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Massachusetts’s students are back to being the top in the U.S. for all categories in a test known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — but still remain well behind the state’s pre-pandemic scores.
“Massachusetts continues to prioritize education, and so while today’s results are not quite where we want them to be — we want to be number one for all students — there is recognition of the work to get there,” Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler said Wednesday. … “Our fourth grade math scores are back to pre-pandemic levels. While nationally gaps increased, they did not here. They still exist, and we have work to do, but they are not getting worse.”
The National Assessment of Education Progress tests, which have been administered to a sample of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading nationwide every two years since the 1990s, showed Massachusetts students to be the highest scorers in all four categories. Students both in the state and across the country remained unable to quite catch up to their pre-pandemic peers.
In 2022, Massachusetts students’ scores hit their lowest point since 2003, and the state dropped into second place for 4th-grade math and 8th-grade reading. Across the country in 2022, scores hit record lows and not a single state saw significant improvement.
In 2024, Massachusetts scores remained relatively stagnant for eighth-grade math and both grades in reading. Only fourth-grade math saw relative improvement — echoing slight improvement in these scores across the country.
Nationally, 2024 scores remained relatively stable from 2022 in eighth-grade math and declined for both grades in reading.
Boston Public Schools was also one of several larger school districts with progress in fourth-grade math scores.
Tutwiler said so far “progress is slow,” but the administration is “building a foundation to go fast” with investments in initiatives like early literacy learning.
Healey highlighted some investments Wednesday, including a $25 million investment in “high dosage tutoring” in the governor’s proposed budget for the next year.
“We want to reach 10,000 students immediately through this initiative to address pandemic related learning loss and accelerate learning growth for students in kindergarten through grade three by prioritizing students in grade one,” Tutwiler said of the tutoring investment.
Across the nation and Massachusetts, gaps also widened between higher-performing and lower-performing students, with the lowest performing students nationwide now about 100 points behind the highest.
“This growing achievement gap between high- and low-performing students is troubling,” said Martin West, Vice Chair of the NAEP Governing Board and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education. “We made progress in closing this gap until around 2010, but it’s been steadily widening since.”
Massachusetts officials said they are “well aware” of gaps and leaning into “investments and strategies to address them.
“The rollback is not going to be short,” said Tutwiler. “We’re talking about adaptive challenges. We’re talking about working with students directly who experience major disruptions in their learning. This is not a quick fix. It’s going to take time, but as the results are clearly indicating, we’re getting the work done.”
Local News
New Hampshire is leading an effort from 25 states to challenge a Massachusetts gun law, and this month, they’re taking it to the Supreme Court.
The centerpiece of the argument is the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, N.H., which reaches across state lines into Tyngsborough. If shoppers park on the south side of the mall’s parking lot, they might end up crossing state lines during a visit.
The attorneys general of New Hampshire and 24 other Republican-led states say this poses a potential problem for firearm holders. A New Hampshire resident who is legally carrying a firearm on their home state’s side of the parking lot may inadvertently be breaking the law when they cross the lot into Massachusetts, where it is illegal to carry without a permit.
Joining New Hampshire are the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, who are calling the arrangement unconstitutional. The states have rallied behind Phillip Marquis of Rochester, N.H., to ask the Supreme Court to protect out-of-state residents from Massachusetts’ firearms regulations.
“The geography of the mall is such that a New Hampshire resident might find themselves in Massachusetts if she parks on the south side of the parking lot or visits Buffalo Wild Wings,” reads a brief from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office to the Supreme Court. “If that person is carrying a firearm without a Massachusetts license — which would be constitutionally protected activity in most of the mall—that person risks being charged as a felon and facing mandatory incarceration in Massachusetts.”
The trouble began for Marquis in 2022 when he was in a car accident in Massachusetts, according to the brief. When police arrived, he informed them that he had a pistol on him and was subsequently charged with carrying a firearm without a license.
Marquis previously sued the Commonwealth for the burdens that Massachusetts’ firearms permit law creates on out-of-state visitors, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied his claims. They ruled in March that the state’s nonresident firearms licensing laws were constitutional, according to court documents.
Claiming that the Massachusetts court denied him his Second and Fourteenth Amendment rights, Marquis has petitioned the Supreme Court to federally overrule that court’s decision. In his petition, Marquis invoked New York State Rifle & Police Association, Inc. v. Bruen, where the court established that state firearms restrictions must be covered by the Second Amendment or adhere to historical firearms regulations.
Using Bruen, Marquis and the Republican attorneys general supporting him are aiming to prove that there is no justification for applying Massachusetts’ firearms restrictions to out-of-state residents and that to do so would be unconstitutional. However, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court found the law constitutional even under Bruen because it intends to prevent dangerous people from obtaining firearms, just as historical regulations have done.
“To the extent that the Commonwealth restricts the ability of law-abiding citizens to carry firearms within its borders, the justification for so doing is credible, individualized evidence that the person in question would pose a danger if armed,” the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision read. “Both case law and the historical record unequivocally indicate that this justification is consistent with ‘the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.’”
It’s not immediately clear if the Supreme Court will respond to Marquis’ appeal or when it will make any kind of decision, but lower courts are at something of a crossroads with how and when to apply Bruen to gun possession cases. As such, they are looking to the Supreme Court for a more definitive answer.
Since the proof of historical context that Bruen requires has led to some uncertainty, any ruling that these lower courts make is likely to amount to a partisan decision. However, if the Supreme Court provides more substantive clarity in a response to Marquis, these lower courts just might find the answer they are seeking.
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Massachusetts State Lottery players won two $100,000 prizes Friday from the day’s “Mass Cash” drawings.
The winning tickets were sold at the Roslindale Food Mart on Washington Street and McSheffrey’s of the South End convenience store (with Mobil gas) on Main Street in Woburn.
Mass Cash drawings happen twice daily, at 2 p.m. and at 9 p.m. It costs just $1 to play.
Overall, at least 625 prizes worth $600 or more were won or claimed in Massachusetts on Monday, including 6 in Springfield, 22 in Worcester and 14 in Boston.
The Massachusetts State Lottery releases a full list of winning tickets every day. The list only includes winning tickets worth more than $600.
The two largest lottery prizes won so far in 2025 were each worth $15 million. One of the prizes was from a winning “Diamond Deluxe” scratch ticket sold in Holyoke, and the other was from a “300X” scratch ticket sold on Cape Cod.
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