Mississippi Aiming to Make Higher Grades : Education: The state figures that the three r’s of the schoolhouse, without the fourth ‘r’ of racism, are the keys to the future.

JACKSON, Miss. —  Down here at the statistical low point of America, the burning issue no longer is race.

In an evolution as long coming as spring, the state has reckoned that the three r’s of the schoolhouse, without the fourth ‘r’ of racism, are the keys to the future. The alternative is chronic Third World status.

In the current climate of introspection Jim Crow isn’t dead. He is irrelevant.

The price of clinging to a sometimes bloody past, when race darkened almost any aspect of public policy or private attitude, has been embarrassingly high: The lowest literacy rate (a third of the state’s adult residents cannot read) in the nation. The highest school dropout rate. The lowest scores on military entrance tests.

About 30% of Mississippi high school graduates cannot qualify for admission to public college. More than half of those who entered college from 1985 through 1989 dropped out before graduation.

“I’m tired of hearing Mississippi this, Mississippi that,” said Marjorie Vaughan, feisty superintendent of Yazoo County schools. “I’m tired of hearing that word ‘bottom.’ We have problems, but we’re all working on them--both races.”

Margie Vaughan is right.

James Meredith was shot 24 years ago after he broke down the color barrier at the University of Mississippi. Now, 65%of that state’s slim public purse is spent on education. Racially integrated education. Legislators are scratching their heads over how to raise $382 million for a three-year education program proposed by Gov. Ray Mabus, a 41-year-old native back home from Harvard and law practice in Washington, D.C.

This is a legislature that “thinks slow and thinks small,” said Ole Miss history professor David Sansing. But the acid test for a public official in Mississippi today is where he stands on schooling, not segregation.

Mabus hoped to pay for a third of the school program through a state lottery, which would have been the first in the South. The Senate wouldn’t play. (H. L. Mencken, who coined the term Bible Belt, called the Mississippi state capital “the buckle.”)

“The defeat of the lottery creates a state of uncertainty for the whole program,” said one state official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The public is ahead of the Legislature on this (in polls, more than 60%supported a lottery) but politicians are amazingly good listeners.”

The rest of Mabus’ “Better Education for Success Tomorrow” school plan would teach adults to read, go into homes to teach parents and preschoolers the basic techniques of learning, equalize per-pupil expenditures among school districts, free teachers and schools from rote manuals to instruct in accord with local needs and provide successful schools with bonus money to be spent as they see fit (excluding athletic programs).

The plan represents an all-out drive to improve schooling that is all the more remarkable in a state where education was voluntary--to keep whites from having to go to school with blacks.

The impetus to change is, of course, economic. To be ignorant in a computer world is to be eyeless in Gaza.

“At every level of planning for our future--higher employment, higher standards--the basic need was always education,” said Olon Ray, Mabus’ special assistant for education and a former teacher. “Our chance for improvement in the state--in the United States--lies in our human capital.”

More than 10% of Americans cannot read or write, U.S. census figures show, and the shortage of high school-educated workers is costing the nation an estimated $225 billion a year.

Mabus aims to halve Mississippi’s dropout rate, now twice the nationwide average, by the year 2001 and reduce illiteracy by 90%. A sobering fact: 75% of Mississippi’s projected work force for 2001 is already past school age.

“They’re all we’re going to get, and we need more brains than brawn,” said Mike Zitterman, manager of Frito-Lay’s Mississippi operation. The food processor has donated to the state a mobile unit equipped with 10 computers for teaching basic skills to adults.

For a change, Mississippi can claim a “first” in the nation: a 25% tax credit for corporations that teach adult education. Packard Electric, in Clinton, is spending $300,000 a year on teaching its employees. About 40,000 adults are enrolled in almost 50 literacy programs in the state, said Judy Lipscomb, director of the Governor’s Office for Literacy.

Mabus is impaled on the horns of a self-made dilemma. He says he takes “a dim view” of raising taxes to pay for his school plan. His predecessor, William Winter, bit a similar bullet.

Among the memorabilia and diplomas on the wall of Winter’s law office in Jackson, the capital, is a painting of a one-room schoolhouse. “I was the only student from that school ever to graduate from high school,” he says. Winter’s mother was the teacher there. Along with the alphabet she taught her son respect for education.

