A Genealogy of The Southern Surge

Why Southerners still kinda remember how to make kids learn.

Earlier this year, there was a big stir about the unexpected surge in Deep South public education.

I’ve always known my home state of Louisiana as either 50th or 49th in public education scores, jostling back and forth with Mississippi. Alabama was always hanging down there with us as well. Magically, it seems, we all just leaped to the high-middle. If you adjust for demographics, whatever the hell that means, then you could argue that Mississippi was close to number one in the country.

Some people have since tried to downplay and discredit some of the more miraculous claims of the Mississippi Miracle, the most damning evidence being that a lot of the gains are lost by 8th grade. That is partially true. I looked into the numbers, and actually, not all of them regress and it’s getting better over time. Between 2013 and 2022 Mississippi roughly halved the 8th grade gap between itself and the nation, which is smaller than the 4th grade gains, but still good.

Critics also claim Mississippi juiced its numbers by retaining the lowest decile so those kids don’t have to sit for the test. On the surface it seems reasonable to say, well, if you just erase the held-back bottom decile then all your statistical improvements mostly vanish. Poof, no miracle. In real life, those kids aren’t erased. They come back and take the test again the next year, with substantial improvements. We know that because the average age is not meaningfully rising. On top of that, all deciles are improving here, even the top deciles.

So, there certainly is at least some hard-to-explain sudden improvement in deep south public education, especially in relation to the rest of the country, which itself is suffering a decline in education outcomes, particularly in literacy. Both of these facts, I think, can be explained culturally.

Most have tried to explain the Mississippi Miracle or the Southern Surge by the details of their policies. This is neither convincing nor interesting to me. There happens to be a great real-world comparison case to bear out my intuition: Michigan passed very similar policies as Mississippi, and they have seen almost none of the same improvements. The teachers, AFT-Michigan, the MEA, the Michigan Association of School Boards, and Michael Rice, the state superintendent of education in Michigan, were all completely unwilling to enforce those reforms. In fact, they did a political campaign to repeal them because they were worried that holding back would “traumatize” the kids. Even when the reforms were law, they allowed nine out of ten kids to go ahead by “good cause” exemptions. Nobody “sophisticated” wants to suggest that any child is dumber than any other child, ever. God forbid.

This points to the real underlying mechanism. Policy and the science of learning are fully downstream of the mere fact that education, particularly literacy, is something that happens to young people because you force it to. Southerners can do force, if nothing else.

The people who run our education system have, through a now mandatory ideology, given up on the idea that education is something that happens through an act of diligence, and instead succumbed to some kind of vaguely Rousseauian delusion that academic achievement happens when children are allowed to unabashedly follow their “natural” passions. In New York, they implemented a reading education system where the children were allowed to read whatever books they were interested in and were meant to learn the meanings of the words by guessing. This was publicly declared a total failure in 2023.

Phonics is a style of reading instruction that is, without a doubt, most effective. The reason “progressive” educators don’t like it is because, in order to teach children to read by this method, you have to force them to sound out meaningless phonetic portions of written language until they finally learn to associate it with natural speech after a long and tedious period, which you basically just have to force them to endure. Every child intuitively learns to speak, but unless you make them, they don’t really learn to read and write. That’s an important bridge to cross, obviously, because reading and writing is the only reason that we have a shared culture across distances. If you stop disciplining young children to learn to do it, people stop making a coherent culture. Surprise, surprise.

Still, the most incredible anthropological artifact of the Southern Surge is that it is an educational boon originating in the Deep South. It didn’t start in the usual cultural hubs on the coasts, and then maybe five, ten years later, bleed its way down through the Sunbelt. What’s unique about the Southern Surge is that while the rest of the country seems to be sinking, something bright seems to be originating from our normally murky depths. This is most unusual.

I remember an inferiority complex humming under the surface of the South when I was a kid: trends came here about five years after they hit the coasts. Believe it or not, though, Southern sensibilities were not always considered to be a mild retardation of Northern ones. The Southern accent, as my high school history teacher used to tell us, was seen as closer to the British aristocracy than the vulgate of the North (according to linguists, this is complicated and only sort of accurate, but true enough to be interesting). “Redneck” speech is, of course, crass and slurred, but so is the working class variant of any given dialect.

Southerners were once thought of as more interested in art, beauty, and the education of great people than were their Northern counterparts, who were more likely to bear the indignity of factory labor (and who, as a result, had much more total wealth and social mobility). The industrial revolution was more keenly embraced in the North, so the school systems were set up like factories, after the Prussian model, to train a sufficient working class; with rows of desks and bells and long working hours. Ellwood Cubberley, the guy who shaped American school administration more than anybody, put it like this: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.” On its own terms at the time, the system worked: it trained poor people to run the factories, which made the later abolition of slave labor not a total economic disaster.

By an ironic twist in the fabric, the very factory school built for the machinery that helped end slavery is now, in the post-information age, badly failing our children. We mostly no longer work in factories. We hardly work in offices. AI is here. Wisdom, tutelage, deep literacy, and classical morality seem to be returning as the most important skills to have. There is still a withered memory of that around here.

