Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.
This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.
Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.
I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.
And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.
A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.
Only stuff that works.
My guest today is Rachel Kantor.
She is the Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America's Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute and author of "Inside the Mississippi Marathon." She holds a bachelor's degree in English and history from the University of Pennsylvania, and a master's degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
In 2008, she founded Mississippi First and served as its director, served as its executive director for over 16 years.
During her tenure, Kantor was the lead advocate of multiple watershed public education initiatives in Mississippi, including the passage and expansion of the state's pre-K law, the passage of the state's charter school law, the adoption of new state educational standards and assessments, the passage of the Winter Read teacher loan repayment program, the passage of the 2022 historic teacher pay raise, and the passage and funding of the 2024 student-centered public school funding formula, to name a few.
She is a 2004 Mississippi Delta alumnus of Teach For America, and from 2018 to 2023, she served on the board of the Policy Innovators in Education Network.
She is married and has two children.
Rachel is somebody with a lot of experience in ed reform and
I think you're gonna like it.
Rachel, welcome to Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works.
Rachel Canter: Hi.
It's nice to be here.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh, I've been looking forward to this especially to talk about something that that has been in the news, you know, in different ways.
We read about the Southern surge and the Mississippi Miracle, but you wrote about it in a different way.
You called it the Mississippi Marathon.
Rachel Canter: That's right.
Can, ca-
Gene Tavernetti: can you talk about that a little bit and why you chose that?
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
So I'm not gonna cl- claim credit that I am the originator of the Mississippi Marathon term.
I actually don't know which one of us came up with it, but it seemed like about a year to a year and a half ago, several of us that were deeply involved in this started to say Mississippi Marathon instead of Mississippi Miracle.
I will say for my part, I never liked the miracle framing because a miracle is something that happens sort of out of the blue, no one really knows from whence it came, and it's not going to be repeated.
That is the whole purpose of a miracle.
And I strongly believe that what happened in Mississippi was not a divine intervention.
It was- ... the product of 20 years of really hard work on the pa- on the part of many people, including educators in classrooms, local school district leadership, state department of education folks, nonprofit folks, and advocates like myself, state policymakers, all of us working together from our own perspectives to try to bring about this big educational transformation.
And I think the marathon frame is a lot more appropriate because a marathon is something that is, is pretty miraculous, you know, in the sense that it's a human marvel to run a marathon.
There's a lot of people who would say it's like a pinnacle achievement in their life if they ever run a marathon, but it's something that you can train to do, and that almost all of us, if we really believed in, you know, wanting to run a marathon, that we could do.
And I think that's a more appropriate metaphor for what really took place in Mississippi.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I think you have a unique perspective of the reporting that I have seen on that, in that you were actually on the ground as part of this process.
Not just on the ground but truly involved in this process from the beginning.
H- how was ... W- what has your role been in- Mm-hmm ... in, in this process?
Rachel Canter: So I grew up in Mississippi.
I'm from a small town called Starkville, which is a college town.
It's where Mississippi State University is, and I went to public school and graduated from high school and went away to college and realized the good things about my public education and also the ways in which my public education didn't quite prepare me for the university that I went to.
I decided to come back to Mississippi and be a classroom teacher, so I taught in Greenville, Mississippi, which is a Delta town on the river on the west- western side of Mississippi.
I taught for two years through Teach For America, and it was really frustrating and eye-opening how even in my own state I had seen and experienced a much different public education than the ones that the kids in my classroom were getting from their school district.
And I started to feel that I needed to do something about it, and th- that thing, whatever it was, needed to be something that was much longer term than just, you know, backing a politician or supporting some sort of, you know, individual transformational leader.
I needed to figure out what... how to make lasting generational change, and I recognized that was going to be a decade, multi-decade process.
So I went to graduate school, and I moved to Jackson, Mississippi, in 2008 to start an education policy and advocacy nonprofit called Mississippi First, and that is what took me into sort of the thick of it.
From 2008 until when I left in 2025 to come to PPI, I was one of the people who was most engaged with the Mississippi legislature, with the state Department of Education, and with local school districts on all of these issues.
Gene Tavernetti: So just fo- trying to follow your timeline, before you were working on these issues, had you done your master's at the Harvard School of of-
Rachel Canter: So, yes.
So I taught school, and then I went to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and got my master's in public policy, and then I moved to Jackson in 2008.
I went to the Kennedy School because the big question to me was, "Okay, if I'm gonna try to do something that's much bigger than any one human, how do I do that?
How do I affect policy change?" And it... Luckily, the Kennedy School said, "Okay, we'll teach you."
Gene Tavernetti: So, so you earned your master's degree in, in public policy.
You came back to Mississippi, and what were the things that you learned there that helped you get things rolling i- in to starting this marathon?
Rachel Canter: Mm-hmm.
Gene Tavernetti: Or a- and did you realize that, that you were at the beginning of the marathon when you came back to do the work?
Rachel Canter: Well, I wanted to be At the beginning of something.
I think that I definitely always thought of it as a sort of a marathon, this long-term generational change, movement for generational change is the way that I always thought of my work.
I knew it wasn't gonna be two years, three years, five years and done.