“In 1952, one in four whites in Mississippi finished high school; one in 40 blacks did,” he says.

Winter ran for governor in 1967 on an education reform platform. He lost. Ditto in 1975. He ran a third time, in 1979, and won.

His education package was finally passed in 1982--and paid for with the largest tax increase in Mississippi’s history while the nation was suffering from a recession.

“Education had developed a substantial constituency,” Winter recalled.

Kindergarten was made compulsory. Teacher salaries were brought up to the regional average and school attendance laws were given teeth. Mrs. Winter’s little boy had changed the terms of political dialogue in Mississippi.

“First, Mississippi was a frontier; then, before the Civil War, a besieged slave society,” said Charles Wilson, a professor of Southern culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford (home of the author William Faulkner). “Both societies looked askance at education.

“Nat Turner’s rebellion--he could read--in 1831 was used as a horrible example. Teaching slaves became illegal. After the war, the politically powerful wanted to keep taxes low. Why waste money on inferiors? Landlords didn’t want sharecroppers reading the fine print at the company store. Let ‘em grow cotton.”

The paradox of such a state producing Faulkners and Eudora Weltys and Richard Wrights arises from the oral traditions of both the English settlers and their African slaves, Wilson explained. The traditions of both societies were handed down by storytellers. But that is not book learning.

“Then, in the 1980s, there was some kind of transformation in Mississippi, a consensus that the state was part of the United States, even the world. Economic growth became agreed on as much as race used to be. All the debate now is how to fund education, not if.”

But after centuries of neglect, change does not come easily. “Illiteracy produces a sense of powerlessness,” Wilson said. “It feeds a sense of fatalism. There’s a certain security in the status quo, however narrow it may be.”

A third of Mississippi adults can’t help their children with their homework or read instructions on medicine when they are sick. They cannot get the car fixed on a credit card, so it stays in the garage for weeks.

Illiteracy means standing in line for government forms, going home to get them read, then going back to stand in line again. It means eating potatoes because the prices of other foods are always changing in the market--all those mysterious numbers. Late in life it means no solace from a Bible you can’t read. . .being eyeless in Gaza.

To Merre Dorman in Starkville, the problem--and the answer--begins almost with birth, in the home. After considerable arm-wrestling, she won grants to begin an outreach program for children ages 1 to 7--children identified as being “at risk” of dropping out of school through welfare rolls and the like. Dorman’s paid staff visits their homes weekly to help mothers with nutrition at the stove and nutrition of the mind. One of Dorman’s staff, Emma Mays, is testing two of the children of Karen Isaacs, who is barely 20. Can Lemarcus, 4, catch a ball? Differentiate textures? Later, Mays will bring textbooks so that Karen and Lemarcus can learn habits of basic intelligence.

Lemarcus, a bright-looking child, doesn’t know that he’s at risk. Merre Dorman did, and she did something about it. “Just talking to PTAs is like preaching to the choir,” she says.

Countless similar experiments are under way in Mississippi, some financed by foundations, some using computers donated by corporations.

Judy Lipscomb overheard two janitors at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg talking about the computer software program they were using in their literacy class. (They are two of the 270 employees at the campus identified as illiterate.)

“How many janitors do you hear talking about software? Gradually, we are taking the stigma out of illiteracy.”

It takes four years, on average, to teach an adult to read and write, the same as for a child.

Since Winter’s 1982 reform, the test scores of Mississippi’s 500,000 schoolchildren have risen, although slightly. (An additional 50,000 children attend the private academies opened since integration became mandatory in 1971.)

School superintendent Margie Vaughan’s problems are typical.

“You can’t teach with leaking roofs and trash cans in the halls that need dumping. I’m on probation because my teacher-pupil ratio is too high. I could fix it tomorrow if I had money. That’s all it takes. Money.

“I tell my teachers: ‘Don’t talk to me about a child’s background. That child is coming to you with nothing. Give him something!’ ”

Behind Vaughan’s desk is a sampler with the motto: “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” One of her kids did that once--named a horse for her. She laughs. “We shall overcome!”

Coming from a white superintendent, that rallying call of Southern blacks did not seem out of place in the context of Mississippi’s school reform. Education has always been the silver bullet that could kill bigotry.