Notwithstanding Mayor Wu’s claims, the ‘State of the Schools’ in Boston is not good

THE REALITY OF public education in Boston is far from what Mayor Michelle Wu depicted in her recent State of the Schools address. Hiding behind the improvements she touted is a broken system with abysmal performance outcomes across every grade in the district.

In the Boston Public Schools, seven out of every 10 third-graders can’t read or do math at grade level, which is also true for eighth-graders. The outcomes are far worse for Black and Latino students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities, and low-income students in Grades 3-8, with proficiency levels as low as 4 percent for some subgroups.

It serves no benefit to students and families to push this truth aside or to dismiss this data point as “one number.” Our city must do better, and the first step to real improvement is acknowledging this grim reality, something Mayor Wu continues to fail to do.

When asked head-on about these low performance outcomes, the mayor stumbled, citing “accountability metrics in the speech.” But the metrics she shared hardly show any accountability at all and fail to address the real issue: that the vast majority of the 44,000 students in BPS can’t read or do math at grade level.

In the wake of the recent Next Chapter Boston education advocacy campaign, Mayor Wu called the group’s billboards “cynical” and “disgusting.” The billboards show a picture of a child’s eyes with the phrase “BPS IS FAILING HER,” while citing the factual data that shows why. After the ads were pulled from the MBTA, despite prior approval, it’s clear our city’s leaders are too fearful to come to terms with the truth.

If anything, Mayor Wu’s education speech should be described as cynical, pointing to misleading numbers and increased investment in a handful of student clubs, instead of the systemic academic overhauls that are required for improvement. In one year, the mayor announced, BPS went from six math clubs to 22 (out of 104 schools) at a time when only 33 percent of 10th-graders are doing math on grade level. For English learners, this number drops to 10 percent, and for students with disabilities it is 6 percent.

Mayor Wu mentioned that BPS had their highest graduation rate last year, but seniors at BPS need only a D- to prove “competency” and pass core courses. Meanwhile, without MCAS as a graduation requirement, is a BPS diploma worth what it claims with standards set so low?

The mayor also noted that Boston’s third-grade reading scores have ranked at the top of its urban school district cohort for each of the past six years. But this is disingenuous framing that makes it appear as if reading scores are actually good.

In reality, just 29 percent of BPS students in grades 3-8 met state proficiency in reading and math on the 2026 MCAS, compared with the statewide average of 40 percent — itself a worrisome statistic.

Our state leaders, who consistently cheerlead about Massachusetts’s number one national ranking, also need to come clean about the crisis in education that we’re experiencing. The ranking that really needs their focus is that the Commonwealth also holds the distinction of having some of the largest achievement gaps in the country.

BPS uses its own Focus early literacy curriculum, which has been in place for more than 10 years with little results. Teachers and school administrators have voiced concerns about this curriculum and have seen no change from the district.

The mayor spent a significant amount of time in her speech celebrating the expansion of free weekend sports, opening vocational programs at Madison Park to the community, and expanding early college. These “nice-to-have” additions are not what BPS should be focusing on given its true state of crisis. We need real academic overhauls, acceleration academies on school breaks, and ongoing data sharing and dissemination practices to set real benchmarks for improvements across every grade.

To continue to pretend like our schools are better than they really are is a disservice to students, teachers, families, and the city at large. The same is true of painting a picture of widespread progress when not nearly enough is being done to address our deep-rooted issues.

The mayor also promised to set five-year targets that will improve poor performances, like attendance rates and test scores. These goals are meaningless if they don’t include concrete, measurable benchmarks. The updated 2026-2031 Strategic Roadmap for BPS, introduced at the beginning of this academic year, reads more like a roadblock. It’s vague and neglects to establish real plans or standards for needed growth.

With years to create this plan, why are district leaders overlooking such essential details? We need to set real, achievable targets for improvements across all grades in reading, writing, math, and science, and develop a step-by-step implementation strategy to do this.

These can’t be goals that keep getting pushed back to far-future dates. We have to create policies that make change for students now, so our city can live up to the true promise of delivering a quality public education to all students.

With a total budget of $1.7 billion, per-pupil spending in Boston is among the highest in the nation, at roughly $37,000 per student. With such deep pockets, you would think it would be easier to integrate a concrete plan for improvement in literacy and numeracy among students. The question is not whether we invest enough money in our schools, but whether we are putting this money in the right places to achieve better results versus paying for the same mistakes year after year.

The challenges BPS faces, whether they are academic or operational, are compounding. From literacy and math scores to chronic absenteeism to a $200 million transportation system that seems incapable of delivering students to school on time, all performance indicators are either stagnant or moving in the wrong direction. The “fix” requires both immediate interventions and long-term policy shifts.

This starts with true oversight and accountability standards that directly tie district funding to verifiable student benchmarks, operational efficiencies, and a guarantee that all students are safe within their school environments. Today, none of these three critical levers for change are evident.

If the mayor is truly committed to making BPS the “best in the nation,” she and other city leaders must come to terms with the fact that we cannot achieve this without first recognizing where we are drastically falling short. And despite what Mayor Wu has stated publicly, this campaign is not aimed at families, students, or teachers; it is aimed at the people who have the power to change this.

Mary Tamer, a former member of the Boston School Committee, is the executive director of MassPotential, a fiscally sponsored program of the Goodnation Foundation. Next Chapter Boston is an initiative of MassPotential. Vernée Wilkinson is the director of the Family Advisory Board at SchoolFacts Boston, a nonprofit working to improve education for all in Boston.