The Southern Surge Is Leaving Georgia Behind.
If you pay any attention to news about America’s K-12 education system, you’ve likely heard of the “Mississippi Miracle” or the “Southern Surge.” The terms refer to the impressive learning gains students in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee have made in recent years.
Pretty much the only good-news story in education through the first half of 2025 has been the “Southern Surge”—the impressive National Assessment of Educational Progress gains posted by Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee amidst an otherwise dreary landscape. Well, last month, I went down to Louisiana to help kick off the state’s 2025 Teacher Leader Summit with state chief Cade Brumley. While I’m admittedly skeptical of edu-convenings, I found this show pretty impressive: three carefully orchestrated days honoring 7,000 “teacher leaders” at the New Orleans Convention Center.
I don’t want to dwell on the summit, other than to note that it was heartening to see a state putting this kind of thought into teachers. (I used to urge this sort of thing back when I penned The Cage-Busting Teacher in 2015, and Louisiana is a pioneer on this count.) But I do think it’s worth being clear about just how well Louisiana and its southern brethren are doing. As Brumley told me earlier this spring, “Our 4th grade scores have led the country in reading growth for the past two NAEP cycles and ranked in the top five for math growth.” Louisiana is the only state in the nation where 4th-grade reading achievement on NAEP has surpassed pre-pandemic levels. In other words, this isn’t one of those foundation-fueled PR exercises—the results are real.
By comparison, Georgia’s 2024 NAEP scores remained flat when compared to the 2022 results, and are at or just below the national average. In other words, our neighbors are surging while we’re standing still.
What then are these states doing that we are not? One key area that Georgia has tried to address is literacy.
It has been known for many decades that for a student to perform well in school, they need to be able to read at grade level by the third grade. Examining the four surging states, they have taken steps to address this issue, in the case of Mississippi, a decade ago.
Rep. Bethany Ballard and Sen. Billy Hickman have led Georgia’s effort to improve literacy. These two champions authored bills to require literacy curriculum to be based on the “science of reading,” banned the ineffective “three cueing” reading technique, and created the Georgia Literacy Council to implement the legislation. That’s when the fun began.
The Georgia Literacy Council made recommendations on what “high-quality instructional materials” (HQIM) Georgia should adopt when teaching students how to read. The Georgia Department of Education added other HQIMs to the list that, when evaluated by third-party experts, were found to be not high-quality at all. Nevertheless, those HQIMs were approved for use in Georgia classrooms.
Karen Vaites of the Curriculum Insight Project has been observing and writing about the Southern Surge for some time now. Her most recent Substack took a look at how things are going in Georgia. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but the early returns are not good. While there are several outstanding HQIMs approved for use, local school districts can choose HQIMs of lesser quality and efficacy. Guess what many districts did?
Sadly, Georgia districts didn’t select the best options. Among districts using approved programs, most selected basals. The programs with stronger evidence of efficacy (CKLA and Bookworms2 with standout performance in studies, EL Education with frequent use in top-performing states Louisiana and Tennessee) have much less traction in Georgia.
A quarter of districts use approved “supplemental bundles.” This isn’t always bad: it includes districts using Wit & Wisdom, a strong curriculum designed to be paired with a foundational supplement. Also, Georgia has banned materials with three-cueing. None the less, that 25% is a black box.
Here’s the biggest concern:
The curriculum used in Georgia have little in common with the curricula in Louisiana and Tennessee, the two states with surging reading outcomes (emphasis by the author). That matters – a lot.
If you don’t want districts to make poor choices, don’t authorize the use of materials known to be of poor quality. Vaites has more bad news:
Ultimately, Georgia is a case study in implementation failure–stalled reading scores in spite of passing reading legislation in 2019, 2023, and 2025. Not only have most districts selected mediocre programs, they’re apparently also dragging their feet on state-mandated training. In addition, local advocates worry about the mixed-quality state screener list.
There are some bright spots…in districts that made wise choices:
In Marietta City Schools, investments in structured literacy have paid off. Marietta invested in well-trained reading specialists in 2021, and by 2023, it was outpacing the state in reading gains by a factor of 5. Unsurprisingly, Marietta made excellent curriculum choices, adopting Wit & Wisdom in 2024, paired with UFLI for foundational skills. The smart curriculum selections are part of a broader effort: Marietta provides intervention during the school day for underperforming students and it has piloted after-school tutoring for struggling third graders. Its “success spans across all demographics. Black, disabled and economically disadvantaged students all saw double-digit gains in proficient literacy rates.” You love to see it.
Friends, in a few short weeks, the 2026 session of the Georgia Legislature will begin. I learned the hard way that it’s hard to pass a new law to tell agencies to comply with existing law, but pressure must be brought to bear somehow. I’d love to see Committee Hearings on this, where the folks charged by law with implementing our new literacy legislation are brought forward and asked questions about the decisions they’ve made. In addition, we have elections coming up in 2026. Every candidate for Governor, State Superintendent of Schools, Lt. Governor, and the Legislature will tell you they want to make education in this state great. Asking them questions about the implementation of our literacy laws seems like a good place to start.
Are we as a state content to be hovering around the national average in reading and math (the national average is sliding downward, BTW)? Are we content to sit by and watch our neighbors give their students a shot at a better life while our students tread water? This will eventually translate into good-paying jobs flowing into those states and increased economic opportunity for their citizens. How long can we hang on to our “best state for business” designation if we fall farther and farther behind other southern states?
Well, what are we going to do about it?
