Mississippi has recently made a few changes to its primary school education curriculum, and its scores on standardized tests have been improving for the past 2 decades.
Their reforms have been controversial, since they are bucking a lot of weird educational trends that tend to be loved by very loopy liberal types of people, and they are bringing back older, stricter curricula - most notably, hardcore phonics.
Rationalists also tend to disagree bc of genetic determinism.
There’s been a lot of debate about whether these changes to schooling are driving this, or whether there is some kind of trick.
The last I heard, the dissenting opinion was that Mississippi achieved higher scores merely by “holding back” students in the 3rd grade.
This article really took aim at this and debunked it.