It's new information to me that parts of the South are improving the average student (relatively speaking). One thing they had already done well, in my experience, was cultivate the smarter poor kids. When I was a kid in the Deep South, they funneled kids testing above about 125 IQ to magnet schools, busing them in from all over the metro. My friend and I escaped our working class neighborhood school that way. Now, I live in Silicon Valley, where no such programs exist, and by-and-large the public school you go to is based on how expensive your zip code is. Talk about reinforcing inequality.