Mississippi Learning: Why the State's Students Start Behind — and Stay Behind 

Thirty years after Mississippi established statewide kindergarten and made school attendance compulsory starting in first grade, classroom readiness remains a major obstacle to student success in this state, which has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the country and test scores that are consistently among the nation's worst. Liz Willen, Time/The Hechinger Report, July 27, 2012