Mississippi Today
‘They’re being totally ignored’: Lawmakers say Gov. Tate Reeves isn’t focusing economic development in majority-Black regions
Days after Republican Gov. Tate Reeves pledged to be a governor for all Mississippians, several Democratic lawmakers said Reeves uses his power to invest in certain parts of the state while ignoring others.
The governor demonstrated his favoritism just this week, the legislators said in a Wednesday interview with Mississippi Today, when Reeves called a special session to ask lawmakers to spend $350 million in state funds to finalize an economic development deal in north Mississippi's Marshall County.
READ MORE: Reeves asks lawmakers to appropriate $350 million in state funds to Marshall County EV battery deal
The legislators say none of the state's recent economic projects have gone toward communities west of Interstate 55, an area where the Mississippi Delta and population hubs of Black citizens are located, or to the state's capital city.
“Not taking anything away from Marshall County, but I do believe the impact of having 1,500 or 2,000 jobs west of I-55 would change the whole status of this state,” Democratic Rep. John Hines of Greenville said.
The Delta remains one of the most impoverished places in the nation. The region's hospitals are at risk of closing, and its citizens are continuing to leave for other areas of the state and other states, according to U.S. Census data.
The Democratic officials argue that economic investment like the Marshall County project would give a major boost to west Mississippi, an area struggling to survive.
Rep. Robert Johnson III, the Democratic leader of the House, believes the Delta and southwest Mississippi, despite disinvestment, has an educated workforce that can staff major industries and an infrastructure system to transfer any goods produced — if only state leaders would give the area a chance.
“You've got I-55 to the east, you've got the largest river in the country to the west and you've got railways to go back and forth,” Johnson said. “It makes more sense to develop jobs in that area where you've got an infrastructure in place.”
The multibillion-dollar project on the table this week is, instead, scheduled to be constructed at the Chickasaw Trails Industrial Park near the Tennessee state line, where half of the state's proposed investment is planned to go toward infrastructure development.
The Mississippi Development Authority, the economic agency directly under Reeves' control, recently invested around $1.1 million in the Chickasaw Trails center, as well as over $15 million in 12 other industrial parks. None of those sites are located in the Delta, Hinds County or in west Mississippi.
“At the end of the day, you look at the population west of I-55, and that's almost one-fourth of the state's population,” Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark of Pickens said. “And they're being totally ignored.”
Corey Custer, deputy chief of staff to Reeves, said in a Wednesday statement that the governor supports investing in all areas of the state, including the Delta, Hinds County and communities west of I-55.
“Private companies — not state government — determine which sites best meet their needs,” Custer said. “This project will help strengthen our state's economy, which is a benefit to all Mississippians. Gov. Reeves will continue to use every tool at his disposal to bolster every region of our state.”
This is the second type of economic package that Reeves has called on lawmakers into a special legislative session to finalize. In November 2022, he signed legislation into law that gave money and tax incentives to benefit a Steel Dynamics expansion in Columbus, also located in northeast Mississippi.
The governor, at a Tuesday press conference, said the public can expect more state economic development projects to be announced in the future, though he did not give a specific timeline or disclose which areas of the state would be impacted.
Democratic Reps. Fabian Nelson of Jackson and Daryl Porter of Summit said on Wednesday if the governor pledges to unify the state along partisan and racial lines, then he should follow through and implement an economic plan that includes all areas of the state.
“It's been said that Mississippi is open for business, but I think we need to define what part of Mississippi is open for business,” Nelson said.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi’s ‘reading miracle’ has been out of reach for some schools
CLARKSDALE — On a Tuesday afternoon in the fall, Jessica Johnson held up index cards of words as students crowded around the table to identify the type of vowel sound and sort them into buckets.
In another classroom, Shalandria Ivy guided students as they identified images, sounded out the first letter of the item in the drawing, and found that letter in their cards. These teachers at Kirkpatrick Health & Medical Science Magnet, an elementary school in the Clarksdale Municipal School District, are also tutors in the Reading Roadmap after-school literacy program.
Johnson and Ivy are among hundreds of Mississippi reading teachers and leaders that helped create a rise in test scores after the passage of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013. Mississippi, which has long struggled with reading outcomes for students, has been showered with international acclaim for its gains that some dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.”
But in several school districts across the state, including here in Clarksdale, the drastic reading gains haven't been as strong. For the teachers and students, the effects have felt less than miraculous, for reasons ranging from resources to teacher turnover.
