jossell said. That approach has involved both more targeted professional development and one-on-one coaching when necessary.

Jossell also has taken an individualized approach to helping teachers who have had difficulty passing the Praxis® exam, which some experts think is a reflection of Mississippi’s systemic and generational educational failings. The district offers both coaching and courses at William Carey College to help better prepare teachers for the test. Last summer, the first 13 teachers enrolled in the program which is run by volunteer, Ph.D.-level instructors. At the printing of this publication, the results of the Praxis were not yet available.

“Key to our success in keeping teachers here and, at the same time, meeting Mississippi’s new expectations for achievement has been making sure teachers are proficient in using the new standards and providing a level of instructional rigor that drives student success.”
Evelyn Jossell, Superintendent, Quitman County School District

Still, Jossell is hopeful about the outcomes and continues to use creative approaches for hard-to-fill posts like AP math. Without the prospect of hiring a teacher with the qualifications to teach AP, Quitman is partnering with Booneville School District to offer higher-level math courses online. Another partnership with the Global Teaching Project allows students to take AP physics virtually with classes taught by Yale professors.

Quitman is using other measures to improve access like providing all students with iPads during the school day and a new and improved Career and Technical Education program that offers coursework in the health sciences and computer programming. Giving students more opportunity is one part of delivering a more equitable education. In poor, rural communities like Quitman, considering the needs of the whole community is important too.

Approximately 64 percent of rural counties have high rates of child poverty, as compared to 47 percent of urban counties.
(Schaefer, Mattingly & Johnson 2016)

 
Still, the growth of poverty in America’s suburbs is outpacing that of cities and rural geographies.

The district takes a holistic approach that emulates the Harlem Children’s Zone®, an organization that believes the “success of children and the strength of the community go hand-in-hand.” Quitman works with all of the nonprofits in the area that provide important community services. It also is trying to launch something it calls a “parent academy,” if funding from a recently submitted grant from the Mississippi Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning Center’s Program becomes available. This new effort will help facilitate a better connection between home and school. For example, the academy will help assure parents understand the new standards and curriculum, as well as point them to important resources like GED courses and childcare. The theory is that if parents feel more empowered they can better help their children and build a stronger school community.

All of these initiatives, in Jossell’s eyes, add up to more than just providing an education. “We are navigating an educational movement that is radical and defies the fallacies and labels that have been placed on rural school districts,” she said. “We get it. We own our challenges, but we will not allow those challenges to define us or our children.”