Improving Student Achievement: What Red and Blue States Are Doing Right
This post was originally published on March 4, 2026 by Forbes. It is part of the Transforming Schools series, which shares effective practices and foundational research for educators, students, families, and policymakers who are reimagining schools as places where students are safe and can thrive academically, socially, and emotionally.
A number of recent articles have suggested that a small group of red states hold the key to education improvement in the country. The articles cite gains in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) adjusted for the degree of student disadvantage in the state. Mississippi has been widely recognized for its rapid climb to 1st in the country in 4th-grade reading on this adjusted metric, and a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof pointed to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama as the “three red states that are the best hope in schooling,” as they saw gains in 4th-grade reading while most other states saw declines during the pandemic.
There are lessons to learn from recent gains in these states, especially from Mississippi and Louisiana, which have made substantial progress. (More on that below.) At the same time, these states still have a distance to travel to join the highest performers in the US. Overall, in 2024, Alabama still ranked 48th and 45th, respectively, on 8th-grade math and reading on NAEP; Louisiana ranked 42nd and 28th on these measures; and Mississippi ranked 35th and 41st—below the national average in both subjects.
There are also important lessons to learn from states that have long ranked among the very top performers on national assessments. Massachusetts, for example, has been the top-scoring state in both 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math for more than 2 decades, ranking 1st in both adjusted and unadjusted scores in 8th-grade reading in 2024—meaning that it outscores other states both overall and when student demographics are taken into account.
Three other blue states and a purple state—Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New Hampshire—rank 2nd through 5th in the country in 8th-grade reading. In math, Massachusetts and New Jersey appear again in the top five states. The others include blue Minnesota, purple Wisconsin, and red Utah—a state that holds the honor of the most equitably distributed school funding in the country in relation to student needs.
There is no one party that holds all the answers. If we want to plot a strong path forward, we should be asking about the states— red, blue, or purple —that are performing well overall and on these adjusted measures and have been doing so for an extended period of time. As conservative commentator Robert Pondiscio recently noted in a thoughtful op-ed: “Studying successful schools matters. Studying enduring success matters more.”
To know which policies matter most, we need a shared understanding of what is actually working, especially in the settings where reforms have proved long-lasting and sustainable.
What’s Important for Understanding State Performance?
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the U.S. Department of Education through the National Center on Education Statistics, provides the nation’s most reliable long-term measure of student achievement. It tracks trends in reading and math, and less frequently, science and writing, to examine how states and the country are progressing on a common scale. The recent analysis from the Urban Institute adjusts scores for student demographics, offering a useful way to compare states that serve very different populations of students by controlling statistically for some of the differences associated with poverty, language background, or student disabilities.
While statistical adjustments to the scores based on student demographics are informative, it’s also important to remember they don’t change the actual performance of the students taking the test—something industries that settle in states consider when they evaluate the extent to which they will encounter a well-educated workforce. An understanding of both overall performance and adjusted scores is useful for a more complete picture of state performance.
It is also important to use a fuller lens than 4th-grade scores. In this article, I look primarily at 8th-grade NAEP scores, because there are two substantial sources of potential distortion in the comparability of 4th-grade NAEP scores across states: the outcomes of grade retention policies and the size of English learner (EL) populations.
About 20 states now have policies that require holding students back in 3rd grade if they score low on a reading test. The rigor of the tests and cut points varies across states. Some states allow for exemptions; others do not, so the results also vary. Some states (like Mississippi) provide extensive interventions to students that prevent many from ultimately being retained; others do not. These differences make the impacts of such policies difficult to generalize. In some cases, states with mandatory 3rd-grade retention policies will appear stronger on 4th-grade NAEP scores because large numbers of their lowest-performing students are excluded from the tested cohort in 4th grade.
What happens to those students after this point as they move through school is an important question. Most studies have found that students retained based on test scores do score higher when they get to the following grade, but their achievement is not always maintained thereafter. Many studies find that these students have higher dropout rates in secondary school. (This can also increase scores when low-performers leave the school population.)
