Alabama Offers Three Tricks to Fix Poor Urban Schools
20th February 2026
The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.
Just six years ago Democratic states looked like they were better at educating children than Republican ones. Their pupils scored higher on reading and maths tests. But since the pandemic students in places like Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas have shot up the national rankings.
Gee, I wonder why? Perhaps by eliminating Woke indoctrination and actually teaching facts and skills?
Adjust the results for such things as student poverty, and the “southern surge” is even more impressive. On a ranking compiled by the Urban Institute, a think-tank, Mississippi comes top (see chart 1). Florida, Texas and Louisiana also beat Massachusetts, the state that scores best when disadvantage is not taken into account.
Notice that they can’t give you straight data; it has to be ‘adjusted’—which is how we got the Climate Change Crisis.
It helps that red states have gone back to basics: legislators in state capitals have enacted new rules that require teaching reading via phonics and holding failing schools accountable. Those decisions matter a great deal for classrooms. But America is made up of more than 13,000 school districts, most of which have the autonomy to set policy, too. That gives cities and towns across the country the opportunity to run small experiments to figure out how to get students to learn—and then to double down on what works.
And there it is. Education majors need not apply.