Pretty much. Mississippi does have significant issues (it's HDI [0] is significantly lower than anywhere else in the UK or US), but is comparable to peers in Metropolitan France [1] such as Normandy, Lorraine, and Picardy, as well as several regions of Italy [2]. Basically, not great but also not some third world despair of darkness.
Most likely, if a deeper subnational analysis was done of Mississippi, there would be a stark difference in HDIs between the unindustrialized Delta and industrialized North and Gulf Coast.
That said, at least it's been decades since Mississippi has seen a race riot where rioters were purposely burning black people's houses like what we saw in Belfast last night [3].
Plenty of Brits need to do some soul searching. There's a reason why even despite Trump, everyone who is eligible for an O1 tries to come to the US over London. Comparing the UK with Mississippi based on GDP per Capita is facetious, but the UK is similar to Mississippi in many other ways.
[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA+GBR/?levels=1+...
[1] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/FRA/?levels=1+4&ye...
[2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/ITA/?levels=1+4&ye...
[3] - https://time.com/article/2026/06/10/belfast-protests-erupt-k...
The North-South divide in Italy, the FRG/GDR divide in Germany, Northeast and Southern versus Central France, and various other representations of spatial inequality exist within Europe as well.
The reality is a Parisian, Londonian, and New Yorker have much more overlap with each other than they do with their own compatriots, yet it is this class that is overrepresented in any discourse on social and traditional media.
The reality is landmass and stuff doesn't matter as much as HDI which acts as a lossy indicator of development.
>It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasizes the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test.
Holding students back a grade is how things worked previously, it leads to students dropping out of school 20%-50% for once, 80-95% for twice. They also found that any improvement in test scores fades to below average by middle school.
If a student is failing to learn the same material 180 days in a row, why would 180 more days help? For any mentally normal child 180 days is already well more than enough.