Analysis: New Bedford and Massachusetts schools at the crossroads

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“If you’re an underprivileged kid in America, you will, on average, get the best education not in rich Massachusetts but in poor Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is half as high.” — Idrees Kahloon, The Atlantic

Massachusetts is the No. 1 state for education. 

Just ask the governor. Or the federal government’s testing results. Or the survey companies who release much-publicized rankings. They all say that education in Massachusetts is a resounding success. 

“Massachusetts is home to America’s first public school and has always led the way when it comes to providing our students with the best education,” Gov. Maura Healey said last year. 

These glowing reviews can feel far away in New Bedford, the historic port city of 100,000 people largely made up of immigrants and blue-collar workers. 

New Bedford High, home of the Whalers, fell backwards again this year, so that 75% of the high school’s students are not meeting grade-level expectations in English; 86% fall short in math; and 84% miss the mark in science, according to state test data. The high school sits in the second percentile of the state’s accountability ranking.

But it’s not just New Bedford. Poor students in Massachusetts face some of the most severe educational disparities anywhere. 

In fourth grade, Massachusetts ranked 49th out of 50 states last year in the gap between poor students’ reading scores and their peers’. Meanwhile, the math gap came in dead last — tied for the largest gap of any state (only D.C. ranked lower).

By eighth grade, Massachusetts’ poor students still face the largest gap in math scores out of any state, while Massachusetts’ eighth grade reading gap has narrowed but still remains in the bottom third of states. 

One of the nation’s wealthiest states, Massachusetts struggles to educate its poorest students. In fact, Massachusetts is not the No. 1 education state when “compared with demographically similar students around the country,” according to an analysis from The Urban Institute. 

Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas beat out Massachusetts in fourth-grade math scores, English scores, or both when using a demographics-controlled comparison. 

And New Bedford is certainly not the “rich Massachusetts” that education pundits often reference. The Whaling City is among the poorest places in the commonwealth. About 80% of students qualify as “low income.” Up to one in three children lives below the poverty line, according to census estimates.

Those levels of poverty can be “devastating,” said Superintendent Andrew O’Leary. Schools become the last line of defense against a range of social problems, from homelessness to food insecurity. “Our schools have to be so many things,” O’Leary said, and it makes the traditional academic metrics and rankings feel like “a false economy.”

For years, the fight for better education outcomes in New Bedford focused on improving funding. Local leaders pushed for a new state education formula, which distributes more funds based on low income, special needs, and language learning populations. 

And, for the most part, New Bedford won that fight. (Some advocacy is ongoing.)

In 2019, the state passed the Student Opportunity Act (SOA), and since then, New Bedford has received years of historic funding increases. The public schools now receive $140 million more annually than in 2013, according to The Light’s recent analysis. 

New Bedford now receives more than $250 million in state education aid each year — 51% of the entire city budget. On a per pupil basis, New Bedford now receives significantly more ($21,087 per pupil) than do some low-income states, including Texas ($14,257), Mississippi ($12,394), Louisiana ($13,760), and Florida ($12,415). 

(Of note, dollars don’t go quite as far in Massachusetts.)

This state funding was long “overdue,” as O’Leary has described it. For decades, education funding had ignored places like New Bedford. High poverty districts in Massachusetts received less than richer districts, even though their students had many more needs.

And the battle for funding is not over. Even in 2022, the Education Law Center gave Massachusetts a ‘D’ grade for its funding distribution and a ‘D’ for its effort (which compares education spending to total economic activity). 

The report, describing the Bay State, read: “high average funding levels often mask significant disparities among districts.”

Still, New Bedford now finds itself at the bizarre crossroads of having more money than ever before, but lower scores than any time in recent history. At this strange juncture, O’Leary recently posed the question, “Where will New Bedford schools be by 2030?”

The question was used to unveil a new strategic plan, which acknowledged recent academic struggles: “The heart of our work is student outcomes. Data trends remind us that achievement gaps remain, and that too many of our students are not reaching their full potential.”

But while the district calls the document New Bedford’s “blueprint” for the future, it doesn’t set any measurable goals. (Teacher retention and chronic absenteeism are highlighted, but have no numerical targets.) O’Leary said that each of the district’s 26 schools will instead be setting and tracking progress toward their own specific goals.

Meanwhile, recent statewide policy changes, including a 2024 ballot referendum that repealed the state’s only meaningful graduation requirement, don’t provide students, families, or districts with a clear path forward, either. A Governor’s Council has proposed a new graduation framework, which suggests course requirements and new end-of-course tests. But the plan has not yet been approved.

