Andrea Romer, a reading interventionist, left, helps third graders, from left, Ceyla, Zoe, Jory and Sonia pick out books they can take home for the summer at East End Community School in Portland on June 12. (Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer)

New data released this week shows that Maine’s state standardized test scores have made the slightest of improvements over the past four years. After concerning declines in the state’s performance on a national assessment last year, the numbers are encouraging.

But the state’s top education official continues to dissuade anyone from seeing test scores as the sole measure of student success — or even an important one.

“The test scores don’t tell us what we collectively, as a society, think they are telling us,” Commissioner of Education Pender Makin said in an interview last week. “Any one particular assessment is no more than a snapshot in time.”

She said standardized tests evaluate rote memorization rather than real learning, don’t effectively test innovative curricula and can’t assess some of the most important skills that students gain in school.

Education experts around the country said there’s some truth to that. Standardized tests are good for some things, like uniform monitoring and comparisons across time or states, and bad for others, like determining classroom-level interventions, or assessing other qualities like creativity or civic-mindedness. Test scores, they said, should be just one data point among several.

“But even then, the onus is on leaders to show that students really are learning,” said Jon Valant, education policy director at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. “It’s not enough to say that the test scores are misleading and the public should just trust that kids are learning a lot. There needs to be real evidence of learning.”

Makin criticized the media for extensive reporting on the state’s 2024 national assessment scores, which showed that fourth graders had performed among the worst in the country in math and reading, and that Maine had dropped the most of any state compared to prepandemic numbers.

“We know that you can always create an alarming headline with numbers,” she said. Makin wants the public to look instead at measures like rising graduation rates, growing enrollment in career and technical education programs, and more second-language fluency.

Still, the state has taken steps to address the issue. Last October, acknowledging the “concerning declines” in national scores, the department rolled out “back to basics” plans for reading and math, which included new instructional resources for teachers.

As Gov. Janet Mills’ gubernatorial term comes to a close, Makin penned an op-ed in the Portland Press Herald arguing the administration has left a strong educational foundation for the next governor. Some experts say Maine still has a long way to go.

DO STANDARDIZED TESTS MATTER?

The consensus among education policy researchers is that standardized tests don’t show the whole picture, but they’re a necessary and important method of measurement.

Valant, from Brookings, said it’s fair to call test scores imperfect and incomplete, but unfair to call them useless. They provide valuable information, especially as report card grades have become inflated, and don’t measure important attributes like resilience or creativity. (He cited a University of Chicago study showing that teachers who are good at improving test scores aren’t necessarily the best at improving student behavior.)

“We should pay attention to test scores, and we need objective measures of student learning,” he said. “At the same time, we should recognize that test scores aren’t the be-all and end-all of showing how kids are doing at school.”

Jonathan Schweig, a senior behavioral and social scientist who studies education policy at RAND, a nonprofit think tank, said the U.S. doesn’t have a lot of other measures that provide student achievement information in a uniform, consistent way. On the flip side, he said there is evidence showing that focusing too much on test scores can narrow curricula over time.

Better test scores do line up with other successes. A 2025 study out of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research found that increases in national scores correlate to improved outcomes later in life, like higher earnings and declines in unemployment and incarceration rates. That study suggests the median student in Maine can expect a 4% loss in lifetime earnings following recent declines.

Some states, like Mississippi, have embraced national test score improvement as paramount. There, student scores climbed from 49th to near the top in an attention-grabbing shift dubbed the Mississippi Miracle. To do that, the state embraced science of reading curricula and accountability measures, like sending literacy coaches into schools and holding back all third graders who don’t pass an end-of-year reading test.

That approach isn’t replicable in Maine, a local control state that doesn’t mandate curricula for individual school districts.

STATE VS. NATIONAL ASSESSMENT

While Maine’s latest state test scores show slight, steady improvement, its scores on the biannual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also called the Nation’s Report Card, have been declining for more than a decade.