I knew it was gonna take my lifetime, potentially multiple people's lifetimes.
And i- in 2008 when we started we really had no idea that we would be in the place that we are now, receiving so much attention, having been so successful in a period of about 20 years.
Because people in Mississippi at the time just thought it was absolutely impossible that we would improve at all, let alone, you know, have this big transformation.
And I think one of the things that was most striking to me when I started my job in Mississippi in 2008 was that I felt that people had the wrong diagnosis of the problem, and that was driving a lot of the inaction that I saw in the capital.
And one thing that they talk to you about in policy school is, you know, how to really frame and understand a problem so that when you develop solutions, they actually fix the problem that you have and not f- some problem you want to have or think you have.
And it was very obvious to me when I started... 'Cause the first couple of years after I started Mississippi First, I was 26.
I don't come from a political family.
I don't come from a wealthy family.
Nobody had any reason to listen to me, in other words Other than the fact that I was just showing up over and over again.
And I would go around and I would ask people, "Well, you know, what do you think the problem is? Why do you think that we haven't done this or done that or made any improvements?" And a lot of people really just felt like the problem was that kids were too poor, and there was nothing you can do if kids are too poor.
'Cause, you know, you can't solve poverty and, or you have to solve poverty before you can do anything about the fact that kids can't read.
And I thought that was absolutely nonsense.
I thought that there were lots of examples of schools doing right by kids, regardless of their background, and helping them learn a lot more.
And I wasn't ever so arrogant as to think, "Well, we are just going to come up with some magical new process, and that's gonna solve everything." I really just thought, "We can be doing a lot better than we're doing, and there's really no excuse why we're not doing a lot better than we're doing.
'Cause other people have kids who look a lot like ours, and they do a lot better than we do.
We need to learn from people who are doing well with the same population of kids instead of just throwing our hands in the air and saying it can't be done."
Gene Tavernetti: You know, I'm wondering how much your Teach For America background impacted your thinking here, because I've worked with teachers who've been trained in Teach For America, and I was just impressed with the training they received.
They were much more ready to to actually handle the challenges of the classroom than many teachers who had gone through, you know, traditional programs.
Did that, th- did that not only the training, but your experience in working in a challenging district, did that make a difference in how you looked at how the problems could be solved?
Rachel Canter: Yes.
I mean, I was attracted to Teach For America because of the mission.
I knew I wanted to come back to Mississippi and teach.
The university I was at didn't have an undergraduate education program, actually.
I would've had to stay for a fifth year to get a master's degree, and that was financially prohibitive for me.
And it offered me an opportunity to go back to Mississippi to become a certified classroom teacher and to teach in my home state.
And so I... That was why I was attracted to the program.
And yes, when you go through the... And I went through in 2004, I was a 2004 corps member, which means I was in the classroom from 2004 to 2006, and you get, at that point in time, you got training, summer training, and then you go into a classroom and you're expected to, you know, function like any other teacher, and you have some Saturday training sessions and somebody comes and checks on you periodically throughout the year.
But a lot of it was, you know, sink or swim.
But there were certain ways in which Teach For America had a very practical viewpoint about what they were going to spend their time training you on.
Because if you don't have a whole lot of time, you're not going to spend a lot of time going through the history of educational philosophies with students.
You know, you're gonna focus on classroom management strategies, you're gonna focus on, you know, assessment and how to do that, and you're gonna focus on very practical things.
And I also think Teach For America attracts at least at the point in time that I did it, a person who has, like, a real belief that, yeah, if I learn how to do this job and I try really hard, I will be able to be successful.
And I, I think a lot of teaching can be about mindset, and certainly a lot of what we learned in Mississippi was about mindset.
You know, if you were open to feedback, if you were open to a concept around continuous improvement, it really helped you to be able to... You know, it really helped our state that we had a leadership that was thinking about things through continuous improvement.
We're gonna try, and if it doesn't work, we're gonna try something else, and we're gonna keep trying until we get better.
And so I do think that mattered.
I also think that the two years that I spent in my classroom deeply impacted the way that I thought about policy up until now.
Because every time I would hear an idea at the state capital, I would immediately think, "What would this look like in my classroom?
What would this look like in a school like the one that I taught in?" And that gave me a perspective that I think a lot of legislators don't have, a lot of advocates at the capital don't have, a lot of lobbyists don't have, around what are the practical realities for a classroom teacher trying to make sense of whatever comes out of the state, and however that's filtered down to them through the State Department and their own school administration.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, let's jump ahead a little bit to actually the marathon and what happened, what were the things that transpired in the state, and and how we moved kids forward.
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
So I tell people that there's a part of this story that is really the state reacting to the policies that came out of the federal government, you know, around, well, you need to have learning standards, you need to have a state assessment, you need to be measuring kids.
And then how that evolved into the state sort of taking ownership over our own destiny when it came to what we were trying to do in the state of Mississippi with public schools.
And the, that, so that process was not, you know, it was not ... It was messy, and there were times that it was really messy, right?
I think that in the ear- between, like, 2000 and about 2008 or '9, when I, my first session to lobby was 2009, we were really reacting very strongly at that point to No Child Left Behind.
