Midway through her State of the Commonwealth address in January, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey uttered 11 words that would be greeted with raucous cheers in any state capitol other than the one she was standing in.

“By every metric,” she said — skipping past the word “nearly” in the official transcript — “Massachusetts has the best schools in the country.”

If the lawmakers and civil servants packing the State House didn’t burst into applause, it was partly because they were hearing old news. For years, Healey and her predecessors have touted the excellence of the Massachusetts school system before local and national audiences, citing math and English scores that have soared since the early 1990s. By the late Obama era, its path of ascent was held up as a template for lower-performing states.

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The audience also understood, however, that Healey wasn’t calling for a victory lap. Rather, she warned of a serious threat: thousands of children deficient in literacy skills thanks to schools using what she called “disproven, out-of-date” methods. While disadvantaged students face the greatest risk of falling behind, the Boston Globe revealed last year that questionable curricula are in use in some of the wealthiest and best-regarded school districts in Massachusetts.

The governor quickly moved into a pitch for her new reading initiative, which will offer resources and incentives to local educators to revamp their early literacy programs in accordance with scientific evidence. But the proposal, and the academic drift underlying it, reveal worries about where Massachusetts finds itself after three decades of energetic policymaking and school improvement.

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As even the state’s biggest boosters concede, however, those reforms stopped yielding the same results in the years leading up to the pandemic. Since COVID, already-significant achievement gaps between rich and poor students have ballooned even wider, with test scores mired far below levels seen in 2019. Ed Lambert, a former state representative who now leads the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said that local leaders had been too slow in recent years to embrace the kind of experimentation that fueled the state’s remarkable rise.

“Often, holding that mantle of ‘first in the nation’ has led to a level of complacency that isn’t serving us well,” Lambert said.

Even more alarming, in the eyes of education officials, is the possible reversal of some of the hallmarks of Massachusetts’s brand of K–12 reform. Activists have begun a spirited push to eliminate the use of the MCAS, the state’s standardized test, as a high school graduation assessment; in late May, leaders of the effort announced that they had collected twice the number of signatures necessary to place their initiative on the November ballot. The campaign is being led by New England’s largest union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has transformed itself over the last 10 years into a progressive heavyweight.

Harvard professor Paul Reville, who previously served as a top policy advisor to former Gov. Deval Patrick, observed that Massachusetts was caught between its celebrated past and a murky future. If the state is to remain a national exemplar, he said, it will have to change the way it pursues change.

“Massachusetts reflects a national uncertainty about where we go next, post-reform and post-COVID,” Reville said. “It’s an era of chronic absenteeism and declining confidence in public education generally, and Massachusetts demonstrates the symptoms of that as vividly as any other state.”

MCAS viewed as ‘roadblock’

No single development will influence the path ahead more than the clash over MCAS.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System was developed as the result of the landmark Education Reform Act of 1993, considered the Big Bang of recent K–12 history in the state. The legislation included a host of provisions, but its central achievement was to vastly increase the role of the state government in overseeing schools.

Nearly a decade before Congress took up the No Child Left Behind Act, that meant students in elementary, middle, and high school would sit for the MCAS each year; that their performance would be monitored and reported to families; and that schools would be held accountable for the results. In addition, tenth graders would need to pass the test in order to graduate high school.

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Federal law caught up with Massachusetts with the passage of NCLB. But according to the anti-testing group Fairtest, it remains one of only nine states to administer a graduation exam, down from a high of 27 in the 1990s. Education authorities in New York recently recommended making the Regents exam optional going forward, while legislators in Florida considered abandoning the existing requirement that students pass tests in Algebra I and tenth-grade English before graduating.

The same process may well play out in Massachusetts. Defenders of the exam insist that discarding it will allow the state’s 316 school districts to adopt a patchwork of separate, weaker standards — concerns that were loudly amplified by members of the special legislative committee that reviewed the ballot question this spring.

In one of the panel’s meetings, Reville and Lambert both testified in favor of retaining the tenth-grade MCAS requirement. Among those speaking in opposition was Kirsten Frazier, a high school teacher who works with English learners in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester.

In an interview with The 74, Frazier said that her students — many of them recent arrivals to the United States — often fail the MCAS on their first attempt. Though they are given several opportunities to retake it, each comes at the cost of desperately needed instructional time, she added.

“This test, especially when you have the pressure of not graduating if you don’t pass, creates a massive roadblock,” Frazier said.

Members of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have responded that only about 700 seniors each year fail to graduate due solely to their test scores. Ninety-five percent of upperclassmen pass by their second try, state data show.

What’s more, an analysis by Brown University economist John Papay strongly suggests that performance on the test is correlated with real-world outcomes like college enrollment and career earnings. Paul Toner, a former president of the MTA who now serves on the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, argued both that the MCAS should be more regularly updated and that it stood head and shoulders above other state tests.

“If you talk to anyone in the assessment game around the country, they will tell you that MCAS is the best of the state assessment systems,” Toner said. “Is it perfect? No. But it’s the best.”