“We're in a space where students need hardcore remediation, (we) can't really teach the grade-level themes because their comprehension is not there,” said Janice Citchens, a first-year English teacher in the West Tallahatchie School District. “My students are 100% capable, if they had the resources and the right people … then the sky is the limit.”
‘The science of reading'
The 2013 state law created a more robust infrastructure around helping children learn to read and holding them back at the end of third grade if they didn't hit a certain benchmark. While the law did not create a mandatory curriculum, the State Board of Education promoted, and in some cases required, teacher training on the principles of the “science of reading.” This term refers to a body of research that demonstrates the importance of phonics instruction in learning to read.
The success of the new system, which includes targeted teacher training, more parent communication and interventions for lower-performing students, brought much national attention to the state.
These test score improvements have come primarily on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test administered by the federal government in the fourth and eighth grades that is often used to compare between states. A decade ago, Mississippi ranked near the bottom of the list for its fourth-grade reading scores. In 2019, the state made headlines for making the most gains in the nation on fourth-grade reading. Again in 2022 and 2023, Mississippi has been lauded for surpassing the national average in this area.
Nearly every district in the state has seen some amount of improvement: A recent analysis by Mississippi First, an education policy nonprofit, found that 97% of school districts improved third-grade reading scores since the passage of the 2013 state law.
Despite this success, many districts across Mississippi are still struggling to get all their students to be successful readers, with 24 having 10 percent fewer students passing the third-grade “gate” on the first try than the state average. Teachers and policy experts attribute the challenge to multiple factors, including higher teacher turnover rates and fewer resources in low-income communities.
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“One of the things I think we did with the Literacy-Based Promotion Act is prove … that Black kids and low-income kids can learn to read just like everybody else,” said Kelly Butler, former CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute that workeds to improve Mississippi students' pre-literacy and reading skills. “So when you think about those districts that still have big pockets of low performance, I think part of it has to do with being able to attract (educators) in these hard-to-serve schools.”
Citchens, the West Tallahatchie teacher, said she can see in the data that many of her seventh- and eighth-grade students have regularly been behind grade level. She attributes this to her students receiving inconsistent reading instruction and a disparity in resources.
Citchens also said the teaching coaching she received has been some of the most influential training in her career, as it covered resources and best practices as well as how to use them in her classroom. She believes the benefits of these trainings are stemmed when teachers regularly leave a district.
“They're pouring into the teacher, they're getting these coaches, but if (the teachers) don't stay long enough to perfect these practices … then the students are still at a disadvantage,” she said.
A recent Mississippi First analysis had similar findings. Its review of state testing and teacher turnover data for the 2022-23 school year found districts with higher rates of turnover were more likely to have low proficiency on state tests. While this analysis does not prove one factor is causing the other, it also points to research on the negative impacts on student learning when teachers leave.
Other educators have also observed this pattern. Rosemary Collins, a reading interventionist working in Leland, said that, while some districts have more resources, knowledge and experts to implement new tools, other districts are “asked to do more with less.”
Collins works with third-grade students who are projected to fail the reading assessment, or “third-grade gate” as it is colloquially known. She said she would like to see a highly structured literacy curriculum implemented for all students, not just those she works with, as she believes it would decrease the need for intense intervention. She also discussed the need for effective and equitable teaching training to make this happen, something that is stymied by turnover.
“To keep teachers in the classroom, it has to be a mindset change about what educators are and who they are for the community,” Collins said. “You have to feel respected and valued as an individual to want to stay in an environment.”
Both Citchens and Collins described an increased investment from parents in helping their children pass the third-grade test after all of the discussion and positive press related to Mississippi's “reading miracle.”
“With the growth, and with all of the positive promotion of the growth, I see parents in my community … willing to be more active in their child's education because they're not only proud for their child, it's like a sense of pride for themselves as well,” Citchens said.
‘The gains aren't zero-sum'
‘The science of reading'Reading Roadmap, founded in Kansas, came to the Mississippi Delta in 2017. The interactive program places students in small groups based on their skill level and uses instructional materials that follow the “science of reading” principles promoted by the state education board.
“Mississippi as a whole has done it successfully, but here in this area, an area that's sort of marginalized or stigmatized, I think we wanted to bring equity and bring a better light to this area,” said Taurean Morton, Mississippi state director with Reading Roadmap.
