Overall performance scores are down for Mississippi's public schools and districts. The Mississippi Department of Education released the state’s latest accountability report Thursday and the results were sobering.
Only 80.1% of schools and 87.2% of districts earned a grade of C or higher in the 2024-2025 academic year, a dramatic drop from the previous period. In 2023-2024, 85.7% of schools and 93.9% of districts earned a C or higher.
Shamira Muhammad
Mississippi accountability scores dip
Mississippi’s accountability scores are produced from the data of at least 14 different sources, including standardized tests, student growth and graduation rates. It measures growth at both the school and district level.
Mississippi's State Superintendent Lance Evans said the report indicated areas of growth, such as with the passing rate for third grade reading assessments, English learner progress and college and career readiness. He acknowledged that overall, there were several areas of concern. Proficiency scores in math, reading, science and U.S. history fell this year.
“Obviously, we are privy to the results before they become final,” he said. “So as we get those results back and start looking at them, we literally start analyzing every aspect of it before it even gets close to the time in which we start sending them out to the field. We did see some of the trends that were a little alarming, especially dealing with proficiency across our state.”
Overall graduation rates in the state also fell slightly from a 89.4% rate in 2023-2024 to 89.2% for the 2024-2025 school year.
“We did see those drops,” Evans said. “You don't necessarily know what the full gravity of it is early on, but the changes were far less than what I was originally worried that they would be.”
Districts have time to appeal scores, which will be factored into the overall report.
“There's a lot of work that goes on because there's lots of times over the course of assessment season that we'll have to rerun accountability a couple of times because what people don't realize is it's not just a big data dump to MDE and we just hit a button and it calculates it and it processes it,” Evans said.
Perhaps most notable in these scores is the states slight shift away from years of notable progress, a trend popularized as the “Mississippi Miracle.” Still, Evans said any academic progress will inevitably face moments of stagnation.
“When you have seen tremendous gains year after year after year over a period of eight, nine, working on 10 years, that is difficult to maintain no matter where you are, because the deal is, each year you have a large gain,” he said. “Well, now your starting line for that year is further ahead. Then, each year the starting line is further ahead.”
Some shifts on the report seemed particularly alarming. One school dropped from a “B” rating to an “F.”
Evans said that’s not completely surprising.
“That does happen every once in a while,” he said. “I always refer to that as like an outlier. If you're looking at a line of best fit, a scatterplot, that was way up there to the top. I don't know the reasons why necessarily. It could be leadership changes. Who knows? I would be completely speculating, which would not be appropriate.”
Evans said the department of education is researching reasons behind this year’s scores. The department will be making changes for the current school year, including expanding college and career readiness measures, eliminating the high school U.S. History assessment and increasing standards for the assignment of A-F grades.