Dear Neighbors,
There's so much happening at the state house. For example, I'm following the negotiations about the rent stabilization ballot question; I've done a few updates on Facebook; things changing daily. But I'm hopeful.
Alain and I wrote an article for Commonwealth Beacon about the failure of high stakes testing to improve learning - using test score evidence. Here it is. At least look at the charts. (I love charts!) And keep reading for a link to an article making similar points from yesterday's Globe, with more data.
New end-of-course testing unlikely to do much good.
Now that voters have eliminated the MCAS graduation requirement, some supporters of the old system are afraid many students will graduate without a foundation of basic skills.
Gov. Maura Healey and some business leaders are proposing to restore
some of the test pressure with a new set of state standardized end-of-
course tests that would count toward graduation.
But test score data provide no support for their claim that eliminating the
graduation requirement will harm students, or that the proposed partial
restoration will do any good.
Yes, test scores in Massachusetts and the nation have been slipping, but not because we have softened the penalties for low scores. Three facts make that very unlikely:
1. When the punishments were instituted, scores on the main national
assessment did not go up to any significant degree.
2. Scores started slipping a decade ago when the threat of penalties was
very high. In Massachusetts, these penalties included denying diplomas to
low-scoring students and state takeover of low-scoring schools.
3. Scores are also sliding in other countries, not just here.
The sinking scores that are the subject of recent media attention are on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, a program that has tested large samples of students across the country since the 1970s.
Originally, NAEP only published results for the whole country, but more
recently, NAEP has tested large enough samples of students to get
statistically useful results for individual states. NAEP began reporting
Massachusetts scores in 1998. That was also the year the state started
MCAS. But the pressure to boost scores did not really kick in until the No Child Left Behind Act took effect in 2002. That law demanded that states impose penalties on schools that did not raise their scores until every student was “proficient.”
In Massachusetts high schools, the pressure started a year earlier. The class of 2003 was the first that had to pass a standardized test to get their diplomas, and they took the MCAS in their sophomore year, 2001, but this seems unlikely to have affected fourth-grade scores.
Ramping up the pressure had little effect on scores
The chart below shows Massachusetts average fourth grade reading
scores since 1998. The advent of NCLB does not seem to have had much of an impact on Massachusetts scores.
No Child Left Behind also doesn’t seem to have had much effect on national NAEP scores.
Since raising the pressure had little impact, reducing that pressure seems unlikely to have done any harm.
Scores started slipping before the pressure eased
But – our second point – the decline in test scores in Massachusetts did not start after the pressure eased. It happened when the penalties were at their peak.
The Massachusetts Achievement Gap Act of 2010 gave the state
commissioner of elementary and secondary education authority to seize
control of schools and districts with low scores. Then-Commissioner
Mitchell Chester used that power to take over four schools in 2013 and
three districts, Lawrence in 2011, Holyoke in 2015, and Southbridge in
2016.
State officials used the threat of takeovers to impose their policies on other districts. As late as 2022, they were threatening to take over the state’s biggest school district, Boston, and forced city officials to agree to state oversight.
The 2022 Boston agreement was a last hurrah for state intervention. In
most cases, state officials had failed to raise the MCAS scores of the
districts they took over.
It turned out that they didn’t actually know how to teach children better than local educators. In 2025, the state returned the Holyoke Schools to local control.
But Massachusetts NAEP scores started sagging before 2019, when state intervention was still a very live possibility. So something else must have caused scores to decline.
Scores are falling in other countries, too
Our third point: The same thing is happening in other countries, as noted in a report on the 2023 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). “The decline in performance can only partially be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, with falling scores in reading, science and maths already apparent prior to 2018,” the report says.
We don’t claim to have an explanation for what is happening. Maybe, as
many have suggested, social media and smartphones are responsible.
There may be other reasons: It is well established (and widely ignored) that most of the variation in student test scores is due to non-school factors, especially family income. So maybe our “K-shaped economy,” in which the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, is affecting scores.
Raising the minimum wage might help.
In this essay, we have only looked at standardized tests and the skills that these tests measure.
But in public forums held by the governor’s Statewide K-12 Graduation
Council and independently by Citizens for Public Schools, parents,
teachers, and students overwhelmingly agreed that some of the most
important skills students need to learn in school are not reflected in these tests.
These skills, like problem-solving, initiative, and cooperation, are hard to
measure, which may be why easily testable skills get so much more
attention.
We don’t know whether today’s students are doing better or worse than
students 20 years ago when it comes to working as a team and following through to the successful conclusion of a project.
But one thing seems clear from the standardized testing data: New test
mandates like those in the governor’s proposal are not likely to help our
children prepare for satisfying and productive adult lives.
Patricia Jehlen is Senate vice chair of the Joint Committee on Education.
Alain Jehlen is a retired education journalist and edits the Boston Parents Schoolyard News blog.
Now here's the Globe article making similar points.
No, despite what everyone says, American schools aren’t failing
A claim so familiar, people no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence.
By Freddie deBoerUpdated June 22, 2026
This is a short excerpt of a Boston Globe article that uses evidence from the Programme of Student Assessment that:
- US students score better than 68 out of 90 developed countries (the top 6 are all in East Asia)
- Scores across the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development have dropped since COVID, as they have in the US
- "Failing" schools are concentrated in a small group of districts with high poverty. "The United States has the highest child-poverty rate in the OECD." Test scores generally reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups of students. But our poorest students do well compared to the poorest students in other countries.
Song of the Week:
"What did you learn in school today?"
by Tom Paxton 1963
Trivia Contest: Who said "You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have." Prize of limited value for first correct response.
Happy summer, and stay in touch,
Pat Jehlen