The excitement and investment around reading is something Clarksdale Municipal Superintendent Toya Harrell-Matthews said Reading Roadmap helped bring to her district. While COVID-19 interrupted some of it, she said she is working to see the energy return and help the program thrive.
“The first training they did in that little boardroom right over there, just the excitement (of) the teachers learning a new approach and the science of what they were actually going to be doing … I want to get back to that,” Harrell-Matthews said.
Morton, the state director for Reading Roadmap, said the program uses the local district's benchmark testing results to sort students into skill groups and track their movement to ensure they are getting the interventions they need. Activities at each skill level are interactive or gamified, which allows students and teachers to reset from the school day.
He also said he's noticed a gap in higher education teacher training programs around phonics and “the science of reading.” Morton said he hopes that if they can show the effectiveness of these strategies in their work, it will help create a shift at the post-secondary level.
Butler, the former CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, also said strengthening Mississippi's teacher training programs remains one of her key focuses. She said the programs have made improvements but there is still a lack of accountability for higher education programs.
“Until they are required to do something differently, we're always going to be retraining teachers,” Butler said.
The Mississippi Department of Education attempted to address this issue in 2016 by requiring candidates to pass the Foundations of Reading assessment to receive an elementary education license.
Morton is excited by the growth students in the program are experiencing, with some of the schools they serve in Clarksdale also seeing improvements in their accountability grades. But even in the years where the program hasn't seen huge improvements, his team still considers it a success.
“Each year we've seen movement and growth,” said Becky Nider, director of programs for Reading Roadmap. “Maybe a kid doesn't go from being in the red to the green like we want, but we see them move through the red… We get to celebrate those small successes because it's not a small success for that child.”
This mindset of incremental progress is one that some teachers would like to see more consistently represented in discussions of the so-called “miracle.”
Langly Dunn, an elementary librarian in the West Tallahatchie School District, said her district can have both a celebratory attitude and a clear understanding of the work they have left to do. It's something she wishes politicians would also embody instead of “weaponizing and politicizing” the reading gains for their own benefit.
“When it comes to reading, the gains aren't zero-sum,” she said. “It's not like ‘we solved all problems and the way that we teach reading in Mississippi is perfect in every district, in every school, in every classroom all the time' or ‘the results are unreliable'. It doesn't have to be one of those two things. We can have made great strides and still interrogate what's left for us to do.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1892
MAY 21, 1892
Crusading journalist Ida B. Wells published a column exposing the lynchings of African-American men and denouncing claims that the lynchings were meant to protect white women.
Her anti-lynching campaign came after a mob killed three of her friends, who had reportedly opened a grocery store that competed with a white-owned store in Memphis.
Upset by Wells' writings, a white mob destroyed her presses and threatened to kill her if she ever published again. She left Memphis for Chicago, but she continued to expose lynchings, calling for national legislation to make lynching a crime.
In 1898, she took her protest to the White House.
“Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 and 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless,” she wrote. “We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home.”
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which opened in 2018, features a reflection space in honor of her.
Congress finally passed an anti-lyncing law in the 2021-22 session. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act defines lynching as a federal hate crime.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1961
MAY 20, 1961
A white mob of more than 300, including Klansmen, attacked Freedom Riders at the Greyhound Bus Station in Montgomery, Alabama. Future Congressman John Lewis was among them.
“An angry mob came out of nowhere, hundreds of people, with bricks and balls, chains,” Lewis recalled.
After beating on the riders, the mob turned on reporters and then Justice Department official John Seigenthaler, who was beaten unconscious and left in the street after helping two riders.
“Then they turned on my colleagues and started beating us and beat us so severely, we were left bloodied and unconscious in the streets of Montgomery,” Lewis recalled.
As the mob headed his way, Freedom Rider James Zwerg said he asked for God to be with him, and “I felt absolutely surrounded by love. I knew that whether I lived or died, I was going to be OK.”
The mob beat him so badly that his suit was soaked in blood.
“There was nothing particularly heroic in what I did,” he said. “If you want to talk about heroism, consider the Black man who probably saved my life. This man in coveralls, just off of work, happened to walk by as my beating was going on and said ‘Stop beating that kid. If you want to beat someone, beat me.' And they did. He was still unconscious when I left the hospital.”
To quell the violence, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent in 450 federal marshals.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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