Boston Public Schools has posted its highest graduation rates in district history. 81.3 percent of seniors graduated in 2025, according to recently released data, compared with 59.1 percent in 2006.
Despite this surprising jump, Mayor Michelle Wu insisted that BPS isn’t “lowering any expectations” or “moving the goalposts and making it easier for people to get by.” A closer look at Boston’s standardized test scores and policies, however, challenges this assertion.
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Graduation rates used to be a reasonable proxy for students’ academic standards. But they are slowly losing their meaning as schools across the country inflate grades, making students appear more academically prepared than they really are.
Standardized test scores offer a more objective picture. BPS’s scores on the reading and math portions of the SAT, for example, have remained flat as graduation rates have soared. The average BPS student’s SAT scores hover around the College Board’s college and career readiness benchmarks. Many students score below these thresholds.
Some student groups are graduating at higher rates even as their measured performance declines. Low-income students’ graduation rate rose by 12 percent between 2017 and 2025, for example, while their math scores declined by 5 percent. English Language Learners (ELL) saw their graduation rates go up by 21 percent in that period, while their reading and math scores declined by about 9 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
State exams, administered through the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), tell a similar story. Only about 40 percent of Boston’s tenth-graders meet expectations in reading and math, both down since 2019. Less than a third of the district’s low-income students, and less than 10 percent of its ELL students, are MCAS proficient in reading and math.
BPS policy is one reason for the disconnect between graduation rates and student achievement. The district’s credit-recovery programs, for example, allow students to retake courses that they failed. In 2012, BPS found that its online credit-recovery program boosted the district’s four-year graduation rate by 4.8 percentage points.
Such credit-recovery programs are widespread in the United States. They often encourage schools to prioritize graduation rates over actual learning. A 2018 audit of a Brooklyn high school, for example, found 96 percent of make-up courses awarded credits inappropriately.
Boston has also eased its grading policies. Ahead of the 2021-22 school year, the district published a policy banning teachers from giving “No Credit” grades. Instead, teachers could give students “incomplete” marks, which supposedly would “enable equitable learning recovery.” In 2021 and 2022, the district spent at least $120,000 on an educational consulting group that reportedly advocates “equitable grading policies.”
State policy has also affected BPS. After a 2024 ballot initiative, Massachusetts lifted the requirement for students to pass the MCAS to graduate high school. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, reportedly a major force behind the ballot measure, was penalized for having failed to disclose nearly $2.4 million in contributions before Election Day 2024. Ahead of the vote, the union argued that tying graduation to a state exam caused “harm,” and that the test “does not truly measure the breadth and depth of our state’s high academic standards.”
Mayor Wu and BPS leaders seem to have taken a premature victory lap. The increase in graduation rates is more the result of policy changes than of students’ rising academic achievement. And it comes at the expense of students’ readiness for the real world—a cost that the students themselves will ultimately pay.
Photo by Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images