You know, we were institu- we had instituted a new state assessment, we had instituted a, an accountability system because of the requirements of No Child Left Behind.
And in fact, we had to redesign our standards and assessment because they didn't quite meet the federal requirements.
They were too, they were actually too bad.
The federal government said, "You need to fix this." And this was before Common Core even came about.
Right.
And so we w- it was this slow process of trying to improve.
But it wasn't something that the state, again, because there was this mindset that people thought, "Well, we really can't do very much," we weren't, we were doing it, but sort of reluctantly.
Like, yeah, okay, No Child Left Behind, okay, if you say so.
And not really, like, you know, enthusiastically trying to figure out how to improve education for all kids.
And the change to that really- Started in around 2009, but really accelerated in 2012 when we got a new legislature.
And that new legislature had a n- a lot of new leaders that came with it, but it also gave an opportunity for some people who had been in the legislature for quite some time to rise to positions of power where they could actually make a difference in terms of the agenda setting for our policy.
And I, I really think it made such a difference when we got people in power who truly believed, actually, we can make ... Actually, what we do in the state capital matters to whether or not kids learn in classrooms.
And if we do d- different things from a state level, that can really change if kids learn in our state.
The expectations we have for them, how we measure against those expectations, how we report student data transparently to families and to communities matters.
And we really had to do that first, because It should come as no surprise that if you don't teach something to a child, that they're not gonna know it.
And at a basic level, when students in Mississippi would take the National Assessment for Educational Progress, and it would turn out that they didn't know things, I don't know why anybody was surprised about that.
Because if you compared what that assessment was testing to what we expected kids to know, there was this huge difference.
We did not expect kids to know those things.
We either didn't expect them to know them at all at that grade level, and we waited until f- later grades to teach them that content, or we expected them to know such a low level of, you know, rigor for that, you know, whatever standard it was, that it was
It should've been no surprise.
We had to dramatically increase our expectations for student learning in order to start to improve.
And the reality was that when we did that, kids started rising to those expectations, and teachers started teaching that content.
And that was the foundation on which we built, was the, those new standards, that new assessment, that new accountability system.
And then you start layering in the science of reading, pre-K, high-quality instructional materials, all the things where we're supporting the classroom directly.
Gene Tavernetti: So let's talk about kind of the journey from the state house to the school house.
So there was legislation passed.
What was that next level that needed to be, That you needed to penetrate, I guess Mm-hmm
ha- because you know, so much, we have a, you know, just as teachers have a history of m- being disappointed in their professional development, you know, educators have a history of being disappointed in the legislation that comes down from the state house.
So, so how did that-
Rachel Canter: Yes
... Gene Tavernetti: kind of filter down?
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
I spent a lot of time talking legislators out of bad ideas- ... as much time as I spent talking them into the ideas that I thought would work.
You know, because they would have a constituent that would come to them complaining about something, and this may be the only time in the universe this ever happened, but from that one experience, they would wanna write a bill to legislate on that thing for the entire state.
And the reality is that would've caused more problems than it solved.
So I spent a lot of time trying to explain to legislators, "If you do it this way, this is how it's gonna affect teachers in classrooms in ways that you might not want. If you wanna do this, there's a better way to do it." I think one of the things that legislators are good at is legislating around things like priorities, goals, resources, guidelines.
They're not necessarily good at legislating things like instructional methods, right?
Because you could, you can legislate that somebody use the science of reading, but the legislature is not gonna go down to classrooms and go around canvassing to see who actually did that.
There has to be a whole other system of support and oversight that does that, and that's the State Department of Education.
That's what it should be, is an entity capable of high-quality support for implementation in classrooms.
And when we started down this path, we did not have that at our State Department of Education.
Our State Department of Education was very much like many across the country.
It was a compliance-oriented entity.
You know, it, it could, it, if you gave it a list of things that you had to have according to law, you know, you have to have an air conditioner, and you have to have so many numbers of kids in classrooms, and you have to have so many books in the library, they could come and check that.
But they didn't really have the ability to go out and offer high-quality professional development or help administrators think through how we organize our school in order to get this kind of outcome, how we do our schedule, et cetera.
And what we had to do is the State Department had to develop the capacity to do that because we had all these small rural school districts that did not have any capacity to spare.
You know, they might have an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school.
They might have had 10 people total in the central office.
They were not gonna have this huge cadre of people who could do coaching, who could go to conferences and learn things and come back and teach teachers in classrooms.
We needed to be able to provide capacity to small school districts, and that was sort of like an eye-opening thing for a lot of people at the legislature was we have to have a partnership.
It has to be a partnership between us as legislators and what is happening at the State Department of Education if we wanna get change in classrooms.
And I think that w- we were lucky to have had that partnership.
The individuals who were at the State Department of Education and at the legislature at the time when we started making these changes, it...
This is the only part that feels miraculous to me, is that there were the right people at the right time in those places, and we could work together towards that goal.
But it did require us to change some of the people who were at the State Department of Education to hire different kinds of people with different skill sets, and that was not without controversy when it happened.
Gene Tavernetti: So it seems like, again, to use the marathon metaphor, we're just warming up here.
