What's Really Behind the "Southern Surge"?

Education advocate Karen Vaites appears to have coined the term “Southern Surge” to describe recent improvements in reading scores in four Southern states: Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama. Shortly after scores on national reading tests for fourth and eighth graders came out early this year, she wrote a couple of pieces pointing out that these states had shown remarkable progress.

Mississippi used to be reliably at or near the bottom when compared to other states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Now it’s soared to ninth in the nation for fourth grade reading.

Between 2019 and 2024, Louisiana moved up from 50th place in that category to 16th, leading the nation in reading growth for the second consecutive cycle.

Tennessee, according to Vaites, “topped the country for growth of its eighth graders,” and Alabama was one of only two states to show growth in fourth grade since 2019.

When adjusted for demographics, these states look even better. Seen through that lens, Mississippi and Louisiana are currently in the first and second spots in fourth-grade reading. In 2019, Alabama was 49^th for low-income fourth-graders; now it’s tied for 31^st. “We need a LOT more coverage of these success stories,” Vaites urged.

She seems to be getting her wish—sort of. While Vaites’s pieces were thorough and nuanced, the coverage that has ensued has vastly oversimplified the situation, reducing the success stories to “more phonics” and “more test-based accountability.” If people take that coverage at face value—and use misleading information to try to replicate the formula for success—we’re likely to see continued widespread failure.

Parts of Vaites’s message appear to have come through—the part about teacher training being important, the part about curriculum being important too, and maybe even the part about the importance of grounding teacher training in a specific curriculum. But other crucial points have gotten lost.

Phonics Only Gets You So Far

Let’s start with the “more phonics” oversimplification. Phonics instruction is important, but it only gets you so far.

Phonics-focused reforms can boost state test scores in the elementary grades, but those gains fade out by middle school. That’s largely because as grade levels go up, reading proficiency increasingly depends not just on the ability to decipher, or decode, individual words but also on the ability to understand complex text. The fade-out