So, as the superintendent recently posed, where do New Bedford schools go from here? 

How are New Bedford schools doing, really? 

“Any serious voice in education understands that out-of-school factors — like poverty and risk exposure — deeply influence in-school performance,” O’Leary wrote in a recent op-ed. 

New Bedford has more poor students and more English learners (by far) than the Massachusetts averages. Challenges include an influx of Guatemalan students who do not speak Spanish, but K’iché, the Indigenous Mayan language. That has required the district to purchase hard-to-find translation services and additional teacher training. (This reflects good-hearted community responsiveness, but also an order by the Department of Justice.)

There have also been record numbers of homeless students in New Bedford in recent years (and numbers remain at near-record levels), which the district is working diligently to serve. 

All these students (for the most part) end up at one massive high school: New Bedford High. (The regional Voc-Tech school located in New Bedford is another destination, but in recent years it has not accepted many high needs students.) 

Providing so many supports alongside rigorous college preparatory classes, career vocational training, and community services under one roof is complex, O’Leary said, and not always comparable to other Massachusetts districts.

In the face of such obstacles, the superintendent and the mayor prefer to point out successes: an increasing graduation rate, improving attendance rate, and higher AP test scores and AP test participation. 

But a sober assessment should include a number of caveats. 

New Bedford High’s four-year graduation rate soared to 82% in 2024 (the most recent year data is available) from 66% just a decade ago. But student achievement has actually decreased during that timeframe: only 16% of high schoolers were at or above grade-level on the state math test in 2024, while a decade earlier it was 41%. 

So more students are graduating, but the large majority of them may be performing worse. 

The higher AP scores and participation rates have been a more recent success story. Mitchell said at a recent School Committee meeting, “This is a really strong sign of college-admissions competitiveness and preparedness.”

That is true, but only a slim minority — 12% — of New Bedford students are actually earning any academic credential (associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees or other) four years after leaving high school, according to data the district shared this year.

Moreover, there’s a gap in what students are reporting about their college plans: while 55% said they planned to enroll in two- or four-year programs, only 30% actually did, according to the district. 

“It doesn’t look good when kids are leaving saying they’re going to do something, then it doesn’t happen,” said Jen McGuire, the district’s college and career coordinator. 

The high school’s chronic absenteeism rate is also a stubbornly high 42%. (This means close to half of all high schoolers are missing 10% of school days, or more.) Though not yet back to pre-pandemic levels, this chronic absenteeism rate is significantly improved from a pandemic-era high of 69%. New Bedford has dedicated significant time and resources toward this improvement.

Overall, the good news for New Bedford is that new state aid has allowed for record-breaking hiring of teachers and paraeducators. Improved staffing arrived with new contracts that pay educators more and give them new benefits like paid family leave. The agreements were reached without the months- or years-long delays that used to plague the district. 

Now, New Bedford is not facing a crunch in looking for new or qualified teachers, O’Leary said.

More than that, low income students in New Bedford now have access to a robustly-staffed family engagement department that is connecting families with more community services and aid. A beefed-up translation department contributes to the effort.

New Bedford is also investing in early childhood education, expanding the number of seats and the quality of services for pre-kindergarten learners. Notably, all early education programs now offer full-day classes.

Early education is widely regarded as the most-effective possible use of public dollars, as every $1 invested yields up to a $9 return, in the form of better educational and social outcomes for the students, all while allowing parents to go back to work sooner. 

The new state aid in New Bedford has transformed the schools into a one-stop hub for families to access social, cultural, and financial services. These will have long-term benefits throughout the city and fight the poverty that drives so many issues. 

What’s missing so far is a turnaround of academic performance at New Bedford’s middle and high schools.

But O’Leary says all the pieces are now in place. “Over two to three years, I have a lot of optimism for New Bedford to move into excellence,” O’Leary said.

The state’s role, and finding hope in the ‘Mississippi Miracle’

Some low-income states are proving that New Bedford does have enough resources to provide for an academic turnaround. 

A well-chronicled “Mississippi miracle” has seen the southern state surge past most places in the country, including northeastern neighbors like Connecticut and Rhode Island, in early-grade reading performance. 

