Sources & Notes
Every factual claim in the timeline, with its source and — where the record is thinner than the sentence suggests — a plain statement of what is and is not established. Claims marked caveat deserve care when quoting.
The chart
Three series, twelve assessment years, NAEP grade 4 reading, public schools. Every plotted point was checked against the source table below rather than reconstructed from memory.
| Year | Wisconsin | Mississippi | Nation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | 222 | 203 | 213 |
| 2003 | 221 | 205 | 216 |
| 2005 | 221 | 204 | 217 |
| 2007 | 223 | 208 | 220 |
| 2009 | 220 | 211 | 220 |
| 2011 | 221 | 209 | 220 |
| 2013 | 221 | 209 | 221 |
| 2015 | 223 | 214 | 221 |
| 2017 | 220 | 215 | 221 |
| 2019 | 220 | 219 | 219 |
| 2022 | 217 | 217 | 216 |
| 2024 | 215 | 219 | 214 |
Source of record.
1998–2022: NCES, Digest of Education Statistics, Table 221.40. 2024: NAEP state snapshot reports for Wisconsin and Mississippi.
caveatScale scores are not rankings, and small gaps are not differences.
NAEP reports significance, not league tables. In 2024 Wisconsin’s 215 was not significantly different from the national 214, and Mississippi’s 219 was higher than 20 states, lower than 2, and not significantly different from 29. A one- or two-point move between adjacent years is usually noise; the twenty-year shape of the lines is the story, not any single crossing.
Mississippi
Jim and Sally Barksdale gave $100 million on January 20, 2000, in Jackson, founding the Barksdale Reading Institute; both were Mississippi natives.
Mississippi Today places the announcement at the old Central High School auditorium on that date. The Mississippi Legislature’s House Concurrent Resolution 69 (2005) records both as Mississippi natives and the endowment at $100 million.
Then the largest private gift to literacy in the nation’s history.
Contemporaneously described by The New York Times as believed to be by far the largest in the field of literacy, as recounted by Mississippi Today; HC 69 calls it the largest private investment in literacy in the nation’s history.
Barksdale, the former Netscape chief executive, could not read in the second grade.
He says so on camera in The Mississippi Story (Reading Universe — WETA, First Book and BRI; the same film also appears on YouTube). He led Netscape as president and chief executive, and earlier served as chief operating officer of FedEx.
caveat“Ranked 49th in 2000” is the institute’s framing, not a NAEP measurement.
NAEP did not administer state-level grade 4 reading in 2000 — Table 221.40 states plainly that state data for that year are unavailable. The figure circulates via BRI’s own accounting. The nearest hard measurement is 1998: Mississippi 203, nation 213 — last or near-last, which is consistent, but the timeline says so rather than implying a test that did not occur.
2013: Governor Phil Bryant signed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, Senate Bill 2347, creating intensive K‑3 intervention, parental notice, and third-grade retention with good-cause exemptions.
Enrolled bill text at LegiScan; program description at the Mississippi Department of Education; codified at Miss. Code § 37‑177‑1 (Laws 2013, ch. 495).
caveatThe Act did not mandate literacy coaches or teacher training.
This is the correction most worth carrying forward. The Parents’ Campaign opposed the final bill precisely because coaches were omitted and training was made contingent on appropriation; implementation drew $9.5 million, which critics called an underfunded mandate. In 2014–15 the state hired 41 of a hoped-for 75 coaches. Accounts differ in emphasis rather than fact: BRI’s own film credits the Act with funding a statewide coaching network, and BRI as its forerunner, while contemporaneous advocates recorded that the bill left coaching to appropriation and that the appropriation fell short of what was sought. Both are true, and the timeline now says so. Anyone citing Mississippi as proof that a retention law works should know the law’s teeth and its instruction were funded separately, and that the coaching and training came substantially from thirteen years of prior philanthropy.
correctedThe institute concluded operations in June 2023 — not 2022, and not by closing in the ordinary sense.
An earlier version of the timeline dated the closure to 2022. That was the announcement: Magnolia Tribune, June 13, 2022, reports that BRI will close. Kelly Butler’s biographies at Deans for Impact and Reading Universe both place the conclusion in June 2023. The 49th-to-26th movement is a 2019 figure, which is why the timeline dates it to 2019 rather than to the closing year.
The work continued as Reading Universe.
BRI is one of three producing partners of ReadingUniverse.org, with WETA / Reading Rockets and First Book; the site describes itself as rooted in BRI’s work and carries a 2026 copyright. This is why msreads.org remains online and written in the present tense, and why “closed its doors” is a misleading shorthand: the institute wound up its Mississippi operations having met its goal, and its training materials were rebuilt as a free national service.
2024: Mississippi’s fourth graders outscored the national average for the first time.
Mississippi First. Confirmed by the state snapshot: 219 against a national 214, a statistically significant difference. In 2019 the two were equal at 219, so “first time above” is precise.
caveat“9th versus 37th” and “two and a half times” are Bill Maher’s framing of a New York Times analysis.
