As a high school student I read E.B. White’s “The Supremacy of Uruguay” in a paperback edition of Ray Bradbury’s 1952 collection Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow. Bradbury explained in his introduction that he was looking specifically for stories that “show us the unreality of reality” and “entertain us with our precarious state of equilibrium.”
E.B. White’s short story comes to mind in connection with the inspirational news that Mississippi has emerged as one of the best places in the country for a poor child to get an education. As the New York Times headline has it, Mississippi has “transformed its schools from worst to best.” The Times story by Sarah Mervosh cites the accessible Urban Institute study States’ Demographically Adjusted Performance on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The International Business Times followed up on the Times story with an accessible account in “Mississippi Schools Rise From Last to First: How Literacy Reforms Drove Education Improvements.”
Mervosh reports for the Times:
Mississippi has figured out something almost no other state has, and it has involved far more than just changing the way reading is taught, the most common explanation for its success.
Even as schools elsewhere have focused on issues like school funding, social justice and mental health in recent years, Mississippi schools like Hazlehurst have made academics their North Star.
“At the end of the day, our job is teaching. Their job is learning,” said [teacher Kim Luckett-Langston], who added that no matter what is going on in a child’s life, the classroom is the one thing she can control. “If we don’t meet that need, we have failed them.”