We're just, we're j- we're just getting started.
We haven't even made it down to the school le- level yet.
Now I'm in California, and I know it's viewed as a pretty liberal state.
Mississippi, kind of the perception of that it's a pretty conservative state.
So how did this... i'm always curious, you know, when I think of conservative states as being, you know, small government, how did this idea of the State Department getting beefed up, how was that, Well,
Rachel Canter: it, yeah, it- Or was it an
Gene Tavernetti: issue?
Am I making up an issue that it wasn't there?
Rachel Canter: No, because Mississippi has this process where the legislature dictates to state agencies how many people they can hire because they don't wanna expand the size of government.
So even if they appropriate enough money to you to hire individuals, they're gonna tell you that you can't hire more than X number of individuals.
Well, what that means is that if you can't just add people and add people, you better have the right people in every single position because you're not gonna be able to just expand the department even if they give you extra money.
So that meant that we had to be really rigorous around who works at the department and what are they capable of doing.
Because the legislature- Really said to the department, "You know, we don't want you to grow to be this enormous entity.
We want you to do w- a job, the job that we've given you better." And in some ways, they were, they used some creative things in order to say our coaches our state-funded coaches are actually not technically employees of the Mississippi Department of Education even though they're hired by them.
They're technically employees of local school districts through a process we call Educators in Residence.
And that was one way they got around the fact that they couldn't actually add more state department employees when they needed a cadre of at least 75 people to go cover the, you know, 25% of lowest performing schools across the state.
But in general, Mississippi is a place where there's never enough money, there's never enough people.
You have to figure out sometimes how to do more with less.
And rather than just throwing our hands in the air and saying, "Well, that's just impossible," we had to get a lot smarter and more strategic about the way that we were using the resources we already had.
You can have a teacher in a classroom, and you can pay her the same amount, and a teacher in a classroom that you've paid the same amount that has much better training, and much better professional development, and much better support is gonna be a much better teacher.
And that is what we figured out we had to do.
We have to figure out how with the same people we have in schools, the same number of positions we have at the state department, how we're gonna make everybody much better at their jobs.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, I have to say this before we move on, 'cause that's a great segue to now talk about, you know, the things that you did.
But I know I have listeners in California that I want to stipulate our Department of Education runs on a skeleton crew.
You know, whatever the budget is, I know that we are not top-heavy at the State Department.
I just wanted to stipulate that.
I wanted people to know.
So, so you started to talk about some of the things that, that teachers needed s- such as the training.
So, so what were the elements that contributed to being able to keep this race running?
Rachel Canter: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
A lot of people have talked a lot about what we call the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which is the literacy law that we passed in 2013.
And I try to put that in context for people, because some people have exclusively thought about that, and I try to help people see that even if you wanna put that at the center of your universe, there's this whole context around it that make it make s- sense and make it work.
The Literacy-Based Promotion Act was actually a law that was really focused on things like screening three times a year- Sending home letters to parents to say when children were below the benchmark or below grade level on reading.
It said, you know, if you can't meet a minimum level of reading proficiency by the end of third grade, you get retained.
And then there was this provision that said, "Hey, Mississippi Department of Education, we want you to come up with an intervention program for the lowest performing schools in the state of Mississippi in reading, and you figure out what that looks like." At that point in time, we didn't know what we didn't know.
And, but luckily, there were people inside the state of Mississippi in nonprofits, the Barksdale Reading Institute, some folks at universities, who really understood that the best way to teach reading was the science of reading, and they had been working on trying to figure out how to improve instruction around reading for a really long time in Mississippi.
And when the state department sort of got this charge from the legislature, there were folks... W- we were in transition.
We didn't have a permanent state superintendent at that point in time, but the folks that were in the right positions over at the department in interim positions said, "Okay, we've gotta do this intervention program, and what that means is we're gonna have to figure out how to get the sci- all this knowledge that folks have about the science of reading to classroom teachers in these school districts."
And that's where the training, the coaching, the curriculum, that's where all these things came from, was this was the design by the Mississippi Department of Education to support the lowest performing schools to try to get to this goal of every child a reader by the end of third grade.
The State Department had a very small budget for this.
The legislature gave them nine and a half million dollars in the first year, and they said, "Okay, what's the best way to use nine and a half million dollars? What's gonna give us the most bang for our buck?" And they decided that it was gonna be training on the science of reading for every teacher.
It was required for teachers in the lowest performing schools and their administrators, because the department, correctly I think, felt that it's difficult to get buy-in from teachers if their administrators have no idea what this is about and don't have buy-in themselves.
So we need to require administrators to get the same training.
We're gonna require it of teachers.
And then we're gonna say to everybody else in the state, "You can come, too, for free, and we'll give you this training." There were school districts that didn't, weren't required to do it and didn't wanna do it, but the State Department of Education made, did a really good job of making that offering such high quality That when people started learning about it, it became sort of like a snowball, and more and more school districts started sending their teachers.
I also recently heard that my friend Kim Benton, who was the interim chief academic officer over at the department, would call local school districts and say, "Hey, I see you're not on the list. You haven't sent anybody. Would you like to send somebody to this training?" And which is it's- it's such the kind of thing that she would do, but it also meant that s- folks in school districts knew somebody was paying attention.