Maher’s May 2026 Real Time remarks drew on Nicholas Kristof’s column of February 9, 2026, published alongside the Upshot district lookup. Note that a column is argument as well as reporting. The proficiency comparison is well grounded — 2024 NAEP snapshots show Black fourth graders at 19% proficient in Mississippi against 7% in California. The state rankings, however, depend on which measure is used and whether demographics are adjusted; they are not read off average scale scores. The timeline presents these as his claims, in quotation, rather than as findings of its own.
Wisconsin
2011: Act 166 required new elementary, special education and reading teachers to pass a test identical to the Massachusetts Foundations of Reading test — effective January 31, 2014.
Statutory text at 2011 Wisconsin Act 166, creating Wis. Stat. § 118.19(14)(a); the initial applicability date was moved from January 1 to January 31, 2014 during the 2013 budget. The requirement followed the Read to Lead Task Force. Confirmed by Wisconsin DPI. The three-year gap between enactment and effect matters: Wisconsin legislated in 2011 and began testing in 2014, the year after Mississippi legislated.
FORT first-time pass rates: 78% under the initial cut score, then 66–68%, falling to 54% for 2020‑21 from 66% in 2014‑15.
Early-years figures compiled by School Information System from DPI data; the 54% figure is Corrinne Hess’s reporting, Wisconsin Public Radio. Note the cut score rose in September 2014, which explains much of the drop from 78% — the later decline from 66% to 54% is on stable footing.
2007: Madison declined roughly $2 million in Reading First funds; Seidenberg called the stated rationale a “big lie.”
Mark Liberman, Language Log, March 13, 2007, publishing Seidenberg’s letter in full. The trigger was Diana Jean Schemo’s New York Times report of March 9, 2007. Seidenberg’s specific correction: the funds were destined for five low-achieving schools and the federal evaluation raised documentation questions rather than requiring any curriculum change — so the district-wide threat officials described did not exist. Note that this is his account and argument, published contemporaneously and never, so far as the record shows, rebutted in detail by the district.
2007: the district cited its own rising scores; the state test had been made easier and NAEP showed no gain.
The contemporaneous local compilation, School Information System, March 8, 2007, gathers the Times report, Superintendent Art Rainwater’s defence, the New York Times letters, and Ken DeRosa’s analysis showing that the Wisconsin reading test had been eased and its proficiency cut score lowered — lifting results statewide — while fourth-grade NAEP was flat. This is the same measurement problem the 2004 entry names and the 2008 DPI warning concedes: state and federal instruments were telling different stories, and only one of them had been left alone.
2009: Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s Madison Rotary Club address.
Quoted in full from the contemporaneous account, which also hosts the audio. The talk date, August 5, 2009, is fixed by the post (“last Wednesday” of an August 12 entry) and by the recording’s filename. The closing line at roughly twenty-seven minutes is paraphrased, not quoted.
2021: DPI Superintendent Jill Underly said she would support eliminating the FORT; Governor Evers vetoed AB446/SB454 that November.
Both via School Information System: Underly’s remarks and the veto. November 5, 2021 was indeed a Friday.
2019: Mississippi was the only state whose fourth-grade reading scores improved.
Alan Borsuk, writing after the 2019 NAEP release. Consistent with the table above: Mississippi rose from 215 to 219 while the nation fell from 221 to 219.
2022: phonics ascendant; Lucy Calkins credited critics including Mark Seidenberg and Emily Hanford.
Dana Goldstein, The New York Times, May 22, 2022. Hanford’s Sold a Story is an APM Reports production.
caveatThe 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2018, 2020, 2023 and 2024 entries are quotations and headlines from School Information System.
These are faithfully reproduced and each links to its original post, but they are that publication’s reporting and commentary rather than independently adjudicated findings. The WEAC contribution figure, the “tyranny of low expectations” framing, and the characterisations of DPI’s motives are argument as well as fact, and a careful reader should treat them accordingly.
What this page does not claim
The timeline sets two states side by side. It does not demonstrate that Mississippi’s laws caused Mississippi’s gains, or that Wisconsin’s inaction caused its decline. Two states are not a controlled experiment, demographics and spending differ sharply, and reasonable researchers dispute how much of Mississippi’s rise reflects retention, coaching, teacher training, funding increases, or the exclusion of retained students from the fourth-grade cohort.
What the record does support is narrower and still striking: Mississippi began far behind Wisconsin, sustained a coherent programme of teacher training and coaching for more than two decades, and now scores higher. Wisconsin legislated a teacher content requirement, then spent a decade debating whether to keep it.
Method
How the chart was checked.
Rather than trusting the drawing, the coordinates were read back out of the finished SVG, converted from pixels to years and scale scores, and compared against Table 221.40 and the 2024 snapshots. All thirty-six points matched. Both pages are single self-contained HTML files — no JavaScript, no analytics, no external stylesheets or frameworks — so they render identically offline, in text browsers, on paper, and a decade from now.