Commonwealth students still leading the pack
This week, the National Center for Education Statistics released the results of the 2009 national math test scores for fourth and eighth graders, which showed, once again, that Massachusetts leads the nation in student achievement. A national report card for math, the fourth-grade test results placed Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Vermont as the highest performing states while the District of Columbia, Alabama, Arizona and Louisiana were the lowest performing. When it came to educating fourth-grade minority students, Black students in Massachusetts scored higher than Black students in any other state while Montana did the same for their Hispanic students. At the eighth-grade level, Massachusetts had the highest scores and the state’s Black students also outperformed their peers across the country.
I’m not saying we don’t have too many students failing to reach proficiency or that the achievement gap, which has not changed, isn’t a problem in the Commonwealth. But as the state with the highest percentage of schools in some form of regulatory sanction as well as threats of takeover by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, perhaps our state education leaders could put at least some effort into promoting the good work our districts do with the nation’s highest-performing students to balance their excessive labeling and sanctioning of the Commonwealth’s public schools.