Donald Brown has an inspiring story. The graduate of Vicksburg High School became a couple of years ago the first Rhodes Scholar from Mississippi State University since 1911.
After two years of studying at Oxford University, the premier university in England, his next stop is the premier university in the United States, Harvard, where he will be pursuing a doctorate in literature.
Writing this past weekend in The Clarion-Ledger, Brown notes the disadvantages he and other like Mississippians face when competing against the best and the brightest from elsewhere.
Citing a piece last month in The New York Times, Brown said his home school district was educating at a level that is 1.7 grades behind the national average. In other words, a typical senior coming out of the Vicksburg Warren School District would have learned about as much as an average sophomore would in most of the rest of the nation.
He then crunched the numbers on the 31 others who were selected as Rhodes Scholars the same year as he. Their schools averaged 1.25 grades above the national average.
One way to look at this is to marvel at how well Brown has done, despite the documented disadvantages he faced.
The other is to question why Mississippi continues to deliver an elementary and secondary education that is inferior to what most of the rest of the country receives. We can blame it on the state’s high rate of poverty. We can blame it on the legacy of slavery and segregation. We can blame it on failed leadership, which is what Brown largely focuses on as he takes Gov. Phil Bryant to task.
Whatever the mixture of causes, though, the fact remains that Mississippi students, on average, are hamstrung when they compete against students from other parts of the country — not only when it comes to getting into the best colleges but later on when landing the best jobs.
It’s great to have the Donald Browns of the state who show that individuals can beat the statistical odds if they are blessed with innate abilities and personal drive, complemented by supportive families, teachers and other mentors.
But it would be better if Mississippi students didn’t start off in the hole.
