To hear some tell the story, the fundamental problem with education is inadequate funding. If only taxpayers would pony up more dollars, goes the line, students would excel. How much is enough? The answer from the teachers’ unions is always “more.”
Colorado’s $43.9 billion education budget is “far less than what school leaders say they need,” Chalkbeat reports. Of course it is. There is no conceivable budget for which the response would not be “we need more.”
But news from Mississippi and Alabama challenges the presumption that the fundamental issue is funding. Methodology seems to be more important. In other words, teachers actually teaching students more consistently makes a big difference.
The Colorado advantage
Colorado spends $16,410 per student for 2025, according to World Population Review. This roughly lines up with estimates from the Colorado Department of Education of $15,752 per student for the 2023–24 school year. Mississippi, by contrast, spends $12,394, while Alabama spends $13,461. Of course both those states have lower costs of living. Still, it’s hard to argue that students in those states have a big spending advantage.
Colorado has a big advantage in parents’ education, with 44% of the population sporting a bachelor’s degree or higher. By contrast, the figure is 25% for Mississippi and 27% for Alabama.
Colorado also has a huge advantage in poverty rates. Colorado has one of the lowest poverty rates in the nation at 9.3% (looking at 2023 numbers). Mississippi has nearly double that rate at 18%, while Alabama comes in at nearly 16%.
Given these figures, you’d expect Colorado students to radically outperform students from Mississippi and Alabama on standardized tests. What we find instead is that Colorado students do score better, but not by much.
If we look at results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “Nation’s Report Card,” we find the following average scores for fourth grade math for 2024: Colorado 239, Mississippi 239, and Alabama 236. The NAEP considers a score of 208 here to show “basic” understanding, a score of 238 to indicate proficiency, and a score of 268 to show advanced understanding.
Dropping the ball
To emphasize the point: Colorado fourth graders are doing as well as Mississippi students in math and barely better than Alabama students. That should serve as a blaring siren that something is seriously wrong with the school system in Colorado.
If we turn to fourth grade reading, we find that Colorado students scored an average of 221. The numbers are 219 in Mississippi and 213 in Alabama. Again, Colorado fourth graders are barely doing better than students in two of the poorest states in the country.
Let’s look at some of the details about those other states. “Alabama is the only state where 4th-grade math scores are higher now than they were in 2019, before the pandemic,” NPR reported in March. The story focuses on DeKalb County. One factor is that students there “returned for in-person learning in the fall of 2020, well ahead of schools in most places across the country” (during the pandemic). But another ingredient is the schools’ embrace of math manipulables in lower grades over wrote memorization to foster intuitive learning. I’m a huge believer in this, having used things like counting blocks and fraction wheels with my son when he was younger.
What about Mississippi? As Tim Daly writes for Free Press (hat tip Tyler Cowen), “Mississippi has become the fastest-improving school system in the country.” When the Urban Institute adjusted for demographics, Daly writes, it found Mississippi students at or near the top in reading and math for first and fourth grade. Daly points out that throughout the country “education spending has risen significantly over the past decade . . . but student outcomes have not risen.” Something else is going on in Mississippi.
The 74 reports “there really was a ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in reading.” That article cites another from Mississippi First, in which Grace Breazeale outlines key components of Mississippi’s success: literacy coaches for low-performing schools, universal screening assessments, better communication with parents, stricter standards for advancing grades, and “scientifically research-based reading instruction” (i.e., phonics-based).
In other words, to a greater extent, Mississippi teachers checked to see if students knew how to read and then taught them how to read. I know, it sounds revolutionary.
If Colorado schools would get at least as serious about math and reading as Alabama and Mississippi have become, on top of the many advantages many Colorado students already have, just imagine what our students could achieve.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
