This commitment to high standards was the context in which Mississippi passed our now-famous literacy law in 2013. Under the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, Mississippi students who cannot read sufficiently by third grade are held back a year—“retained,” in education-policy parlance. Importantly, the law allows only very narrow exemptions, such that the overwhelming majority of children promoted to fourth grade must pass the state reading assessment in their first three tries. It also requires schools to screen students through state-approved assessments three times a year and send parents a letter reporting their child’s progress. These two accountability requirements made sure that everyone in the system would be in a hellfire hurry to teach children to read. No one wanted children to fail.
‘Civil liberties come first’
MaryJo Perry became a leader in the movement challenging vaccine mandates more than a decade ago. Perry said her son had experienced convulsions after a round of shots. When it came time to get his final pertussis vaccine, she tried to get a medical exemption. His pediatrician wrote to the health department three times, she said, but they kept turning him down.
Perry was not allowed to send him to school without that last shot, so she decided to homeschool.
“I just thought that was wrong, and I definitely thought it was unconstitutional,” Perry said.
She co-founded Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights, or MPVR, as a Facebook group in 2012. Soon, parents started meeting in person, then heading to the state capitol to ask legislators to loosen the vaccine laws.
#PairedTexts
1. States Are Learning the Wrong Lesson from the ‘Mississippi Miracle’ (www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...)
2. As RFK Jr allies hailed Mississippi’s rollback of strict school vaccine rules, whooping cough surged and a baby died (www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...)
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