Want better schools? It’s all up to states.

Southern states have historically underperformed in educational achievement. But a recent rise in test scores in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee has led some experts and journalists to describe the “Southern surge” as one of the few bright spots in U.S. education over the past several years.

According to the Education Recovery Scorecard, Alabama ranked first among states in math recovery and third in reading, Louisiana ranked second in math recovery and first in reading, Mississippi sixth in math recovery and fourth in reading, and Tennessee third in math recovery and ninth in reading.

The scorecard is a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, and faculty at Dartmouth College, to compare learning loss between 2019 and 2024.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Thomas Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics, and the center’s faculty director, spoke about the lessons for other states.

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Why have the recent educational gains in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee become such a big story?

It’s a big story that we all ought to be paying attention to because the federal government essentially handed power over K-12 decisions back to states in 2015. That was a decade ago, and nationally, achievement has been declining.

I think it’s largely because a lot of states, including Massachusetts, were not ready to take the reins. And this subset of Southern states has undertaken ambitious reforms to the way they teach literacy that seem to be paying off in terms of improved student achievement.

State leadership matters more than ever, and we ought to be encouraging states to step up with ambitious efforts to reverse the decline.

Your center examines educational policies and their impact on students’ achievement. Did the data surprise you and your team?

Part of what we’re trying to do at the center is highlight not just states, but individual districts that have been improving. For instance, Compton in Los Angeles is a low-income community that has made unusual progress since 2019. Union City is a low-income district in New Jersey, and they too have seen bigger increases than many of the higher income districts in the state.

The truth is that before 2015, many states, including Massachusetts, were making a lot of progress. But over the last decade, policymakers in many states have been leery about investing their political capital in education reform because they fear controversies.

We need to remind them that investing in state and local efforts to improve K-12 education leads to educational progress. In our center, we’re trying to provide evidence on the specific policies that are making a difference to inspire other communities and states to do the same.

What are the factors behind the success stories in the Southern states?

Unfortunately, we don’t know which policies these states have pursued were most important. For instance, Mississippi, which now ranks sixth in math recovery and fourth in reading, invested a lot in literacy coaches. Based on other research I’ve seen, the literacy coaches might have been a critical part of the Mississippi success.

Massachusetts is working on literacy reforms that don’t include much funding for coaches, but they include some of the other less controversial aspects of the Mississippi plan, like changing curricula and changing teacher training.

Our center is studying whether specific policies, like teacher coaching or student grade retention, are the key moving parts — so that states don’t just pick the most uncontroversial (and ineffective) aspects of the Southern state initiatives.

What changes did Louisiana and Alabama implement?

Louisiana provided state incentives for districts to change their curricula in math and literacy and also provided state support to retrain teachers in how to use those new materials. It also made it easier for districts to combine funding across different federal funding streams to pursue priorities and cleared away some of the red tape involved in federal funding.

Alabama passed a Numeracy Act in 2022, and provided math coaches to low-performing schools and funding for summer learning, especially for students in early grades.

But I hesitate to say that every state should do exactly the same thing because we don’t yet have good evidence on which aspects of their plans made the most difference. Going forward, we want to help states learn which specific policies make a difference.

Can you explain the cases of Tennessee and Mississippi?

The literacy reforms in Mississippi go back to 2012, when they shifted their early literacy curricula to emphasize more phonics-based literacy instruction, which is sometimes referred to as the science of reading.

The state provided funding for coaches to work with teachers in early grades, starting with the schools that were struggling the most. They also had a requirement they believe was a critical part of their success, which was requiring students to pass a literacy test at the end of third grade before proceeding to fourth grade.

It was a controversial move. Massachusetts has shied away from that requirement. But it could turn out to be critical.

Tennessee offered training for its K-5 teachers in phonics-based literacy instruction. They did not invest in literacy coaches statewide, although I’m guessing some individual districts did it.

Mississippi and Alabama also use what are called universal screeners to try to identify kids that have dyslexia and other issues early rather than wait for them to fail in third or fourth grade.

One thing that Tennessee did, especially during the pandemic, was invest statewide in tutoring programs to help students catch up.

What are the lessons for other states?

The most important thing that states need to realize is that it’s up to them whether their students’ achievement recovers — or continues to fall.

There is not going to be any federal leadership on K-12 education. It’s not just the current stalemate in Washington. The federal government gave the power back to states in 2015, and the decline in students’ achievement began that year.

It got worse during the pandemic, but it started back in 2015.

States need to realize that if we’re going to turn this around, it will depend on their own leadership. Four states have clearly taken that message to heart: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Let’s hope that Massachusetts and other states decide to step up and show some leadership, too.