re: WSJ: Why is Mississippi Falling Behind Rest of South?

Fun fact about class stats in many of these horrific school districts. If you can help a couple of the F students that never show up to class earn a C-, the average of the entire class will improve more than if a A student edges out just enough to earn an A+. It's easier to help the A and B students, so that's what we tend to do. That's not necessarily the biggest impact to society though.

I'll say the obvious around how catastrophic Mississippi's situation is in their delta region. That whole area is one of the country's F students.

The USA is falling behind in health, life expectancy, and literacy. Some suburban areas have gotten better, most have held steady by posting slight increases or decreases, but some other parts of the country have fallen off the map. The Mississippi delta region is one of them (this also impacts parts of Louisiana and Arkansas too).

There are other regions in the country with these problem (West Virginia, Texas panhandle and border areas, etc.) but the lower Delta is the largest problem area in both geography and population. Despite the abundance of cheap land and decent infrastructure, it's never recovered from the widespread adoption of mechanized agriculture in the early 20th century.

If we can somehow fix some of Mississippi's problems with education and employment, we would impact broader stats of the United States at large. That's how far behind the delta region is and how far its dragging down the rest of the region and the country. The parts of Mississippi and Louisiana around some of the Memphis suburbs, the gulf coast, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge are actually doing fairly well by comparison. The really sad parts are the former cotton growing regions between all three states in places like Simmsport, Woodville, Natchez, Yazoo, Tallulah, Indianola, Greenville, all the way up through Clarksdale and even into some of the "non FedEx" parts of Memphis. So much of it is sad and hopeless...with very little employment opportunities. What does exist doesn't pay very well and offers very little upward mobility or reason to stay. Most of the people that can rub two nickels together have long since left for cities like Jackson, Baton Rouge, St. Louis, Memphis, or Shreveport because there are more jobs there.

IMO we should be dumping cash into TVA-style employment projects like power plants. Then we should start shoveling cash into K-12 and trade school education programs, rehabilitating the downtowns of those small/med size towns, promoting tourism of the delta region (which is incredibly interesting and worth visiting now) and giving generous incentives for industrial expansion in that area.

Either that or we'll be coughing up welfare for even less educated, less productive, less healthy people in that area 50 years from now.