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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 added pressure does not seem to have had much of an impact on Massachusetts scores.

From Pat Jehlen June 2026

No Child Left Behind also doesn’t seem to have had much effect on national NAEP scores.

from Pat Jehlen June 2026

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 as assessed 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 Boston Parents Schoolyard News.