The gap between Mississippi’s rich and poor students has narrowed too, and today its gap is far smaller than Massachusetts’. The southern state is also a good comparison point, because Mississippi’s poverty rate (71%) is more similar to New Bedford’s than Massachusetts’ (42%).

Mississippi’s turnaround shows that academic success is possible without riches. And New Bedford has already started down the path. 

This year, The Light reported on a $1.7 million grant to help implement New Bedford’s new reading curriculum, which is focused on evidence-based practices like teaching phonics, vocabulary, language skills, and relevant background information. It’s helping New Bedford achieve a simply-stated, but hard-to-achieve goal: use a curriculum that works, and train teachers on how to use it. 

What New Bedford’s new literacy plan has so far left out is a key component of Mississippi’s (and other state’s) success: a policy to not pass students unless they deserve to be passed. 

Contrary to popular belief, holding students back actually helps them to succeed in the long run. And it can be crucial to turning around a school, district, or state’s performance. Alabama and Tennessee have passed legislation that mandates kids hit reading milestones before being promoted to the fourth grade. These laws also offer extra support for those kids who miss those milestones. 

“Of course, it’s upsetting for kids, frustrating for families, and unpleasant for educators. Unfortunately, that’s probably part of why it works,” wrote Kelsey Piper, a journalist. 

State-level legislation that mandates third-grade retention has been a crucial pillar of academic turnarounds in nearly all places where they are happening.

In New Bedford, administrators know the importance of the third-grade reading milestone — that’s when students transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn,” Laura Garcia, a New Bedford administrator, previously told The Light. 

O’Leary, however, does not see it as a likely solution. “It’s a simple idea … But is there a true opportunity cost [of what those held-back students lose] versus their reading scores?”

Massachusetts’ recent reading bill (which passed its House by huge margins and is heading to the Senate) does not include any provision for third-grade retention. At present, 78% of New Bedford’s third graders do not fully meet grade level expectations on state English tests. Only 0.1% of third graders are held back. 

Meanwhile, New Bedford continues to rely on the state for support to build more classrooms. 

Thousands of students in New Bedford go to school in severely out-of-date buildings, including seven century-old buildings. Some are so buried in the renovation queue that they may wait until they’re almost 130 years old. In total, more than 8,000 New Bedford students go to school in buildings completed in 1977 or earlier. 

A plan to replace these buildings will depend on the state’s School Building Authority, funded by a portion of sales-tax revenue. New Bedford officials have long criticized the School Building Authority for leaving poor and urban districts out to dry, though recent momentum suggests that might be changing.

“All this recent work has to be sustained,” O’Leary said. The new facilities projects are starting to bring New Bedford students “to parity with what students are seeing in other districts.” It will be just as important to make sure that progress isn’t lost, O’Leary said.  

Graduation requirements: What bar to hold? 

The biggest education news in Massachusetts in the last few years has been the repeal of the MCAS graduation requirement. In New Bedford, repeal was hugely popular, with nearly 70% of voters favoring it.

Statewide, only about 1% of students did not graduate solely because of their MCAS scores. In New Bedford, that was much higher, with as many as 17% of students unable to pass the test after multiple retakes. Removing the graduation requirement has so far undermined the MCAS test, according to local educators.

New Bedford High Principal Joyce Cardoza said she observed “a substantial increase in unanswered questions and off-topic responses, including students simply writing ‘I don’t care.’ For many, the value of the test shifted when it was no longer tied directly to earning a diploma.”

Removing MCAS may hamper the district’s ability to make sure students are actually learning, and to improve instruction when necessary. 

And already, a new graduation council is considering what permanent graduation requirements should replace MCAS in Massachusetts — and a leading idea is simply making new tests.

The reason: tests really do help students learn — when they are designed with student learning in mind. 

New Bedford — where only 25% of high schoolers are “meeting or exceeding” expectations on the state English test (compared to around 50% statewide) — may need the advantages of every research-backed learning tool, including good tests. 

It falls in line with O’Leary’s main message from the strategic plan release: “Our students can do hard things.”

“Students should see the benefits of assessment,” O’Leary said. From his vantage point, the last quarter century of education reform has wrought an over-reliance on testing and ranking schools. But that doesn’t mean tests should go away. 

“We don’t want teaching to the test. We want a true assessment of where students are at,” he said. 

It’s a part of the future that O’Leary can see for New Bedford schools. “We’re in a strong position for 2026,” he said. “We should be much more interested in looking forward,” and he says there’s plenty of reason for that optimism. 

Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org

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