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As a Millennial Southerner who grew up in crappy white rural schools (aka. north Alabama) where ~20% of the kids exited middle school more or less illiterate my non-ideological take is that some mix of the Bush/early Obama era Republican takeovers and/or old-fashioned generational turnover likely flushed out a bunch of shockingly old-fashioned/complacent educators/administrators (aka. dead wood) such that schools actually started giving a shit about literacy. Are we going to surpass Massachusetts? I doubt it, but I bet there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit to be gathered as late as the 90s and the Southern states just started to grab it.
I don't want to get into wall of text territory, but I am retrospectively appalled that I was lavished with resources by our local school system (however misguided they may have been) because I was a non-compliant pain in the ass while my middle sister was allowed to skate through silently struggling to read because she didn't cause trouble. I'm smarter than she is, but not twice her ACT score smarter.
The past poor literacy is a very real thing. I work for a trucking company whose driver pool mostly draws from MS, AL, and GA and many of our Gen X drivers (who are otherwise successful owner-operators, aka. not stupid) are incapable of writing a basic incident report without requiring heavy editing from management to produce something intelligible in English. Likewise, many of our white-collar office staff (again, I'm picking on the Gen Xers) are barely capable of using computers. If anything goes wrong they just hit the buttons harder and start swearing. They can memorize how to do this or that but don't really grasp how to navigate an interface to find something they want. I would rate my computer skills to be marginally above-average by mid-millennial standards (I can install and use an easy Linux distro and that's about as far as my skills go.) and I'm treated like an IT wizard for what I can do.
On an amusing side note, I vividly remember No Child Left Behind because suddenly my teachers became very friendly during the annual standardized tests and worked to ensure that I was filling in the answers correctly (They were confident that I had the right answer and less confident that I was bubbling in the scantrons correctly.).
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