So there was the training, there was the screening that was required, the letters home to parents, and then there was the coaching.
And the coaching initiative has gotten a lot of a lot of scrutiny or a lot of attention.
The coaching program was not every, a coach for every teacher in the State of Mississippi 'cause we couldn't afford it.
The legislature only gave the state department $9.5 million.
And interestingly enough, that meant about 75 coaches in the first year.
But the state de-
Gene Tavernetti: just to clarify, I'm sorry.
So the $9.5 million wasn't just for the training, it was for the entire legislative package.
It was for the entire thing.
Oh, okay.
It was for the entire thing.
Okay.
So the state
Rachel Canter: department, they had to think about, "Okay, if we have limited dollars, what are the very best ways that we can invest these limited dollars?" And the things they came up with were training, because they thought, "If we give people really good training, it's gonna help them for the rest of their careers."
It was for the screeners that were required, that everybody use a screener, but the department also made one of the screeners free, and then it was for the coaching.
And the coaching program only affected those lowest 25%.
But the department did something really smart, which is they said, "We're going to also...
School districts, if you have your own coaches, you can send them to us, and we will train them for you," so that they could sort of expand the impact of the coaching program. But the, one of the things that I think they did really well is that the department realized, "If we don't implement these things well, no one's ever gonna trust us again.
They're not gonna think of the department as the place you come for expert advice or expert training or extra, or support if we send coaches out to school districts that don't know what they're doing.
Teachers won't trust us.
Districts won't trust us.
Everybody else will hear about it.
Nobody will come to professional development that we offer."
And so in the first year, they actually only hired about 25 of the 75 coaches that they had money for because that's who they c- in the pool, that's who they thought was quality that they got.
Over time, they hired more and more, but their mindset towards it was, "We are going to have the very best people that we can possibly find to do this job because it's gonna pay dividends, not just for the kids in those classrooms, but over time-" It's going to help other people see the value in the science of reading, in the training, in the curriculum, in the coaching process, if we do it really well from the beginning.
And that's something that I think a lot of states have not thought about at all, like just not at all.
They've put a lot of money into coaching, but they've not done anything around how do you control for quality?
Because as a classroom teacher, I can tell you there was nothing more annoying than a person coming in my classroom and telling me to do something that I thought was pointless.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I think it's one thing to legislate it, but the question that I have is, how did they monitor for quality?
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
So the legislature or the state department?
Gene Tavernetti: Whomever.
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
So the legislature instituted something that we called a reading panel.
It was in the Literacy-Based Promotion Act.
And the reading panel originally had six members, three of whom were legislators, or legislatively appointed.
And then the s- the state superintendent got, you know, a somebody on it, and the governor got somebody on it.
But essentially they did this so that they could influence the way the department was thinking about these oversight things.
The reading panel's original charge was, you have to pick the screeners that are gonna, that we're gonna give three times a year, and then the letters to parents are based off these screeners.
'Cause one of the concerns was, well, if you just use any old screener, then people could look better than they are, if you don't control for quality.
And if the screeners are what the parental notification is based on, and we believe pa- parental notification is going to create some urgency around teaching kids to read, then we need to control for quality on the screeners.
So we had this reading panel, and the reading panel became the link between the legislature and the department around implementation.
And the department started bringing to the reading panel for discussion issues outside of the screeners, so that the legislature didn't have to go and badger the department to tell them what was going on.
The department was bringing information, and it became a collaboration.
So when the department said, "Hey, we need you to tweak this in the law.
It- we can't really do what we think we need to," the legislature could go back and say, "Okay, we're gonna pass another bill." And they passed bills like that, like, that tweaked things here and there throughout the next several years.
'Cause when you make a change this big, you're not gonna get it right, totally right the first time.
Yeah.
The state department- Also, they had a lot more control over the lowest 25% of schools because they had this mandate to do this intervention program, and it was mandatory.
They could d- schools could not opt out, and they could s- they could say to schools, "You're gonna have coaching.
You're gonna have to come to training.
You're gonna- your administrator's gonna have to come.
Here are the non-negotiables," et cetera.
They did not have the same level of control over the other 75%.
So really what... That was a mix of the right incentives and the right supports and the right consequences getting compliance from everybody else.
You know, they could say certain things like, "You must have a screener, and here's the list. You have to pick off somebody's list." Well, what if they don't use the screener?
Well, then they could use their oversight authority from other things to say, "Okay, you do have to do a screener, and we're gonna come check."
And I think that it was about a s- it was about a process of folks at the state department thinking of the whole picture and how it hung together, and how they could use every bit of their resources, every bit of their oversight authority to align the system so that you don't have an MDE person coming in this week telling you this one thing, and an MDE person coming in next week and telling you something completely different.
Because school districts used to complain about that, and that was fair.
Yes.
You never want somebody coming in with competing messages, and so the department had to do a lot of internal work around that.
I also don't see that level of work always in other states.
You know, they will a- adopt a f- in California, you all have adopted a curriculum law.
