March Ed Madness: New York vs. Massachusetts
The penultimate round of the MEM Elite Eight.
This is the third matchup post in our Elite Eight series. Read the full bracket announcement here.
Massachusetts has long been an education superstar, its record stretching back before the founding of the United States. The country’s first public school was founded there, and for the past 25 years Massachusetts students have been consistently outscoring their peers on the NAEP. That excellent record is a good sign that something is working about Massachusetts education policy.
Though New York has relatively well-performing students, robust funding, and also a long history of strong public education institutions, in other ways it is much closer to Texas than Massachusetts, its neighbor; anyone reading education news recently knows that New York (and especially New York City) frequently becomes a hotspot for education and culture war issues that go national. But, as we said at the start of the Texas/Minnesota matchup, the public persona a state gets online or in the media is not the same as the results it actually produces for its students, families, teachers, and schools.
Assessments & Accountability
Established via the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) offered rigor and accountability that made it highly respected in reform circles. For three decades, Massachusetts sophomores had to pass the MCAS tests in English, mathematics, and science & technology to graduate, and advocates pointed to the state’s sterling NAEP scores as evidence for the value of such an accountability vehicle. However, Massachusetts voters (with considerable help from the MTA, which has long advocated against “high-stakes testing”) eliminated that requirement when they approved Question 2 in November 2024. Now, students must earn a Competency Determination to graduate high school, but school districts in Massachusetts each set their own policies for what a Competency Determination entails. While certain minimal requirements govern the details of these policies, districts now have considerable leeway in the standards to which they hold their students.
New York, on the other hand, still operates its Regents Examination system, a longstanding set of end-of-course exams students must pass in order to graduate. But the Board of Regents plans to phase out the exam as a graduation requirement by the 2027–28 school year. Set to replace it is the state’s new, holistic “Portrait of a Graduate” framework, which identifies six attributes graduates should demonstrate before being handed a diploma: academically prepared, a creative innovator, a critical thinker, an effective communicator, a global citizen, and reflective and future-focused. Under the new framework, students will be able to demonstrate proficiency in each of these qualities using multiple pathways, including capstone projects, community service, and “work-based learning experiences.”
The specifics of the replacement are vague, and thankfully the plan can still be modified or delayed prior to approval. Replacing objective tests and (relatively) clear content standards — especially in core topics, like math and ELA, not “work-based experiences” and “community service” — with vague and holistic qualities is probably a step in the wrong direction. Put most charitably, though, New York is at least replacing the Regents exams with something. The state’s high school graduates will still have to demonstrate a certain level of competency; the pathways by which they demonstrate competence may be less rigorous, but flexible, vague statewide standards are still statewide standards, and can (hopefully) be moved in the correct direction.
So New York currently requires a graduation exam with real consequences, while Massachusetts has already removed those consequences. If the Regents phase-out proceeds in 2027–28 without modification, this advantage will diminish, but the fact that New York articulates statewide competency standards in its proposed replacement is enough for New York to eke out a win on Assessments & Accountability.
The Learning Environment
Here both states seem to be locked in a contest to see who can enact the more naive and convoluted set of policies governing classroom order, student behavior, and the school learning environment overall.
The Phones
The one bright spot here is that New York has implemented a bell-to-bell phone ban that came into effect this school year (2025–26). It covers all internet-enabled personal devices during free periods and lunch (hence “bell-to-bell”), though the rules come with a number of exceptions and asterisks, as Chalkbeat reported. Schools have frequently tried magnetic pouches, bought with funds provided by the state from the bill, but apparently students are finding workarounds to those.
Moreover, giving some students exceptions (like for those who travel off campus for certain activities, or need it for language translation, or because of a special need or disability) and not others can be tough for school officials and administrators to carry out effectively. All of these complications can make a good policy stumble, but it is still in its first year. The phone ban bill in Massachusetts is currently stuck in their state House. The Senate passed S.2561 last summer, but the bill stalled, and so this school year MA schools saw no anti-phone mandate from their higher-ups.
Discipline
Both states have spent the last decade or so adopting discipline philosophies and frameworks that can all broadly be grouped under that label “restorative justice.” In this way they’ve layered procedural constraints on top of cultural incentives against discipline ( atop even more procedural constraints, for one state!), and the end result has been predictable: more chaos, less learning. The somewhat disappointing question, then, is which state is messing this up less.
Massachusetts brought Chapter 222 into effect in 2012, requiring schools to exhaust alternatives before issuing long-term suspensions and requiring superintendent notification before any Pre-K-3 out-of-school suspensions. While the statute constrains administrators, it is no outright ban. Admins can bypass alternatives when they document them as “unsuitable or counterproductive,” or when a student poses a “specific, documentable concern about the infliction of serious bodily injury.”
