Mississippi Changed How Reading Is Taught. The Children With the Least Margin Gained the Most.

Harold Robert Meyer The ADD Resource Center

Reviewed: August 2, 2026 · Published: August 3, 2026

A state that ranked 49th in fourth-grade reading now has Black fourth-graders outscoring their counterparts in Massachusetts, California, and most other States. There was no technology in it and nothing new. There was fundamentals, somebody watching, and short feedback loops – which is exactly what a child with ADHD requires, and exactly what most reading plans and most 504 plans do not have.

A parent sits across from a second-grade teacher and hears that her son is bright, kind, and not reading. The explanation offered is the usual one: he does not focus. He drifts. He rushes. Nobody asks whether he was taught to decode words explicitly, in sequence, enough times for it to hold. That question is not sentimental. It is the variable Mississippi changed – and the children who gained most were the ones with the least room to absorb bad instruction.

Key Takeaway

Reading failure in a child with ADHD is routinely attributed to attention when much of it belongs to instruction that was never explicit or intensive enough to survive an inattentive brain. Both causes are real; only one is usually investigated.

Why This Matters

Roughly twenty states now run third-grade reading laws modeled on Mississippi’s. Children with ADHD sit at the sharp end of them: they are about three times more likely to repeat a grade, and the statutory exemptions require documentation most families were never told to accumulate. The instructional half of this story is good news, and its transferable lesson is the follow-up loop, not the phonics. The accountability half requires acting early.

Key Findings

Between 25% and 40% of children with ADHD also meet criteria for a reading disability, and reading difficulty is common even in those who do not.
Children with ADHD are off-task during roughly a quarter of academic instruction, so identical exposure delivers unequal teaching.
Reading interventions work well here, with the strongest evidence for programs of at least 30 hours targeting decoding and phonemic awareness.
Children with ADHD are about three times more likely to be retained a grade.
Mississippi’s coaches spent two to three days a week inside a single school for a full year, observing and giving feedback – not a one-off training day.

What Mississippi Actually Did

The 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act is usually summarized as “they held kids back.” That is one clause. The rest mandated universal literacy screening three times a year from kindergarten through third grade, an individual reading plan for any child flagged, intervention delivered immediately rather than after a year of watching, and a statewide retraining of more than fifteen thousand teachers in how reading is actually acquired – phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, taught directly rather than absorbed from exposure to books.

Discussing the turnaround on CNN’s GPS on August 2, Nicholas Kristof told Fareed Zakaria there was no technology solution and no flashy reform in it: structured phonics, intensive coaching for teachers, early intervention, and a state that held its position for years instead of moving on to the next initiative. The state went from 49th in fourth-grade reading to near the top nationally, and its Black fourth-graders now outscore their counterparts in all but a couple of states, Massachusetts among those they passed.

The Part That Usually Gets Skipped: Somebody Watched

Most professional development is a day in an auditorium in August. Mississippi’s was not. The state placed literacy coaches in its lowest-performing schools, and each coach spent two to three days a week inside a single school for an entire year – observing actual lessons, modeling instruction, giving feedback close enough in time to be usable. The screening ran three times a year, so whether the children were actually learning got answered on a schedule rather than at the end.

That is the architecture: a method specific enough to be observed, somebody watching whether it was delivered as designed, and measurement frequent enough to catch a failing approach in weeks instead of years. The coaching network is widely credited as the reason the law produced change rather than remaining a paper requirement.

Anyone who has sat through an ADHD treatment plan should recognize the failure mode. A 504 plan written in October and never observed, an intervention nobody watches being delivered, a child re-measured once a year in the spring: that is a paper requirement. The plan is not the intervention. The loop is.

Why an Instructional Change Lands Hardest Here

A child with typical attention survives vague instruction. He misses a piece and reconstructs it later from context, repetition, a book at home. He has margin.

A child with ADHD has less. Michael Kofler’s group at Florida State found children with ADHD are off-task for roughly 25% of academic instruction and shift between attentive and inattentive states far more often than classmates. The lesson was delivered; it was not fully received. When the curriculum is systematic and explicit, those gaps get filled on the next scheduled pass. When it is not, they compound into a child who cannot decode unfamiliar words by fourth grade and has begun to conclude he is stupid.

This is why dosage matters more here. A 2023 meta-analysis found reading interventions highly effective for children with ADHD, identifying programs of at least 30 hours targeting decoding and phonemic awareness as meeting the threshold for evidence-based practice. Not enrichment. Not more reading time. Direct, sequenced, sufficient instruction in the code.