And but the question to me is, like, is there really a process for the state department or someone else to ensure that actually school districts are implementing curriculum off the list?
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I don't know what's happening now but t- when we began to do work in California, we were authorized to do that type of work.
The, they called it, you know, through No Child Left Behind and through some of the state sanctions, you know, you might have to have an outside entity to come in to do a school takeover.
It wasn't really a school takeover.
And we got out of the business.
We did a few of them, but we got out of the business because it was more of a checklist.
Rachel Canter: That's right.
Gene Tavernetti: And no quality.
They, they- Okay ... and we weren't about that.
We were about quality.
But having said that a couple questions.
So you had the 25% that were, "They're doing it," and then you had the 75% that were gonna have some carrots and sticks.
And so how much of that 75% got on board?
And how long did it take?
Rachel Canter: I think it was a process over time.
Now, we had a couple of sort of contextual things that were happening outside of the literacy law that I really think helped with this question.
One is that we adopted Common Core in 2010, like basically everybody else, not everybody, but most everybody.
And what, and we adopted a new assessment, and that new assessment was supposed to go into the field in 2014, and the school districts knew that meant that they better be teaching kids on those new standards when that new assessment hits, which meant that they needed new curriculum.
So they were already sort of looking around and going, "We've got
We can't do business as usual.
This is g- we're gonna have this dramatic change.
It's g- we're gonna have an assessment.
It's gonna show whether or not we have moved kids along." At the same time, we had instituted a new accountability system with letter grades based on proficiency and growth as opposed to some of the o- other things that we had before, heavily weighted towards growth.
So school districts were already sort of in this mindset of, "Okay, there's change. We've gotta figure it out." And they were already looking for new curriculum, new process to try to meet this, these new expectations.
And the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, the timing of it l- aligned because the first year that, that third graders took the test for promotion was 2014, 2015.
Now, because we were using PARCC that first year, we ended up using the screener that we had adopted, one of the state screeners, as the test for the first two years.
But people were already sort of in this process of change.
And I think really what made the w- another part of the difference was that after 2014, 2015, there was this big explosion nationwide.
People got rid of their Common Core assessment.
They watered down their standards.
Mississippi did not do that.
We kept going.
And so the schools that, you know, got their first letter grades, saw their first test scores and went, "We used to be A-rated," or, "We used to be a, you know, star school district, and now we don't look so hot under these new standards.
We gotta get on board with something.
What are they doing over there?
They did it better." And it sort of was this organic process of people trying to figure it out.
Now, not everybody did that.
Obviously, there are always gonna be people who just don't wanna listen and don't wanna do it, but it showed up in the accountability system, and it showed up on the retention rates after the first year.
And school districts really felt like, "Okay, if this is the bar, I guess we gotta figure out what we need to do to meet this new bar. And if there's support, if there's training, if there's grant money tied to specific things-" We're gonna go do it.
And Mississippi is a small enough state where there's a lot of cross-pollination across school districts.
You know, people know people all over.
And I was in meetings in this time period where I would see superintendents say to other superintendents, "Well, what screener are you using?" "Well, what, you know, what curriculum do you use?
How does that align to the state assessment?" And they were having these conversations and trying to figure out what process they should be doing.
Gene Tavernetti: So let's get back to our marathon metaphor.
So h- you just mentioned this is around 2014, so how long did it take to get to this part of the process where we're just beginning to see things implemented in schools and to see some data?
Yeah.
Rachel Canter: Yeah, so if you look at our NAEP scores, we hit the national average in 2019.
So between when this, I would say the process really started to heat up between tw- 2009 and 2012, until 2019, I mean, you're talking about a 10-year period.
And between, I would really say, like, around 2014, 2015 to 2019, you get five full years of new standards, a new assessment, a new accountability system, people trying new curriculum, new training, new, the retention policy.
You get sort of the cumulative effect of all of these things over time.
And I think that's the story that, that states have not fully heard, is that actually it wasn't just we retained some third graders and then suddenly we met the national average in reading and math, having been, you know, moving dramatically on NAEP.
No, that's not really what happened.
It was all of the work to align the system, to provide supports, to be more rigorous with expectations over a long period of time as we were going up and up.
And actually, in that time period, we raised the bar on what was required of students to pass to the fourth grade.
It had been a minimal expectation, and then it became, okay, you have to get a lot, you have to be a lot closer to proficiency in order to pass to the fourth grade.
And that was something that, a change that we made about 2017, 2018.
It didn't go into effect until third graders in 2019, but so actually those third graders didn't even take the NAEP that year.
You know, this, the kids that made the national average on the NAEP were not the kids that had that raised bar.
But the, you know, the reality is that those kids who met the national average in fourth grade that year in both reading and math, they'd had from the time they were in kindergarten to that point, this entire change in the way that they experience school.
And that's really what- What I think people need to focus on is, like, the systems alignment piece, and not just one thing here, one thing there
Gene Tavernetti: Couple, couple questions for you.
I have another potential miracle for you.
And that is that a new superintendent would come in, and they would maintain the, what they were doing.
A new legislature came in, and they would maintain.
The state department would maintain.
Because that's what I've found over the years.