Yet the exam’s longtime detractors believe that high schoolers should be assessed through other means. Glenn Koocher, head of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said that while passing MCAS was ultimately “not that hard,” its use as a graduation requirement made it more of a cudgel than a meaningful standard of achievement.

“Very few kids ultimately don’t graduate,” Koocher said. “But the MCAS is just there as a symbol of, ‘Here’s what happens if you don’t do what we tell you.’ And I find little value in it.”

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A ‘more progressive’ union

Much of the Massachusetts political establishment has already come forward in opposition to the November ballot initiative, including Gov. Healey. On the other side stands the 117,000 members of the MTA.

The union — known under Toner’s leadership for being willing to cooperate with reform-friendly policies around teacher evaluation and charter school expansion — swerved toward a more confrontational style with the election of new leadership in 2014.

Aiming to roll back the most notable advances of the education reform era, MTA organizers earned national attention in 2016 by helping defeat a ballot measure that would have lifted the state’s cap on charter schools. In a campaign that ultimately saw $41 million of spending, the organization proved it could summon enormous resources and substantially swing public opinion to its cause.

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That reputation has been solidified with more policy victories in the years since, including a push for a $15 minimum wage. Along with its parent union, the National Education Association, the MTA contributed $22 million in 2022 to a campaign that raised taxes locally on incomes over $1 million, a change that is projected to raise billions in future state revenues.

But the organization’s growing profile has been accompanied by political missteps. Current MTA President Max Page, who was elected in 2022 promising to “raise more hell to win greater justice,” was soon derided after opining before the state board of education that an emphasis on college and career readiness was “tied to the capitalist class and its need for profit.”

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Teachers Association declined to provide a comment for this story.

Frazier, a member of her local MTA affiliate, said she appreciated the statewide union becoming “more progressive” over the last decade.

“We basically ended up with activist leadership,” said Frazier. “Those of us who have always wanted to be activists now actually feel like we can be.”

Committed education reformers are less enthused. James Peyser, who served as secretary of education under former Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, said that if the MTA succeeds in jettisoning the MCAS, it could be the first step in an “unwinding” of accountability and school improvement.

“If you have no real assessment system to determine how students are doing, and you have no accountability for meeting standards, and you have no authority for the state to take action when schools aren’t adequately serving their students, then the Education Reform Act is a dead letter,” he said.

Promising strides on literacy

As much as the battles over reform implicate the recent past, many believe Gov. Healey’s overhaul of literacy instruction could deliver a promising way forward.

The proposal was triggered in part by the revelation last fall that many districts around Massachusetts use curricular materials that have fallen out of favor with reading experts for an insufficient emphasis on phonics. Some still rely, or have only recently transitioned away from, the Units of Study curriculum, which was criticized as seriously flawed in an expert report four years ago.

Statewide achievement in early literacy also points to major shortcomings since the pandemic. According to results from the 2022 MCAS, less than half of all third graders scored proficient in reading, including just 26 percent of students from low-income families, 15 percent of students with disabilities and 11 percent of English learners.

Literacy Launch, Healey’s initiative to turn things around, would include $30 million over the next five years to help districts transition to curricula more aligned with the science of reading, along with providing technical assistance from the state’s education department and tightening certification rules to require that teacher training programs provide more instruction about how children learn to read.

The program, included in the governor’s 2025 budget proposal, is virtually assured of passage. But a parallel effort in the legislature, which would mandate that schools use only reading curricula that have been approved by state authorities, has been met with stout opposition from district leaders and teachers’ unions alike.

Dozens of states have passed such laws over the last decade, some explicitly prohibiting the use of low-quality instructional materials, but Massachusetts lawmakers have thus far demurred. A February letter signed by almost 50 local superintendents protested that the bill under consideration would abrogate local control over schools.

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Lambert, of the Business Alliance, said he found the legislature’s failure to act “just confounding,” particularly in light of public support for such a measure. A recent poll found that over 80 percent of parents believed that schools should “probably” or “definitely” be required to use evidence-based teaching materials.

“A lot of the same people who will tell you that society needs to believe in science don’t necessarily believe that when it comes to literacy and choosing a curriculum that works,” Lambert said.

The absence of a strong literacy law pointed to a more general failure to keep up with policy developments that have been road-tested in other places, he argued. While states like Tennessee have invested heavily in programs to target struggling students with tutoring, Massachusetts — the home of the Match Charter Public High School, whose high-dosage tutoring regime has won acclaim and spawned imitators around the country — hasn’t launched a similar effort. Advocates allege that local resources devoted to gifted and talented education, including a statewide office that was shuttered in the early 1990s, also lag those elsewhere.

While arguing that state authorities should, as a rule, avoid meddling in local decisions about curriculum, Peyser said the importance of early reading made it an exception.

“The reality is that we’re 30 years into education reform, and at the third- or fourth-grade level, the reading proficiency levels are not a whole lot better than they used to be,” Peyser said. “It’s such a foundational skill that, unless you solve that problem, it’s an uphill struggle to do anything you want to do.”