Ask most people where student achievement is strongest, and they’ll point to the Northeast: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut—the usual suspects. And that’s been mostly true. These states have stronger tax bases and serve (on average) wealthier populations. They have long invested more in public education and built systems to protect it. Money won’t solve all your problems in education, but it certainly gives you more options. And states like New York and Vermont spend nearly twice the national average per student, giving them a long-standing edge when it comes to resourcing schools.
But a different view of the latest NAEP results—reflected in the Urban Institute’s adjusted rankings—show the Northeast isn’t alone at the top of the leaderboard anymore.
Mississippi is the only state in the country to see gains across all performance levels over the last decade. Louisiana ranked fourth nationally overall and was one of just a few states to surpass its pre-pandemic reading scores. Across the South, we’re seeing bright spots in closing the achievement gap, at a time when most of the country is slipping.
Why now? What’s changed?
One line about the adjusted analysis jumped out at me in this article from The 74. It was from John White, who served as Louisiana’s state superintendent from 2012 to 2020—where I was his chief of staff—and launched Watershed Advisors with us in 2020:
If you look at the states at the top of the Urban Institute list, you would have to say that it’s almost synonymous with those that have said, "We take seriously our role as leaders of classroom- and school-level change, and we don’t see ourselves just as rule makers and check writers."
Since then, John and I have been talking about why the South is making real progress while much of the country is stalling—and whether there’s something structural about the design of these systems that’s making that progress possible.
We landed on a few theories that I wanted to share in hopes of getting your feedback and additions:
1. Fewer, larger districts
In many Southern states, school districts are organized by county. That means fewer districts overall and more capacity within each one. For example: In Louisiana, the average school district serves 9,342 students. In New Jersey, school districts serve 2,529 on average. These differences in scale matter for kids—because with each additional district, you get more implementation chains from statehouse to classroom that get longer, slower, and harder to manage.
Some states have so many school districts that they’ve had to create entirely new layers of governance just to manage them. In Illinois, there are over 850 school districts, so the state relies on Regional Departments of Education with elected leaders as intermediaries between the state and local districts. That means one more layer between state policy and classroom practice, and one more entity that needs already-scarce funding.
Compare Illinois to Florida, which has just sixty-nine districts, or Louisiana, with seventy-two. In those states, it’s easier to align vision, communicate expectations, and move support into classrooms. This doesn’t mean a huge state like California should only have sixty-nine districts, but it probably does mean 800 is too many.
Fewer districts mean fewer handoffs, fewer intermediaries between the statehouse and students, fewer contracts to negotiate or renegotiate, and a better shot at ensuring that what’s decided at the capitol actually reaches the classroom the way it was intended.
2. Appointed state superintendents
Leadership matters, and the way states choose their top education leaders can shape everything that follows. In the South, most state superintendents are appointed—only Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Oklahoma still elect them.
Elected superintendents are inherently more tied to politics: They have to campaign, raise money, respond to headlines, and worry about reelection. These competing priorities can prompt candidates to focus on sensational or trendy issues and leave long-term planning and core academics to fall by the wayside.
Ryan Walters in Oklahoma is a case in point. His public messaging is almost entirely about guns, abortion, gender norms, and ideological battles that have nothing to do with instruction. Most elected superintendents are not so cravenly political, but even those with the best intentions and qualifications are juggling an additional consideration on every decision.
That’s not to say elected superintendents can’t lead well—some are doing real, good work. But broadly speaking, it’s harder to stay focused on what’s best for students when you’re also trying to win an election.
Appointed superintendents aren’t free from politics, but they are one step removed. They don’t have to dial donors or fend off attack ads. And while the good ones are certainly political practitioners, they’re not campaigning in public elections.
Appointed superintendents tend to be career educators focused on the nuts and bolts of teaching and learning. Because they are less directly under the pressure of capital P Politics, they are better positioned to take bold action for kids—whether that means overhauling curriculum, holding the line on standards, or investing in teacher development that takes years to pay off.
Lasting improvement depends on leaders who can stay the course, long enough to see reforms through. Appointed superintendents tend to serve longer terms than their elected counterparts. In fact, seven of the ten longest-serving state superintendents in the country were appointed, not elected.
If we want leaders who can play the long game for kids, we have to pay attention to structure.
3. No laurels to rest on
Right now, every part of the country is facing an education crisis: in the South, in the Northeast, everywhere. The 2024 NAEP results made it painfully clear: nearly every state is moving in the wrong direction.
But not every state feels the same pressure to act.
In places that have historically ranked low on education outcomes, states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana—leaders haven’t had the option to look away. They’ve been forced to name the crisis out loud, confront it head-on, and create the conditions for change. That kind of candor builds urgency, and it gives leaders the political cover to make hard choices.
Carey Wright, Mississippi’s former state superintendent, didn’t sugarcoat the data or shy away from hard conversations. Back in 2020, she said it plainly:
We desperately needed higher academic standards. So we adopted those standards, and they gave us the foundation to raise the bar for children in Mississippi.
For her, improving literacy wasn’t one priority among many, it was the only path forward. And as the Education Daly recently pointed out, that clarity helped Mississippi become the fastest improving school system in the country.
Now compare that to Massachusetts. Year after year, it tops the national rankings—but since 2013, the gap between the highest- and lowest-performing readers in the state has widened by more than twenty points. Yet, the state’s official post-NAEP press release still boasts: “Massachusetts Ranks #1 in National Education Assessment.”
When the dominant narrative is that you’re leading the nation, it can undercut the urgency to fix what’s not working. Too often, states look at the headline data and stop there, not at subgroup performance or what’s happening beneath the surface.
We need to recognize that even the highest-performing states are far from delivering on their promise of a high-quality education for every student. The states making the most progress now aren’t the ones celebrating where they’ve been. They’re the ones asking, every day: Where are we still falling short, and what are we going to do about it?
Editor's note: This was first published in Watershed Advisor's The Delta newsletter.
