Massachusetts’s students are back to being the top in the U.S. for all categories in a test known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — but still remain well behind the state’s pre-pandemic scores.
“Massachusetts continues to prioritize education, and so while today’s results are not quite where we want them to be — we want to be number one for all students — there is recognition of the work to get there,” Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler said Wednesday. … “Our fourth grade math scores are back to pre-pandemic levels. While nationally gaps increased, they did not here. They still exist, and we have work to do, but they are not getting worse.”
The National Assessment of Education Progress tests, which have been administered to a sample of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading nationwide every two years since the 1990s, showed Massachusetts students to be the highest scorers in all four categories. Students both in the state and across the country remained unable to quite catch up to their pre-pandemic peers.
In 2022, Massachusetts students’ scores hit their lowest point since 2003, and the state dropped into second place for 4th-grade math and 8th-grade reading. Across the country in 2022, scores hit record lows and not a single state saw significant improvement.
In 2024, Massachusetts scores remained relatively stagnant for eighth-grade math and both grades in reading. Only fourth-grade math saw relative improvement — echoing slight improvement in these scores across the country.
Nationally, 2024 scores remained relatively stable from 2022 in eighth-grade math and declined for both grades in reading.
Boston Public Schools was also one of several larger school districts with progress in fourth-grade math scores.
Tutwiler said so far “progress is slow,” but the administration is “building a foundation to go fast” with investments in initiatives like early literacy learning.
Healey highlighted some investments Wednesday, including a $25 million investment in “high dosage tutoring” in the governor’s proposed budget for the next year.
“We want to reach 10,000 students immediately through this initiative to address pandemic related learning loss and accelerate learning growth for students in kindergarten through grade three by prioritizing students in grade one,” Tutwiler said of the tutoring investment.
Across the nation and Massachusetts, gaps also widened between higher-performing and lower-performing students, with the lowest performing students nationwide now about 100 points behind the highest.
“This growing achievement gap between high- and low-performing students is troubling,” said Martin West, Vice Chair of the NAEP Governing Board and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education. “We made progress in closing this gap until around 2010, but it’s been steadily widening since.”
Massachusetts officials said they are “well aware” of gaps and leaning into “investments and strategies to address them.
“The rollback is not going to be short,” said Tutwiler. “We’re talking about adaptive challenges. We’re talking about working with students directly who experience major disruptions in their learning. This is not a quick fix. It’s going to take time, but as the results are clearly indicating, we’re getting the work done.”