Will Austin is a former public school teacher, principal, and the founder of Boston Schools Fund. He writes on Substack at Boston Focus.
With another school year ending, Massachusetts residents should not ignore or try to explain away with edu-jargon the recent release of the 2025 Education Scorecard, a Harvard-Stanford collaboration that aligned decades of National Assessment of Educational Progress results with district testing across 8,000 districts with available data.
Across America, student learning in reading and math has been in steady decline since 2013. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this, with America’s lower income students now falling further behind their higher income peers. This is more than a “learning recession” or even a “depression.” And Massachusetts is no exception.
The Commonwealth continues to declare itself number one on the NAEP and Advancement Placement tests. But the Education Scorecard yields a less celebratory finding. Although Massachusetts maintains the top rank by a slim margin in absolute scores, the Commonwealth has actually ranked only 11th in math and 15th in literacy when academic growth and student improvement are measured. The outcome: Many other states are improving faster than Massachusetts.
This is not a blip, nor the fault of the pandemic. The data clearly show that Massachusetts student learning started to peak a decade ago and has been in decline since.
No Massachusetts district made the scorecard’s top 100 list of improving school districts. Gateway cities in particular have struggled, with Lynn, Framingham, Everett, and Revere all losing a year of proficiency since 2019. But this is an issue for all Massachusetts communities.
Even the affluent Massachusetts communities that did maintain learning progress did not keep up with their peers in other states. Take Weston: A town that boasts a median income of a quarter of million dollars and SAT scores in the 1300s still lost ground.
What was the response of our elected officials and education leaders? Crickets. And can you blame them? Consider a recent MassINC poll that shows where education stands on Bay State voters’ priority list.
There have been many underlying forces that hurt student learning, including the pandemic, lower attendance, increases in mental health needs, and the rise of cell phone and social media usage. There is no shortage of policy ideas and evidence-based practices that could help, both in Massachusetts and nationally.
But none of it will happen without first acknowledging the problem. That won’t be easy because for the past two decades there has been a sustained, effective, and bipartisan campaign to discredit the educational measurement that is crucial for pinpointing problems and guiding the allocation of resources.
This began during the Obama administration, when parents and teachers led opt-out movements to encourage children and families to not participate in state-required tests like the MCAS. Tracking and accountability took a more consequential hit in 2015, when both conservative Republicans and liberal teachers unions gutted federal educational policy. Opposition to accountability became the centerpiece of the successful ballot initiative in 2024 eliminating the MCAS graduation requirement.
So pervasive is this distrust of assessments that now some teachers seem to prefer “vibes” to test scores. Against logic and research, we have convinced ourselves that a subjective judgement in one classroom is more valid than an objective task or question across many classrooms.
But it should not be a binary choice: We can care about a child’s well-being while also caring about their ability to achieve. We should care if a fourth-grader can add fractions. We should care if an eighth-grader can read an article and answer some basic questions about it.
For a time, advocates and elected officials on both sides of the aisle agreed that objective standards and assessments were good for schools. That is why President George W. Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy were able to share a stage in 2002 — at Boston Latin School no less — committing the federal government to education excellence. Whether it was to reveal and close achievement gaps, identify high-performing students or districts, or prepare the future workforce, leaders offered reasons to measure student performance, and seemed to care about the results.
Leaders need to care again. Despite never being a top-tier campaign issue, there have been several times when education became a top-tier governing issue: the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, No Child Left Behind in 2002, the Achievement Gap Act in 2010, to name a few.
The initiatives were all imperfect. But they also coincided with consistent improvement in learning and record-high NAEP scores. High standards, rigorous assessments, strong accountability, and increased funding was what produced success in Massachusetts. But while other states around the country copied the Commonwealth’s recipe, Massachusetts stopped cooking with it. That is why states like Maryland, Mississippi, and Alabama are catching up.
There should be a state commitment to new rigorous high school graduation standards that require students to pass assessments; this is the only way to know a diploma means something in every city or town.
The governor should sign a final bill to have Massachusetts join nearly every other state in requiring that children are taught to read using research-based practices. There also needs to be a bell-to-bell ban on cell phones in schools.
Massachusetts’ 2019 Student Opportunity Act injected billions of new dollars into the state’s schools in exchange for plans and programs to support vulnerable students. The continued debate over funding provides a chance to reinvigorate statewide commitment to student learning, while addressing the enrollment and financial challenges that are already disrupting this year’s budget season.
This is the time to confront the reality of lower performance, fewer students, and fewer dollars; to be bold and chart something new much like the Commonwealth did back in 1993. Leaders need to step up to fulfill the promise of public education in Massachusetts.