There's a, i've kind of determined in my head that there's a generation of teachers every 15 years.
Rachel Canter: Which
Gene Tavernetti: means there's a generation of administrators, which means there's a gener- you know, all of that, and everybody wants to make their mark.
That's right.
And it's so... I think it's so difficult.
I mean, we talk about teachers and neo-mania and, you know, chasing the shiny thing.
I think administrators are worse, you know?
They wanna make their mark and here we go.
So d- do you have anything to say about that, how that- Yeah
was reined in?
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
So a couple of things.
There were several of us that I would consider the team that made this happen, that stayed in our roles a really long time.
So I was in my job for 17 years, from 2008 to 2025.
Carrie Wright came in as the state superintendent, the new state superintendent, in November of 2013, after the session where we had passed the state-funded pre-K law and the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, and after we'd done the accountability system, after we'd adopted Common Core and all those things, and was given a mandate, "Go implement this.
Go figure out how to make it work." And she stayed in her job eight years as the state superintendent, and she had people on her leadership team at the state department whose h- who had been at the department prior to her coming, who stayed throughout her- the entirety of her tenure, and even a couple years after some of them.
And I think when you have that level of stability across folks in the non-profit space, folks at the department, and even folks in our legislature who'd been there a while and stayed a really long time, you can deal with some level of turnover at, you know, different positions.
The real test is Carrie left in 2022.
And, you know, Kim Benton left shortly, a couple... she retired and then she came back.
She was the chief academic officer.
She became interim state superintendent for a little while.
And this is the real test.
You know, can the people coming in after that administration continue down the path?
We got a new state superintendent, Lance Evans, in 2024, and he has continued down this path, and the question is he gonna keep going?
But also we have folks at the legislature, I think, who are now so bought in to the idea of Mississippi being best in the country in education that they don't wanna see us backslide.
And I think as long as we have that mindset of this is really important, we have control over our own destiny, we need to keep working at it until we get better and keep, you know, keep going, I think we'll be able to.
We may have some bumps in the road, but I think it's that continuous improvement mindset that's more important than anything else, that we've gotta k- that the success is important and we have some control over whether or not that happens, and we have to keep going.
I do think that there was a lot of my job, like I said, talking people out of bad ideas.
There's always gonna be an element that does not agree with the things that led to the success, and over time, when people start to forget what it used to be like, those voices can get louder.
And some of my biggest you know, moments of panic in the last several years that I was in my job were, "Oh, no, if they do this, they're taking out one of those foundational pillars.
We've gotta hold it off." So far we've been able to do that, and I left about a year ago, and the legislature has this year they passed an adolescent literacy law.
They passed a math initiative.
So there are signs that we're still gonna follow that path, but it's the kind of thing where you don't ever get to the end of this road, not with kids and not with education.
You have to keep working at it, and you have to have people who are willing to keep working at
Gene Tavernetti: it.
So you've described a multi-decade battle to do this based on your successes and based on a roadmap that you can, it may not need to be a roadmap forward for people, but at least to show what you had to do to get to where you're there.
Do you think that there's anything, if you were advising, if you were advising a state, is there anything that they could fast-track based on what you know now, or you just have to go through, you just have to slog through it to convince people and get people on board?
Rachel Canter: Well, I do think that there are a lot of things that people can learn from Mississippi.
So the importance of you've got to, if you're, when you do screeners, you better not have a huge long list with varying quality.
You need to have a few, and they need to be good quality.
They need to give you the information that you need.
Accountability is really important.
Accountability is in part transparency, and in part it's consequences, and you need to think about accountability as a concept.
How are you ensuring that if something is required that everybody is gonna do it, and you're gonna know if they don't?
And when I talk to states, you know, they go through Mississippi's playbook like a checklist, like what you just said.
You know, they go and they say, "Oh, well, we do screeners.
We do curriculum.
We've got a coaching program.
We've got... You know, we put in the law what the definition of the science of reading was, and we said everybody should do that." And then they pat themselves on the back, but that's not actually the work.
That's only step one of the work, right?
What I think people need to think about is, yes, you have to do all those things.
But when you look at Mississippi, look at what made it work for us.
Think about the process of implementation.
Think about how a law goes from the state capital to a teacher's classroom, and all the people that are affected along the way, and what you need to do to align all the ways that those people are engaged in the system that we call education.
And if you do that, and you think about that, you're gonna be far ahead of where we were because it's not about, you know, going and finding the one curriculum or the one screener or the one tool.
It's about systems alignment.
You should think about your system.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, folks can't see me.
I'm smiling.
I'm clapping under the desk at, you know, what you said because it is at every level at every level of any sort of change in education, even at the school level, we'll come in with something to talk about the science of reading or whatever, and the first thing the teachers say, "We do that already.
Let's check it off." "We do it already." But again, it's moving from that checklist to quality and what the essence of that thing is, what really makes it work.
It's not holding a kid back in third grade.
That's not it.
So, you know, I got lots of questions.
I had lots of questions.
I think we got through one that was on my list that I sent you.
But having said that, do you have any questions for me, Rachel?
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
So I know that your background, in part, is in instructional coaching, and that was so important to what we did.
