Jim Barksdale: Sally and I want to make a contribution. I'm going to ask her to help me to fund the Barksdale Reading Institute in the amount of $100 million.

Tom Brokaw: The son of Mississippi who went to Silicon Valley and made a great fortune now has returned to his native ground to help the kids

News Reporter: And it's personal. Barksdale explains he nearly fell through the cracks himself.

Jim Barksdale: When I was in the second grade, I couldn't read. And so when I went to the third grade, I really couldn't read.

News Reporter: Until he got a private tutor. His gift makes it possible now for all 162,000 students from kindergarten to third grade in Mississippi to get special help reading.

Jim Barksdale: This is an investment and this program will and must work.

Natasha Tretheway: In classrooms like this across Mississippi, an extraordinary initiative has transformed the way reading is taught in elementary schools and improved outcomes for thousands of children in the state. Hi, I'm Natasha Trethewey, former poet laureate of the United States and a proud native daughter of Mississippi. I love Mississippi, but its legacy of racism and poverty has historically kept the state near the bottom of almost every measure of educational achievement. In 2000, Jim and Sally Barksdale made a commitment to address, a critical challenge in their home state, giving every child the chance to become a skilled reader ... and the Barksdale Reading Institute was born.

Kymyona Burk: Literacy was just not a topic of conversation for Mississippi. Mississippi had just always been last, and there was really no sense of urgency to change that until Barksdale entered the space. And they entered the space in a major way.

Jim Barksdale: Children need to learn to read first or they can't learn anything else, and Mississippi had struggled for years. When they began producing the NAEP or the National Assessment of Educational Preparedness Report that tested children all over the nation, they would then grade each state and compare it to all the other states. They call it the nation's report card. Mississippi had always been like 50th. I studied that, and I said, well, we could set a goal of getting that statewide testing up and get us off the bottom consistently. You know what it's like to be dead last every race for 40 years or whatever?

Natasha Tretheway: Jim Barksdale first made his mark as the chief operating officer of FedEx where he set a new standard for fast, reliable, and instantly trackable package delivery. He left FedEx in 1991 to lead McCaw Cellular, a pioneer in the cell phone business and then became C.E.O. of Netscape, which Barksdale helped turn into one of the first billion dollar internet startups.

Kelly Butler: The day I met Jim Barksdale, he told me a story about his work at FedEx. He said, if we could get a package from the middle of Manhattan to the middle of Tokyo in 48 hours, deliver it on time, deliver it safely, guarantee its arrival, we ought to be able to teach every child in Mississippi to read. And it's that story that he told me that really has driven the work that we've done at the institute because he recognized that there was a way to do something right and that if you did it the right way and you did it every time, it would yield results.

Jim Barksdale: Early on, we decided we're going to make this contribution measurable. That's one of the basic business principles. You can't manage what you can't measure.

Claiborne Barksdale: He was absolutely explicit from the get-go, as was Sally. This is not a gift. It's an investment. From the very beginning, there was always accountability. We were always trying to measure, "Are we making a difference?" That would give you 60 target schools.

Michael Cormack: Jim is fond of saying that everybody has an opinion, but what does the data say? He is relentlessly committed to the use of data to inform decision making. I think it's what contributed to his great success in business, and it's certainly the ethos of our nonprofit.

Natasha Tretheway: Early on, the institute tried multiple approaches to improving literacy, including hiring new principals, working with the colleges of education, and providing mentors to work with some of the lowest performing schools in the state.

Teacher: This is one of those start letters, isn't it?

Natasha Tretheway: Eventually the institute decided to focus on two high impact interventions, hiring skilled literacy coaches who could work closely and consistently with teachers throughout the year and offering in-depth professional training to help teachers develop their skills.

Tori Greene: That's the name of the letter, but the sound, Darion, is /t/.

Jim Barksdale: One of the things I learned in business is that one of the best ways to learn how to do something new is to try different methods. Find the ones that work and move towards them and the ones that don't work — the ideas or the programs or just the overall concept — if it doesn't work, don't be too proud. Quit it.

Kelly Butler: He's always been dogged about the data. And when things didn't work, we would pivot and try something new.

Teacher: In my elementary school and Quitman County Elementary where I previously worked, I saw us turn our school from a failing school to a successful school. We met students where they were. We focused on that systematic science of reading.

Natasha Tretheway: For more than two decades the Barksdale Reading Institute has partnered with school systems, principals, teachers, and parents to advocate for scientifically proven phonics-based reading programs in elementary schools. And slowly, sometimes painfully, things began to change.

Kymyona Burk: We were met with some resistance. In a specifics school we had one of our literacy coaches go in and the teacher said to her, "Oh, I'm a good teacher. I don't need you in my classroom." So then the coach pulled out her data, and her data said that she was really addressing the needs of only some of her students, of only a few of her students and not all students.

Children: [kids reading along] The beaver's teeth go ...

Claiborne Barksdale: We've had a struggle from the outset with the implementation of our phonics based strategy. A lot of teachers were whole language advocates. That of course, is not what the National Reading Panel advocated and what we felt the science supported.

Student: B, bat, /b/ [children repeat]

Kelly Butler: Applying that research that those experts taught us, we really became the engine for reading expertise in the state.

