Powerline by John Hinderaker 10/2/2025
You may have heard that Mississippi has become a leader in K-12 education. My first inkling of this was when my colleague Catrin Wigfall dug through statistics and found that Mississippi’s black and Hispanic students perform better than Minnesota’s in both reading and math, and their scores are getting better while ours are getting worse. We have been relentlessly publicizing these facts, which are obviously uncomfortable for liberals in free-spending Minnesota, for several years.
Now, as Mississippi continues to improve, others have caught on. The liberal Urban Institute looked at fourth-grade reading, a key metric by which schools are judged, and adjusted the scores demographically to account for race and income levels. Mississippi places first, with Louisiana second:
A few blue states, like Massachusetts, do well. But for the most part, it is red states clustered near the top. Minnesota, as you would expect, fares poorly, ranking 39th. It would be interesting to run a regression analysis, comparing per student spending with 4th grade reading results. I suspect you might find that spending is inversely correlated to results.
More:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/10/what-states-have-the-best-schools.php