It wasn't the only thing we did, but it was really important.
And one of the questions that I always get from people is, well, they have this skepticism that like how did you get buy-in from teachers?
Why did teachers wanna do this, you know?
They're... Why would they take the training?
Why would they do the coaching?
And I talk a lot about quality and how the state department was really careful around quality for coaching.
But what would you say, as a person who's spent a lot of time doing instructional coaching, what would you say you think the biggest pitfalls are for states who go and, you know, set aside, appropriate a bunch of money for coaching, and then get shocked that it doesn't seem to have done anything?
Gene Tavernetti: Well, there, I think you mentioned several points, you know, during the conversation today.
And one of the thing is choosing the right people, and part of choosing the right people is understanding their motivation because I don't know in Mississippi, but in California we have lots of coaches, and many times it's just seen as a a career booster.
You know, something that you do.
And so teachers think that, "Oh, they just didn't want to be in the classroom anymore." Another thing I think that's important is that that you talked about the spreading the word about... So you had your 25% of schools doing this, and they thought it was good, they thought it was...
And then getting those other supes and the state superintendent or whomever, calling them and say, "Hey, look, this is going well. Check with them and you're gonna see that, that that it works and the teachers like it." Why do the teachers like it?
They're not wasting their time.
Another thing that we talked about is all the initiatives from the past trying to talk people out of good ideas.
So much of the resistance against coaching is not what has happened, it's resistance that has been born of their past experience-
Rachel Canter: Right
... Gene Tavernetti: work- working with bad coaches.
Rachel Canter: Right.
So,
Gene Tavernetti: so you have to be competent.
That's the first thing.
And I think a- another thing that's important is when coaches begin to work with teachers, don't offer any advice till you've had a chance to go see them.
Rachel Canter: Right
... Gene Tavernetti: because I may work with Rachel, and I watch her teach, and I go, "Wow, she, she does all of this already." And then I go into another classroom and nope, they have a lot of work.
And so the conversations are gonna be different.
That's another thing that teachers are upset about.
"God, this is a one-size-fits-all.
Why am I doing this?" E- and so those are some considerations.
I think what makes it easier when you're doing literacy, there's a, there are some agreements already.
There's some agreements on the screener.
There's some agreements on the curriculum, so it makes it a little easier for the coach to, to coach in that curriculum in addition to the other things that th- that they need to do.
But one of the things that this is only tangential to your question, but when we've worked in districts that with lots of schools, you know, fairly good-sized district, they'll say, "Oh, we should do this in the entire district." Say no.
Let's start.
Let's get this one school going."
Mm-hmm.
"Let's make sure they go," kind of similar to your 25%, you know?
Let's get this.
Let's see it works." And then people will want it.
Exactly.
Vers- versus let's make this a mandate.
Be successful.
Have a model that works.
The teachers will talk.
The administrators will talk, you know, how it, whatever your political division is, the county supes, what- whatever.
And it'll get out there.
But back to coaches, be competent.
Listen to when your teachers say, "This is why I don't like coaching." Mm-hmm.
Because everywhere I've been, it's the exact same complaints, and they are all valid.
Yep.
You know?
You know, so.
Rachel Canter: Yep, and I think that was wisdom on the part of the folks doing the coaching program at MDE because they had all been instructional leaders themselves, and so they knew if we do, we only get one chance to do this well.
If we do it wrong from the beginning, nobody's ever gonna trust us again.
Yeah.
We have to get it right.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, that's interesting.
That was another thing that, that you said about the the administrators were involved.
Any school where we ever worked we had schools say, "Oh, come and do a PD." No, we don't do that.
We only do a PD and the follow-up, because that's when the change starts.
Rachel Canter: Mm-hmm.
Gene Tavernetti: And then the second condition was, and we're gonna have an administrator in every part of this with it, so that when a teacher had a question, just turn to the administrator.
"Well, are we gonna continue to do this?"
"Yes, we are." Or, you know.
Mm-hmm.
You know, so, so that it is, they know what's happening.
They know exactly what's been told to the teachers, so that message can be continued.
Rachel Canter: Yeah.
Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh, Rachel, this went... any last words of wisdom for people?
'Cause there's only, you know, 45 more states or whatever doing-
embarking on this.
Rachel Canter: I mean, I think that the biggest message I have for people is that it's possible.
It's possible for you to take ordinary people across your state, you know, ordinary teachers, ordinary legislators, ordinary folks in your state department, and do extraordinary things for kids.
If you invest in the right, you know, method, instructional methods, if you give people the right resources, if you are clear about expectations, if you're transparent with data, if you align your system, a lot of really remarkable things are possible.
And one of my frustrations with other states is that they don't really wanna do that hard work, it seems.
There's a lot of political you know, i- on the s- political feeling on the side of, "Hey, literacy's very popular. We're gonna pass a bill. We're gonna pat ourselves on the back, and we're gonna go away."
And, you know, that's good for press releases, I guess, but it's not very good for kids.
Yeah.
It's possible to do great things.
Adults need to be responsible for it.
We've gotta develop a better system and pull together.
Gene Tavernetti: Rachel, thank you so much for coming on, and I look forward to chatting with you again.
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