Children: /k/, /āk/

Kelly Butler: It was our real goal to become the smartest people about reading in Mississippi ... making literacy a focus of a school, meaning it happens early in the day when kids and teachers are fresh, and devoting enough time to it so that you can teach all the kids at whatever level they're operating on.

Children: "Found it. Boom."

Claiborne Barksdale: There has to be a dedicated, lengthy reading block.

Kelly Butler: And that it's sacred, that things don't interrupt the literacy block. It's not when field trips happen. We tried to get them to turn the intercom off during the literacy block so that there were not interruptions so that students and teachers could really focus on literacy.

Claiborne Barksdale: Schools of education were not teaching phonics. We found you could major in elementary education and come out and not know a single thing about phonics, which I just found difficult to believe. Inculcating that into the schools of education has been and continues to be a real challenge.

Jim Barksdale: We sought for more consistency across the state, and we got it. But it wasn't easy.

Natasha Tretheway: In 2013, Mississippi officially embraced many of the Barksdale Reading Institute's core goals when it passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act. The legislation required that all third graders read on grade level by the end of the school year or they would not be promoted to the fourth grade. The new law also provided funding to deploy a network of literacy coaches across the state and a systematic program of ongoing professional development for teachers, building on the key successes of the Barksdale model.

Michael Cormack: The Barksdale Reading Institute was the forerunner for the literacy coaching, which is at the heart of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in our state. Our institute was instrumental in providing guidance around the implementation of the law.

Kelly Butler: When the Literacy-Based Promotion Act passed and suddenly we were faced with the prospect of repe- ... of retaining third graders. Teachers were serious about getting this job done right to avoid that. Nobody wanted the burden of this law to be on the backs of nine-year-olds, and we focused laser-like on the adults. And teachers were very responsive. They recognized from their own data what was working and what wasn't working.

Claiborne Barksdale: It was a game changer for our ability to affect the way teaching reading occurred in the state. There's no question about that.

Kelly Butler: We have had enormous success with teachers welcoming this help, welcoming the training. More than once, I can tell you, they have said to us, it's like a light bulb going on. And they say, "No one ever taught me how to do this. I regret the number of kids that I have tried to teach reading only to discover that now I know how."

Student: [child reading] "In the river ... "

Michael Cormack: When you think about the fact that a student that is a proficient reader by third grade and all of the incredible social outcomes that it's tied to — more likely to own a home, more likely to vote and to be a committed citizen.

Jim Barksdale: Earning capability and their social contributions are enormously better if they learn to read at an early age. And that's what we've counted on, and I think we can say that that's what's happening with a great deal of pride.

News Anchor: Great news for Mississippi schools tonight. National key test scores are improving, propelling students from the bottom to the top in core subjects and skills.

Natasha Tretheway: In 2019, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation's report card, showed that Mississippi's fourth grade reading scores had improved dramatically. Mississippi, which was historically at or near the bottom of state reading score rankings, had moved squarely to the national average.

News Reporter: Fourth grade reading scores are an attention getter. Mississippi's fourth graders are closing the achievement gap.

Natasha Tretheway: What's more, Mississippi's reading scores rank third among all states in growth for students in poverty and seventh for African-American students.

Kymyona Burk: The entire nation began to look and say, well, what's really going on in Mississippi? That it's now not okay for Mississippi to be last ... that also does a lot for our pride just in our state, for our teachers and the pride in their communities, especially low income communities that had never experienced educational success before.

Natasha Tretheway: By 2022, Mississippi ranked second in the nation in accelerating literacy for students from low income families.

Educator: Yes! Yes! That's what I'm talking about. See, I knew you could do it.

Kelly Butler: It's possible to do. We know how to do it. There was a nice New York Times headline not too long after we achieved the national average on NAEP, which read, "There's a right way to teach reading, and Mississippi knows how." And I really believe we know how. We've taught teachers how to do it and with a lot of help. Other states are learning how to do this as well. There are many other challenges we have as a country, and teaching reading, knowing how to teach reading, should no longer be one of them because we know how to do it. We just need to do it everywhere.

Natasha Tretheway: Over 22 years, the Barksdale Reading Institute developed a scalable model for teaching reading more effectively. Now, this knowledge will be made available to schools and teachers across the country.

Jim Barksdale: We've done the work we set out to do in Mississippi, so we're going to move ourselves over to creating the Reading Universe and be online for all teachers in the country and the world. It will be the legacy that will carry on the methods, the methods we've learned work.

Kelly Butler: All of this that we have developed over time needs to be shared beyond Mississippi, and this web-based project will enable us to do that.

Claiborne Barksdale: One of our mantras is "Don't confuse progress with victory," and we certainly do not do that. This work will never cease.

Michael Cormack: This work isn't easy, and if you take your foot off the gas even for a minute, you can backtrack quite easily. And so I think what's important in the ongoing story, is to never lose sight of where you've been, but then to also be very crystal clear about the ongoing actions that it takes to maintain solid performance and to continue to grow.

Jim Barksdale: We calculated, we have affected probably 50 to a hundred thousand children in this state and got 'em up to proficient reading who would not have been there were it not for our reading institute. That brings me a great deal of pride in our work. That makes me very proud of the people who've done that. And it also gives us assurance that what we're doing is right. And I think, in the final analysis, what we're doing is really helpful to those children, and that's what's most important.

Natasha Tretheway: This film was made possible with support from the Community Foundation for Mississippi with funding by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.