Charter Schools Outperform Districts on 3rd Grade Reading Test Initial Results

The Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) has released results of the initial administration of the 2026 third-grade reading assessment, and five of the six Mississippi charter schools with third-grade students outperformed their local school district.

This assessment process is often referred to as the “Third Grade Gate” and is required under the state’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which has gained national attention for improving fourth-grade reading scores on state and national tests. Students who did not score high enough on the initial test have up to two more chances to pass. If they still don’t pass it, they will be retained in the third grade for the next school year. Those follow-up results will be published later by MDE.

Six of Mississippi’s ten charter public schools have a third-grade class. All but one had better results on the initial reading test than the traditional public schools in the district where the charter school is located. (Charter schools are not under the jurisdiction of local school districts.)

The difference was most pronounced in Clarksdale, where 70% of third graders in the Clarksdale Collegiate Charter School passed the test on their first try, compared to only 48% of third graders in the Clarksdale Municipal School District. That’s a 22% difference. Only one of the three elementary schools in the Clarksdale district had above a 50% pass rate.

In the surrounding Coahoma County School District, from which students may transfer to Clarksdale Collegiate, only 54% of third graders passed on their first try, a 16% difference. Incidentally, the school with the lowest pass rate of 31%, Friars Point Elementary, was graded B in the state accountability system last year when it had 35% reading proficiency for the school as a whole.

In Jackson, Ambition Prep Charter School’s pass rate was 72%, 19 percentage points higher than Jackson Public Schools’ 53%. Revive Prep Charter School third graders earned a 58% pass rate, five percentage points higher than JPS. The only charter school to score lower than the district in which it is located was Joel Smilow Collegiate Charter School, with a 46.5% rate.

Of the 21 schools in the Jackson Public School District with a third grade class, only nine had more than 50% of their students pass the third grade reading test on the first try.

In Natchez, 60% of third graders in Instant Impact Global Prep Charter School passed, slightly better than the 57.5% of Natchez-Adams District third graders.

SR1 College Prep STEM Academy Charter School in Canton had a pass rate of 88%, compared to 67% in the Canton School District. SR1 had only a handful of third graders, which means a change of only one or two students’ scores could have caused a significant change in the pass rate.

In the previous school year, charter schools showed a broader impact on reading than third grade only. All charter schools, with one exception, had a higher reading proficiency than comparable students in the district where the school was located. For this comparison, if the charter school was made up of grades 3-through-8 or 5-through-8, or any other configuration, their reading proficiency was compared to students from the same grades in the comparable traditional public schools in the local district.

While there is still room for improvement, these results suggest that most Mississippi charter schools are helping students achieve stronger reading outcomes than they likely would have experienced in their assigned district school. For families seeking additional educational options, the results provide further evidence that charter schools are expanding opportunity and improving student achievement.