Maine, which ranked near the top of all states in 2013, dipped below the national average in 2019 for fourth graders and has stayed there. (Eighth graders, the other age group assessed by NAEP, performed slightly better than the national average in math, and slightly below in reading, in the latest assessment.)

Makin pointed to several methodological differences: the state assessment tests 85,000 students twice a year, while the national assessment uses a sample of 1,700 students every other year. And rather than simply averaging test scores, she said, NAEP makes statistical adjustments and estimates to arrive at a statewide score.

On the other hand, she said, Maine’s state assessment is purchased from a company that provides the test used by more than 13 million students nationwide, allowing Maine to compare itself to national norms. The latest results, across subject areas and grade levels, show Maine is mostly at or slightly above the national achievement norm (with the exception of fourth grade math).

Schweig, at RAND, said one possible reason for the discrepancy is that Maine’s curricular alignment with the state test is better than its alignment with NAEP. He also said the incentives related to the state test are stronger than the national test, which only a small sample of students take, and which they know will have no effect on their grades.

Thomas Kane, the Harvard researcher behind the study on earnings, said as students and teachers become more accustomed to a state test, scores may drift upward even if students’ understanding has not improved. NAEP avoids that, because it tests different students each time.

Valant from Brookings said he prefers to look at NAEP’s state-to-state comparisons adjusted for demographics like poverty and race, although after those adjustments, Maine ranks even lower, in the bottom 10 in both ages and subjects.

The Nation’s Report Card may be an even more valuable measure than the state test, said Jennifer Chace, assistant director of the Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation at the University of Southern Maine.

“It is important to take seriously how well the kids in Maine are comparing on these basic tests to the kids in other states, because they’re competing with them for jobs,” Chace said. “Of course they matter.”

She said there’s no evidence that the assessment doesn’t provide valuable, fair data about how students stack up compared to their peers in other states.

Just over the western border, New Hampshire students consistently rank near the top on the NAEP. Commissioner Caitlin Davis said she believes strongly in the importance of statewide assessments, and those scores are used regularly in the state for comparison and when discussing any major policy or legislative changes.

“If we are serious about improving student outcomes, we have to be willing to measure them,” she said.

Davis said NAEP is a very important piece of data, and the state strives for high achievement on it. New Hampshire’s performance on the state assessment closely maps its national performance, she said.

The next round of NAEP scores should be available this winter.

Makin acknowledged test scores have a tangible impact on school districts, especially politically — she referenced campaigns against school budgets that invoke messages like “raise test scores, not taxes” — but said the tests have gained an inflated importance, and that so much of the important progress that happens in school is unmeasurable.

Maine has never set a specific target for state assessment scores, and Makin said the department isn’t considering one. The number, she said, would be arbitrary, and would signal to schools that the state’s priority is the “rote learning” measured by standardized tests.

“It would disproportionately elevate even further the sense that a test score is telling us so much more than it actually is right now,” she said.

Teachers tend to agree. The National Education Association, the labor union that represents teachers nationwide, says standardized tests are an inaccurate and unfair measure of student success.

The education department rolled out a campaign in 2024 called Measure What Matters, a statewide interview tour based on the idea that standardized tests “no longer tell the full story” of student success. They interviewed more than 100 students, educators and other stakeholders about how the department could report student achievement that “reflects a more holistic view of student development.”

Makin said the results of that process showed that for the people of Maine, “test scores were not a priority.” The state is now rolling out a framework, based on that campaign, to measure what makes a great school.

Chace, from USM, said that new framework is an important contribution to the conversation about how we measure achievement, but said it’s based on self-reported data and can’t be used as an objective measure of comparison. She recently conducted independent research about what Mainers want out of the state’s education system.

“Do people care whether kids can read and write well, and do math well? Yes, they absolutely do,” she said. “And what we found in our research was that most people think, ‘Yeah, test scores more or less reflect that.’ And they definitely want them to be better.”

Chace said the goal shouldn’t be improving test scores: it should be improving reading and math. But those advancements should, in turn, increase test scores.