If you’re governor of the state that effectively introduced universal public school education in the United States, the one thing you want to avoid is losing the state’s ranking as having the smartest kids in the country.
Massachusetts is the richest, most highly educated state, where the nation’s first public school was founded and home to Horace Mann, the 19th-century reformer known as the Father of American Education. And, for the past two decades, governors could brag how students from Massachusetts have consistently beaten every other state on all four main tests on the Nation’s Report Card.
But now that perch atop the education hierarchy is in jeopardy, as the edge Massachusetts has long held over the nation is shrinking dramatically: Test scores have been sliding for nearly a decade and many students here have not recovered from the pandemic as much as in some other parts of the country.