In my little town, there was once a college called, at the time, College of Louisiana. Today, it’s an abandoned historic site where I sometimes go to write. A Northern abolitionist named Stephen Pearl Andrews came to teach here around the 1830s, thirty years before the war. Andrews would attend dinner parties with doting Southern women and was surprised when they would lament the evils of slavery and the desire to end it. He himself was radicalized against it during his time here. The ladies knew everyone by name in the town, even the slaves, and were bound to them by obligation. What was coming down from the North was more like the interchangeable cogs of a factory. A man was his wage, his child was a “raw product,” and nobody was from anywhere. A few decades later, when northern industrialist reformer presented himself as a moral superior, they felt proud standing against him. Pearl seems to suggest that a lot of them believed slavery was wrong, but they just weren’t going to let a rootless Yankee tell them that. On the historical arc, obviously, they were wrong. But there is still a thing there.

Southern honor and localism getting badly tangled up with what is now America’s original sin, really, is the key to understanding this. The historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown made the distinction that the puritanical North ran on conscience, which meant that how you individually felt about your actions is most important. The Old South ran on honor: morality was not only an internal affair, but a public artifact. You had to stake your beliefs in front of your community, which was perfectly entitled to judge you.

When this honor attached to race after the war, it was curdled nasty by defeat into an inferiority complex disguised as racial pride, which has kept the area economically and culturally dark way beyond its due. A man of the Old South could not have known his cursed place in history from the low vantage of being a man of his time, but he was harshly punished for refusing to learn it long afterward. Humiliated, instead he lashed out with lynch laws and demands for continued segregation to maintain white superiority in lieu of any other kind of superiority. That resentment mutated over time into the cross burnings and the cartoonish hatred spewed from our otherwise folksy and charismatic politicians. Faulkner captures their spirit well, drawing from his real experience as a member of this dying Southern gentry class in Mississippi. Our noble aristocracy turns incestuous as race humiliation and stubborn agrarian pride slowly take away everything we once were proud of.

When that same honor was better attached to stewardship agriculture, nature, beauty, and the raising of moral and talented children, it was obviously good. Atticus Finch is the archetype of this kind of Old Southern honor, who famously had the courage to be publicly unpopular for the sake of what he knew he owed his neighbors and children. That’s the same brand of Southern courage it takes to risk being temporarily hated by the child you have to force into being educated. I’m picturing people like Wendell Berry, too, who stood nearly alone against the ideologies of technological progress. This is what I think we are seeing re-emerge now in the Southern Surge, coupled with the simple fact that we were never “hip” or “academic” or, frankly “wealthy” enough to have the privilege to become delusional Rousseauians.

The uncomfortable must be reckoned with: George Wallace at the schoolhouse door in Alabama is a dark twist of the same stubbornness that is willing to hold a child back a grade to make damn sure he gets it.

My parish (what we call counties in Louisiana), was hostile to integration in the ‘60s. As a reaction to the laws passing, we built private schools for the white kids. I went to one of those (no accident that it was a Civil War hospital with massive and then-crumbling neoclassical columns). For most of my life the public school I avoided had one of the worst districts in the state. Dropout rate over 20%. By extension and reactionary guilt about my private schooling, my own life was marred by a fixation on race. In college, I obsessively read critical race theory, trying to assuage some of my guilt, in the process infantilizing black people and wasting large portions of my time and energy. Interestingly, the very next parish over from ours, for various reasons (mostly involuntary and after protracted battles in the courts, to be fair), did not create white flight schools, so those kids had to stay in the public school. Sixty years on, it is now the top-ranked school district in Louisiana, first in the state two years running. Its success is distinct from the Northern afterglow of somewhere in the Sunbelt like Atlanta, and you can tell that because it’s a deeply rural and therefore truly Southern parish of about two thousand kids. They recently dethroned Zachary, the wealthy Baton Rouge suburb. Its elementary schools were just recognized by the state for high-dosage, one-on-one tutoring. That’s a touch of Southern honor, now untangled from racial wounds.

As a whole, top-down, authoritarian, and impersonal factory models have become wildly unpopular and ineffective across the country in the last few decades. The progressive answer to that has been to abolish any and all forms of authority. Only pockets of the Deep South have somewhat retained a tolerance for adult hierarchy, repetition, and discipline. My wife had experience working in education in Los Angeles a year or so ago where the celebration of lack of authority is at an apex. Their Rousseauian dreams have had the most time and space to ferment into a nightmare. The kids are freer than ever to express themselves and have the most conducive “learning environment” that money can buy, and are therefore miserable, diagnosed, and not learning.

The much more effective policies are not Southern secrets. Everyone could put them in place, in theory. But this isn’t theory: they have to be passed, funded, and tolerated by the parents and teachers. Plenty of Northern states have passed science-of-reading laws (phonics) in the last few years. What they still don’t have is the ability to make the painful parts stick when it counts. You’d have to stare down a fleet of helicopter parents, which I could only imagine a Southern lady having the balls to do.

I grew up having to say yes ma’am and no sir, which is a holdover from what was almost abolished by the Northern sense of factory equality. We know from experience that you better not call a middle-aged woman “ma’am” above the Mason-Dixon if you want to keep your head. This cultural distinction seems to be a token of the Southern Surge as a whole, as kids seem to thrive when they know who’s in charge and worth listening to. Southern culture also seems to gain an unlikely edge in the AI context: we alone are willing to be the unpopular one who states the obvious: reading is something that happens to kids because someone with authority makes them instead of just allowing them to cheat with GPT. That idea has been enacted into policies most practically down in the South and is now bearing first fruits as the wider culture shifts slightly in our favor. By nudging its education away from these coastal extremes, the South has gained an easy edge.

We will almost certainly squander that edge. I doubt policy-makers will learn anything from this. But some parents, at least, might.