Education: The old Bay State ain’t what she used to be

First appeared in Contrarian Boston 2.26.25

By David Mancuso

Excellence in Massachusetts public education has been evaporating for a decade, and the talk of equity for all students has achieved little more than serving as a smokescreen for lowering standards and accountability while sinking more money into a broken system.

The most current NEAP scores and the Education Recovery Score Card combine to provide sufficient proof.

Thomas Kane, education economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education told Contrarian Boston national average achievement levels have been falling since 2013.

But, he noted, “the losses have been larger in Massachusetts.”

Consider Massachusetts 8th grade math performance which has declined by 17 points on the NAEP since 2013 representing a 1.6 grade equivalent loss between 4th and 8th grade in the Commonwealth.

At the same time, the Recovery Report Card showed Massachusetts ranked 19th among states in math recovery and 27th in reading recovery between 2019 and 2024.

Said Kane: “The gap between Massachusetts and the national average is now back to where it was in the mid-90s.”

That Massachusetts appears to find itself right back to the time when the so-called Grand Bargain attached standards and accountability to school funding should be a disturbing irony, especially in a state driven by the quest for social equality and reliant upon a knowledge economy.

How did education in the Commonwealth arrive at this moment?

Well, there has been a pervasive lack of leadership among state and local education decision-makers. Now combine that with deference to social justice warriors lobbying to lower the bar for students of concern, rather than supporting efforts to enable those students to jump over the same, higher bar as their more privileged peers.

As Kane sees it, “while accountability might be helpful, especially for the lower achieving schools/subgroups, it’s not sufficient.”

Pointing to the fact that achievement began plateauing in Massachusetts around 2010, Kane has been arguing that “the state has an essential role to play in funding pilots of promising ideas, measuring their effectiveness, and sharing results with local leaders.”

It’s shocking to think a state whose core industries thrive on innovation has rejected such an approach in favor of a system so beholden to local control - a system, that, as Kane notes, makes it “difficult for any individual district to know whether some intervention is ‘working’ or not.”

Kane suggested fixing that would require cross-district comparisons and state government is the ideal player for it. Yet state leaders have ignored Kane on this for some years now.

If logic isn’t a powerful enough force to move the Massachusetts Industrial Education Complex from prioritizing adult employment and local budgets over best practices and learning, then what will be?

Meanwhile, sources tell Contrarian Boston that in a review of the Education Recovery Report Card, Sen. Jason Lewis, chair of the Joint Committee on Education, told a gathering of state leaders that the solution to the problem is more money.

One need only look at the Report Card to bust that myth.

Billions were literally spent to recover from COVID-related learning losses. Districts were freed by the federal and state governments to decide to spend the funds as they saw fit, guided only by their professional expertise. The Student Opportunity Act and funding from the Millionaires Tax poured millions more into the system.

Yet here we remain some five years after the pandemic, with more illiterate, innumerate fourth and eighth graders than we have had in decades.

Sources also told Contrarian both Lewis and state Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler left the meeting before discussions about how to address the state’s challenges beyond more investment were addressed.

Chalk it up to busy schedules, foreknowledge of the findings, or a simple lack of interest in the details, but either way, it makes one wonder if attending the meeting was just checking another box for Lewis and Tutwiler.