For three years, the finest school system in America has faltered under Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA). Now, as she gears up for reelection, Healey will be reciting a familiar litany of misleading statistics and feel-good buzzwords about her education “successes.”
At the heart of her claims to education-policy glory is an oft-repeated stat: “Massachusetts schools, for the first time in eight years, are now ranked Number One.” One glance at the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress and Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System testing data reveals how deceptive this is. Massachusetts is not “number one” because its scores improved — they got worse, much worse — but because nearly everyone else was falling, too. The state’s once-commanding lead has all but evaporated: in 2013, only five states sat within 10 points of Massachusetts in eighth-grade math, about a year’s worth of learning. By 2024, 24 states did.
Keeping with this example, the eighth-grade math scores on the NAEP, the so-called “nation’s report card,” that ranked the state first in the nation in 2024, would have landed it 30th in 2013. The state’s own test, the MCAS, is grimmer still: third-grade reading proficiency fell from 56% before the pandemic to 42%, where it has stubbornly remained for two straight years.
This isn’t to scapegoat Healey: She inherited an already declining system. But perhaps — and I’m no campaign manager — she ought to retire the specious soundbites and attend to the shortcomings they’re covering up. Voters are, quite literally, one line graph away from seeing through it.
Ultimately, if Healey truly believes that Massachusetts “has always led the way when it comes to providing our students with the best education,” as she emphatically professed this past July, then why lean so hard on the raw national rankings? Because the rest is unflattering. Under Healey’s tenure, while Massachusetts was falling, a number of other states were climbing. Mississippi — long a punchline in education rankings and currently 13th in the national rankings — has raised its scores so dramatically that, once results are adjusted for demographics, it now ranks first in the nation in fourth-grade reading and math. Massachusetts, adjusted the same way, falls from first to fifth.
This leads to an even more alarming set of numbers, which Healey has papered over with the same comforting platitudes: “Massachusetts has the best public schools in the country, and that’s in large part due to the fact that we know that diversity is a strength, not a flaw.” As rosy as that sounds, Massachusetts’ huge demographic disparities owe themselves in no small part to the fact that, of every state researchers at Harvard and Stanford examined, Massachusetts has seen the largest widening of the gap between poor and nonpoor students. Affluent white districts such as Needham and Wellesley are soaring past their pre-pandemic scores — handing Healey her new “number one” quip — while poorer, more diverse cities such as Lynn, Everett, and Revere move sharply in the opposite direction. Jennie Williamson, state director of EdTrust-Massachusetts, put it succinctly: “We call ourselves ‘number one’ in education, but that’s only true for some students.”
One might protest that this is merely the inevitable result of COVID-era decline — and Healey does. “We’re still recovering from the pandemic, as all states are,” she declared in March. But one wonders: If Mississippi can manage a comeback, why can’t Massachusetts? Williamson answers, “This is not really a pandemic story anymore. It’s really a policy and instruction story.”
And once we examine the policies at work, this stagnation becomes far less mysterious. One of Healey’s signature education investments — which we’ll certainly be hearing about this fall — is free community college. A curious choice, to say the least. Decades of research, most famously that of Nobel laureate James Heckman, found that a dollar spent on a young child’s education returns far more than the same dollar spent years later. Early learning is cheaper and more transformative. Even if you aren’t a Nobel laureate, it’s intuitive to see that teaching a 6-year-old to read alters the trajectory of his life, whereas subsidizing community college degrees, however noble, returns far less per dollar. Yet Massachusetts is slated to spend $117 million a year on the latter, while a fraction of that number, in annual terms, goes to “Literacy Launch,” the early-reading program that is Healey’s other signature investment.
This is a point about priorities, and not, to be clear, an argument that her new reading initiative deserves any more money. Reading scores have not moved since its inception. There is a wildly misguided but infectious idea at work here: Spend enough, the thinking goes, and illiterate students will metamorphose into little Shakespeares.
Massachusetts already spends more per pupil than 45 states and has funneled north of $100 million across recent budgets — state and federal — into early reading. And still, third-grade literacy, the target of all that spending, sits at an alarming 42%, 14 points below pre-pandemic levels. Despite Healey’s claim that Massachusetts now has “nation-leading early literacy and tutoring programs,” the cocktail of state and federal dollars has, by the available data, produced exceedingly little. The Boston Globe put it tersely: “Early reading scores showed limited signs that Governor Maura Healey’s investments in reading instruction had taken hold so far. Third-grade students made no progress from 2024.” The name of the education-policy game in this administration has been “spend and announce”: Once the check is cut — the larger the better, for press purposes — you can sit back, relax, and declare victory.
Similarly, after promising a replacement for the scrapped MCAS graduation requirement, Healey’s team concocted — and has not yet passed, mind you — a “recommendation” for a new standard. But rest assured, unlike the previously thorough MCAS exam, Healey clarified that “we’re moving away from high stakes to high expectations.” To translate: Students will be expected to perform, gently coaxed to do their best, but never held to it.
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The keys to success here are no secret. Massachusetts effectively wrote the winning playbook in education policy. In 1991, a scathing report from the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education found the state’s students so poorly served that they were unprepared even for entry-level work. “The bill for those ‘lost’ children comes due every day,” it concluded, “a staggering cost in lost talent, lost ambition, lost creativity, and, too often, lost lives.” Two years later, the 1993 Education Reform Act answered this, striking a bargain that nearly doubled school funding in exchange for rigorous standards and accountability. By 2007, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation on all four NAEP exams and could reasonably be called the envy of American education. The formula was not complicated — money and accountability — yet Healey continuously refuses to indulge the second half of this equation.
Instead, she seems content to keep playing these rhetorical games. A careful voter will catch these sleights of hand; most won’t. But the bill for it will come due all the same — paid, as always, by Massachusetts’ young men and women, and especially by those least able to afford it.