Mississippi Prepares New Push on Education It's early on a Friday morning, and high school chemistry students in Victoria Dawson's class are working equations at the board. Dawson is peppering the class of 11 girls and four boys with questions, trying to keep everyone focused as she helps correct mistakes. When a student gets one of the dense equations right, Dawson and the class salute with finger-snapping in place of applause "I want some A's on Tuesday," the teacher says, warning of an upcoming test. In a state where Republican leaders are trying to put their stamp on long-running efforts to improve education, Clarksdale is emblematic of both the challenges the state faces and innovative ideas for boosting schools. Dawson's class is part of a program in the district to develop a more rigorous high-school curriculum. Leaders of the city in the impoverished Delta region - known as the crossroads of the blues where Robert Johnson once lived - hope improved education will help stanch a hemorrhaging population that now stands at 18,000. "Without a strong public school system, you have no growth in the community," said Lois Erwin, a former principal at a private school who's now coordinating a community development effort sponsored by a local bank. You've got to have a strong public school system or you don't have economic development. That's just it. Republicans' statewide solutions include making it easier to create charter schools and holding back third-graders who can't read. Other changes approved by lawmakers are state-funded prekindergarten and higher qualifications and merit pay for teachers. "All those categories that we see that have an effect not only on quality of life, but on our society and workforce, go back to beginning with a failure in the educational system," said Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, who names education as key to improving Mississippi's weak economy. There's nothing better that I could do than change what I think has been a fairly ineffective educational system. The GOP-sponsored measures could mean more big changes for Clarksdale's nine public schools, which would be fine with local attorney and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Luckett. "We need a cultural shift," said Luckett, who's now running for mayor of Clarksdale. We need a big war; that's how I look at it. Though Mississippi lags in education, it has made progress. A Harvard University study found that Mississippi students posted greater gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than the average among the 41 states it measured. The state ranked 13th out of that group overall for improvement between 1992 and 2011. In 1980, only 54.8 percent of Mississippi residents 25 and older had a high school diploma according to Census data, compared to 80.4 in 2010. Mississippi improved by 25.6 percentage points while the nation improved 13.9 points to 85.3 percent. The improvement was even steeper in Coahoma County, which includes Clarksdale. The share of adults with a high school diploma rose from 43.8 percent in 1980 to 75 percent in 2010. But the Harvard study finds that while Mississippi has been able to boost many of its students up to basic achievement levels, most are not yet truly proficient. And while Mississippi has many more high school graduates than 30 years ago, American-born Mississippi adults are still the least likely of those in any state to have a high school diploma.