Here’s one report card that Massachusetts might want to hide: Governing magazine and the Pew Center on the States gave the state a “C” in their Grading the States report, released in early March. As the map below indicates, only New Hampshire and Rhode Island got lower grades for how well their state governments are managed. And with the notable exception of Connecticut, the Northeast seems to have fallen in the eyes of the Governing management mavens. Five of the six New England states, along with New Jersey and Pennsylvania, received lower grades than in the magazine’s last report card, completed in 2005. (Massachusetts got a “C+” last time.)

In this year’s report, the Bay State got mediocre marks for its budget process, the management of its public workforce, and the setting of performance goals, but it really ended up in a ditch thanks to the condition of the state’s infrastructure. And the report’s authors see no sign that we’ll be patching up our potholes soon: “If Massachusetts did decide to make infrastructure a top priority, it’s hard to know where the money would come from. The state’s total outstanding debt already exceeds $18 billion — the highest in the nation per capita — and the Massachusetts budget for next year already faces a $1 billion shortfall.” The state’s new health care insurance program also gave the authors a slight case of the willies. (“Initial estimates of 140,000 enrollees proved low, which will leave the program an estimated $245 million over budget this year.”)

Utah and Washington got the highest marks, with the latter state praised for its long-term budget planning (at least six years out) and Gov. Christine Gregoire’s town hall meetings on the budget process. As for the lowest-ranked states, the report’s authors derided the “myth” of fiscal conservatism in New Hampshire and charged that “meager cost and performance information and tortuous business processes create an institutional inertia that wastes much of the state’s limited resources.” And Rhode Island lost points for the fact that many state employees there still work on typewriters rather than networked computers.