States with fewer English learners also appear more advantaged on 4th-grade tests than those with many ELs, because it takes 5 to 7 years to acquire a new language. Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi have fast-growing populations of ELs, but they are still far lower than states like California and Texas, which serve about four times as many ELs as a share of their populations. For example, half of California’s kindergartners speak a language other than English at home, and most are not fluent in English when they first start school. However, the large majority become fluent within 7 years and, on average, outscore their monolingual English counterparts thereafter in both English language arts and math.
At 8th grade, where the impact of schools over time on a student’s learning is clearer, five of the top 10 states in 8th-grade reading on NAEP in 2024 appear on both the unadjusted and demographically adjusted state rankings: Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. That means that these demographically diverse states (all blue) are doing relatively better than other states for their population as a whole and for their students from low-income backgrounds and English learners. The other states on the list that are high achieving overall (Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Utah) are not as demographically diverse and do not score at the top of the adjusted rankings. Those that are more racially and economically diverse and thus given bigger statistical adjustments—including Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—are not yet high achieving overall, even though progress is being made.
What Can We Learn From High-Achieving States?
There is much conversation about what states need to do to increase scores and close gaps in student achievement and which states we should be looking to for answers. Examining a broader set of high-achieving or steeply improving states—red and blue—and unpacking their approaches to raising student achievement provides a fuller and more accurate picture of the direction states should be heading. It turns out that in some respects the approaches are remarkably similar.
School Funding Reforms
Many studies have shown that school funding reforms that increase and equalize per-pupil dollars have positive effects on school outcomes, especially for historically underserved students.
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey all undertook major reforms of their school finance systems several decades ago—increasing funding for schools and equalizing funds to bring more resources to districts serving higher-need students—and all saw dramatic gains in achievement with reductions in achievement gaps within a decade thereafter. Connecticut and Massachusetts undertook reforms that produced advances in equity, adequacy, and achievement during the late 1980s and early 1990s. New Jersey made great strides a decade later. As a “majority-minority” state, New Jersey holding a position as one of the top-achieving states in the country has been particularly noteworthy. These states perform at levels comparable to the highest-achieving nations in the world on the Program for International Student Assessment.
Illinois has joined this group more recently as it has begun to see the impacts of a school funding reform launched in 2017 to bring greater resources to schools serving students with greater needs. The new Evidence-Based Funding formula is to be fully funded by 2027, undoing the deep inequities that had characterized the state in recent decades.
Investments in Instructional Quality
These high-performing states also did several things that changed the nature and quality of instruction. Investments in instruction, especially high-quality teachers, were found to leverage the largest marginal gains in performance.
Connecticut was the first state to leverage major changes in teacher salaries, preparation, and ongoing training as part of its funding strategy, along with a major literacy initiative rooted in a comprehensive view of the science of reading, and a significant curriculum effort in other subjects as new standards were adopted.
Massachusetts tackled new standards, curriculum, and assessments focused on 21st-century learning goals in a major way, adopting rigorous expectations and tests requiring open-ended responses demonstrating critical thinking and writing skills. Like Connecticut, it developed a comprehensive literacy approach long before a science of reading conversation swept the country, coupled with more rigorous preparation for teachers. And it launched statewide preschool and child health initiatives. Connecticut and Massachusetts were also pioneers in developing strong supports for students with special education needs and, later, for English learners.
New Jersey finally increased and equalized school funding in the late 1990s after 30 years of equity lawsuits, creating “parity funding” for districts serving concentrations of students from low-income backgrounds that had been deeply underfunded for many years. Funds were allocated to implement a new curriculum linked to the state standards; support whole-school reform; provide early childhood education for 3- and 4-year-olds along with full-day kindergarten; enable class-size reductions; and support health, social services, alternative, and summer school programs to help students catch up. It achieved the highest graduation rates in the country—tied with Iowa—and among the highest levels of achievement, generally neck and neck with Massachusetts.
How Steeply Improving States Are Closing the Gap
The Urban Institute’s analysis of the most improved states pre- and post-pandemic between 2019 and 2022 combined demographically adjusted scores for 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math. Nine states—red, blue, and purple—showed large gains: Alabama, California, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, South Dakota, and Texas. Four of the nine—Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada—sustained their 4th-grade reading and math improvements through 2024 even as progress in many states stalled. They were joined by Indiana and New York, the latter having had by far the nation’s largest gains in 4th-grade mathematics. All of these states warrant careful study if they continue their progress.
