Senator Collins Questions Education Experts on Maine Students’ Declining Test Scores

At a HELP Committee Hearing, Senator Collins asked why students' test scores have declined so much further in Maine than elsewhere.

Washington, D.C. - Today, at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, U.S. Senator Susan Collins questioned education experts on the sharp decline in Maine students' standardized test scores. Once consistently ranked among the top states as recently as 2011, Maine now ranks near the bottom on national standardized tests. During the hearing, the experts discussed potential causes for this decline, including the lack of incentives for high-performing teachers, policy failures, student disengagement, and broader societal factors, as well as ideas for how to address these issues.

Q&A on Maine's Decline in Standardized Test Scores

Click HERE to watch and HERE to download

Senator Collins: It is very troubling when you look at the Nation's Report Card, and also, as some of you have pointed out, to realize that the decline in test scores started before the pandemic and has continued after the pandemic. The reason I emphasize that point is oftentimes we hear that it's all due to COVID, and clearly, it's not. It's far more complex and troubling than that. I'm especially alarmed by the decline in scores in my home state of Maine, despite the very dedicated teachers and other educators that we're fortunate to have.

There was a time when Maine was justifiably proud to be at the top of the ratings. We were consistently in the top five. And I remember there was a New York Times piece in 1997 that noted that Maine was one of the states that performed best on the test, and in 2011, Maine's fourth graders still scored among the top five in the country. But then we see this dramatic change, and the data show that Maine's fourth graders, their scores have plummeted. Eighth grade is also not good, and this started happening around 2022. And the most recent high school rankings from U.S. News and World Report rank Maine's high schools as dead last. That was shocking to me, especially since I know how many good teachers we are fortunate to have.

So, I listened carefully to each of you as you identified certain factors. My question to each of you is, do you have any insights on what's going on in my state? My second question, and it will be my last one, is, I've heard cell phones mentioned, mental health crisis, and student disengagement, that we need incentive-based pay for teachers, more teacher development, a focus on chronic absenteeism, and that we need to honor our teachers and principals. So, I'm interested in two things: One, do you know what's going on in the State of Maine that we've gone from the top five to the bottom five? And two, of the lists that I just read you, are there certain solutions that you think we should pursue?

Dr. Eric Hanushek, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University: Well, I would quickly answer to the first question, a pervasive problem is that we don't have any incentives to have higher achievement in our schools, and that is across the board. We have the example of Odessa, Texas, that we heard about this morning; we have the local example of Washington, D.C.; and we have the example of Dallas, Texas, where they have changed the way they reward teachers. They reward the effective teachers very highly. Yet these examples, which are well known around the nation, are not picked up by other school districts. There are 13,500 school districts, of which a handful have followed these examples. If we don't reward achievement and incentivize achievement, I think we're in trouble, and that's a major change that I think we need to make.

Dr. Martin West, the Vice Chair of the National Assessment Governing Board: Thank you, Senator Collins. One observation I would make is that you're not alone in the Northeast in experiencing especially large declines in NAEP performance. We see the same pattern in Vermont, as well as in my home state of Massachusetts, where I serve on the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. We remain at the top of the chart, but other places are catching up rapidly in relative terms. I am not an expert on what's going on in Maine in particular, but elsewhere and in Massachusetts, I think there has been a softening, or a backing away from, the accountability policies that drove improvement in the 1990s and 2000s. And I think that is very much consistent with Dr. Hanushek's emphasis on incentives.

The other thing to keep in mind is that assessments like NAEP tell us about school quality, but they're also influenced by what's going on outside of schools, in the way Senator Sanders talked about at the start. And so, we should think of them as capturing not just what's happening in schools, but in the economy and society generally. And as you look for explanations, you need to think about both of those factors.

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