“When a child with ADHD is not reading, the first question is almost always about his attention and almost never about his instruction. Both deserve an answer, and only one of them is free to fix.” – Harold Robert Meyer

The Diagnostic Confusion Running Underneath

The confusion runs both ways. Willcutt and Pennington found reading disability tracks more strongly with inattention than with hyperactivity, with parents and teachers reporting those symptoms at similar rates across settings – so the inattention was not simply frustration at the reading table. The reverse trap is equally common: a child working at the edge of his decoding ability fatigues fast, loses his place, and looks exactly like a child who is not trying.

So “he has ADHD” does not explain a reading delay, and neither does “he needs to focus.” A child who cannot read nonsense words on demand has a decoding problem regardless of what else is true about him. Establishing that takes about ten minutes and is rarely done.

The Gate, and What It Asks of You

Mississippi’s law withholds promotion from third-graders scoring at the lowest achievement levels. The best causal evidence – Slungaard Mumma and Winters at Boston University’s Wheelock Educational Policy Center – found retention under the policy produced substantially higher sixth-grade English language arts scores, driven by Black and Hispanic students, with no significant effect on math, absences, or special education identification. That is a stronger result than critics usually concede. It is also silent on children with ADHD, who carry disproportionate exposure: Barbaresi and colleagues found them roughly three times more likely to be retained.

The statute’s good-cause exemptions are narrower than parents assume. The relevant one requires a student with a disability whose IEP or Section 504 plan reflects more than two years of intensive reading remediation with a deficiency still present. A diagnosis does not qualify a child. Neither does a 504 plan written last spring. What qualifies is a dated, multi-year record of intervention that did not work – built long before anyone says the word retention.

What To Do In Your Own District

Ask what reading curriculum your school uses and whether it teaches decoding explicitly and systematically. Ask for your child’s screening scores in numbers, not adjectives. If intervention has been provided, ask how many minutes per week, by whom, for how many weeks – then compare the total against 30 hours. Then ask the two follow-up questions almost nobody asks: who observes the intervention while it is happening, and how often is my child re-measured? Monthly is a loop. Annually is a hope. Request an evaluation in writing if reading is delayed; a school may not refuse simply because your child is passing. Keep every log, progress note, and plan in one dated file. In a third-grade-gate state, that file is not paperwork. It is your child’s exemption.

The Next Step

If your child is in kindergarten through third grade and reading is a worry, do one thing this week: email the teacher and ask, in writing, for the screening scores and the name of the reading program. A written request creates a dated record and produces a more precise answer than a hallway conversation. Everything else follows from what comes back.

Bibliography

Barbaresi, W. J., Katusic, S. K., Colligan, R. C., Weaver, A. L., & Jacobsen, S. J. (2007). Long-term school outcomes for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A population-based perspective. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 28(4), 265–273. https://doi.org/10.1097/DBP.0b013e31811ff87d

Chan, E. S. M., Shero, J. A., ??? [author list between Shero and Hand truncated in all retrieved records – verify against the published version] ???, Hand, E. D., Cole, A. M., Gaye, F., Spiegel, J. A., & Kofler, M. J. (2023). Are reading interventions effective for at-risk readers with ADHD? A meta-analysis. Journal of Attention Disorders, 27(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/10870547221130111 · Free full text (PMC)

George W. Bush Institute. (2023). Mississippi’s reading revolution. George W. Bush Presidential Center. https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/the-fix/mississippis-reading-revolution

Mississippi Department of Education. (n.d.). Literacy-Based Promotion Act. https://mdek12.org/literacy/lbpa/

Mississippi Department of Education. (n.d.). Mississippi success story: NAEP results. https://mdek12.org/superintendent/success/

Miss. Code Ann. § 37-177-11. Good cause exemption for promotion to grade 4 of student not meeting academic requirements. https://law.justia.com/codes/mississippi/title-37/chapter-177/section-37-177-11/

Slungaard Mumma, K., & Winters, M. A. (2023). The effect of retention under Mississippi’s test-based promotion policy (Working Paper 2023-1). Wheelock Educational Policy Center, Boston University. https://wheelockpolicycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/MississippiRetention_WP.pdf

Zakaria, F. (Host), & Kristof, N. (Guest). (2026, August 2). Fareed Zakaria GPS [Television broadcast segment on Mississippi’s reading gains]. CNN. ??? [segment aired the day of writing; no published transcript or archive page could be verified – confirm the air date and add the CNN transcript link before publishing] ???

Willcutt, E. G., & Pennington, B. F. (2000). Comorbidity of reading disability and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Differences by gender and subtype. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 33(2), 179–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/002221940003300206

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About the Author

Harold Robert Meyer is the founder and Managing Director of The ADD Resource Center, established in 1993. A Senior Certified ADHD Coach, author, and international speaker, he co-founded CHADD of New York in 1989 and later served on CHADD National’s board and executive committee, including as Vice President for Finance. He was elected to lead the Institute for the Advancement of ADHD Coaching. He can be reached at [email protected].

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