In New York the Dignity for All Students Act (2010/2012) adds a lot of procedural complexity to maintaining classroom order — 24-hour reporting timelines, mandatory documentation, annual reports to NYSED. At the city level, New York City has among the most restrictive discipline policies in the country; NYC does prohibit K-2 suspension, and its 2019 discipline code both mandates restorative justice in all middle and high schools and permits supports/interventions in lieu of disciplinary responses for lower-level infractions. These changes make it more, not less likely that New York will be able to grapple with its stark chronic absenteeism rates that it has seen in recent years.
Neither state should really earn a passing grade here. Both have restricted school and teacher authority to maintain order in ways that impose costs on the vast majority of students who aren’t persistently or consistently disruptive. New York has actually passed a bell-to-bell phone ban (the effectiveness of which remains to be seen), but Massachusetts arguably has not gone quite as far in the wrong direction on sensible classroom order policies.
MA’s Final Sprint: Evidence-Based Literacy & Math Instruction
Here is where New York’s momentum comes screaming to a halt. The distance between MA’s progress on evidence-based literacy policy and New York’s is greater than for any of our other Elite Eight matchups. Despite the well-warranted fanfare for Gov. Hochul’s recent “Back to Basics” literacy legislation, ExcelInEd’s implementation report for New York shows just how much still needs to be accomplished. Out of 18 fundamental principles, as yet New York has adopted only two in policy — state funding for literacy efforts and district guidance of high-quality instructional materials guidance for districts.
Yet Massachusetts checks both these boxes and eight more, including funding for professional training in the science of reading, SoR-aligned teacher prep programs, a licensure test requirement, and both reading and dyslexia screeners. We can look forward to NY adopting some of these soon, but there is a lot of ground to cover.
Even more impressive, though, is that Massachusetts is well on its way to leveling up on high-quality curriculum now that the state senate unanimously passed curriculum mandates with S.2924 on Jan 29. Curriculum quality has been a big weakness for MA, as numerous districts remain wedded to ineffective programs. But soon, all K-3 districts will be required to adopt DESE-approved, evidence-based curricula, and friend-of-the-Substack Karen Vaites is bullish on MA leadership’s ability to improve its existing approved-curriculum lists to make good on the plan. Few states can boast of mandating approved curricula to this degree. While we’re still waiting on the final bill, with the massive political momentum.1
On math policy, Massachusetts’s evidence-based math instruction record isn’t as stellar, but New York’s isn’t clearly better. While NCTQ considers New York’s elementary math licensure test stronger than MA’s, New York doesn’t recommend high-quality math curricula as Massachusetts does. Regular readers of the CEP Substack will also recall that New York has an upsetting recent history of issuing (and then defending!) badly misguided recommendations on math instruction. Despite claiming its Numeracy Initiative communicates “evidence-based” practices for teaching math, the New York State Education Department actually just contradicted rigorous research and spread frightful myths about effective math instruction. Massachusetts has done nothing so egregious.
As it stands, then, Massachusetts leads New York by a healthy margin on early literacy policy, and the upcoming curriculum mandate bill ensures the latter’s “Back to Basics” initiative doesn’t close the gap. Both states still have ground to cover, but between that difference in reading policy and the problems with math guidance from NYSED, Massachusetts emerges the clear victor on evidence-based instruction.
Winner: Massachusetts
Massachusetts has spent a generation as American education’s leading state. But cracks have emerged: the MCAS has lost its teeth, the state is slow to oust phones from classrooms, and its discipline restrictions are cultivating disruption. To the west, though discipline isn’t much better, the schools in New York are refreshingly phone-free, and what will replace the fading Regents Exams still looks to preserve some statewide accountability infrastructure.
But the content taught in these classrooms lags behind, and enough so to decide this match. Massachusetts sets a better foundation for reading and math than New York, with a sounder policy infrastructure more aligned with the Science of Reading. New York is improving, but not fast enough to succeed in this head-to-head. We sincerely applaud Gov. Hochul for “Back to Basics,” but we also ask that she take a close look into how the basics of numeracy are being flouted in state-sanctioned guidance.
Massachusetts advances to the Final Four.
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Unfortunately, the Senate version of S.2924 nixed the ban on three-cueing put forward in the House version of the bill. Yet New York doesn’t score points here, either. While the latter has pending legislation that would prohibit three-cueing, that bill is still in committee, and the previous version never made it out.