Mississippi and Louisiana, in particular, are worthy of attention. Mississippi held 1st first place in demographically adjusted scores in 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math in 2024, with Louisiana just behind. Mississippi’s rapid rise in reading scores at the 4th-grade level gained national acclaim over the last decade. In 2006, Mississippi ranked 46th in the nation in 4th-grade reading, and it climbed to the national average by 2019. While many articles suggest that this occurred as a function of a switch to phonics instruction, and some others note the impact of 3rd-grade retention on the 4th-grade cohort, the actual reform that led to the success was more complex.
Investments in Instructional Quality
Much like Connecticut and Massachusetts had previously done, Mississippi used insights from research to establish the components of a robust, multifaceted literacy policy. The state outlined a literacy block for elementary students in kindergarten and early primary grades. These include the elements described in a recent synthesis of evidence from the science of reading, which notes that, in addition to explicit, systematic instruction that supports decoding, students benefit from rich conversations and books read aloud in the classroom and at home, by frequent reading of connected texts that build on existing knowledge, in-depth discussions about texts, and explicit teaching of comprehension strategies. Materials include the use of culturally relevant texts that increase reading fluency and motivation to read, as well as content that develops background knowledge about the natural and social worlds. Research also demonstrates that teaching students how to write and increasing how much they write improves their word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension.
In line with this research, Mississippi’s guidance for literacy teaching includes explicit daily instruction in foundational skills along with daily opportunities for extended writing and for reading and discussing books while learning vocabulary and practicing comprehension. Far from the rote drill or scripted curriculum featured in caricatures of phonics instruction, Mississippi’s guidance specifies that worksheets should not be used with young children and that most of this learning should happen in hands-on learning centers in each classroom that allow for differentiation of tasks depending on what each student needs.
Additionally, in Mississippi, classroom libraries offer a range of texts that students can choose according to their reading needs and interests. Teachers spend a small amount of time in whole-class instruction and more of their time working with small groups on the skills they need, which is made possible by the fact that kindergarten and 1st-grade classrooms with no more than 24 students are expected to include trained teaching assistants. Students are regularly assessed for progress, and specific interventions are put in place for those who need them. The state, which has created a literacy division in its department of education, provides professional development along with trained literacy coaches to high-need schools to offer support to teachers.
Louisiana followed Mississippi’s lead as it reformed literacy instruction and then mathematics instruction in the early grades. In addition, under previous Commissioner John White, it did important work on more thoughtful curriculum guidance, engaging teachers in leading curriculum reviews and offering widespread, free professional development, then designing innovative assessments mapped to the curriculum.
School Funding Reforms
Mississippi’s progress has not only been due to its very thoughtful literacy reforms. It has experienced a decade of significant investment, including an increase of per-pupil expenditures of 73% between 2016–17 and 2025–26, even as enrollments declined significantly, and an historic 2022 teacher pay raise. Last year featured another pay raise for teachers and an 18% pay raise for teaching assistants, who play a major role in the individualization needed for targeted literacy instruction in the early grades.
Louisiana has also substantially increased education funding, with a 34% increase in funding over the last decade, even as enrollment was declining, and pay raises for teachers, with additional permanent pay raises for teachers proposed for the 2026–27 school year, pending voter approval of a constitutional amendment.
The Common Threads Across the Political Tapestry
There is much more that could be said about the educational strategies in these high-achieving and steeply improving states. What is clear when one looks across East and West, North and South, is that the states that have built lasting educational success—whether Massachusetts in the 1990s or Mississippi today—have done so through patient, systemic investment in schools and in the people who work in them. They invested in schools based on student needs; prepared and supported teachers seriously; and built coherent instructional systems rather than chasing singular reforms. These are not red or blue lessons; they are simply what works. If we are to make progress in public education, we need to evaluate what works across political and geographic borders to the fundamental systemic elements that support learning for all students.