In a state that once led the nation in math and reading test scores, a concerning decline in the past decade is revealing cracks in the education system.
Credit: Leela Stockley / BDN Composite; Kim Higgins / BDN
The Bangor Daily News will spend the coming months examining the public education system as part of a new, ongoing project to cover what it’s like to be a kid growing up in Maine. We aim to understand why schools and students are struggling so much more than they were ten years ago, and to identify ways to create positive change.
As we embark on this reporting, we want to hear from you. We welcome you to share your thoughts and perspective in the form below. You can also reach out to the primary reporter on this series, Sawyer Loftus, at sloftus@bangordailynews.com.
Maine was once among the top states in the country for math and reading. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, students routinely ranked first or second in the nation on the tests known as “the nation’s report card.”
About 10 years ago, that began to change.
Students here are now posting their worst test scores in a generation. Today, the same federal exam that once put Maine on top shows that 74% of Maine fourth graders are not proficient in reading. Similarly, 67% of Maine fourth graders are also not proficient in math.
There isn’t a uniform strategy to fix it, education experts say. Maine’s response has played out in incremental policy changes, a pattern experts the Bangor Daily News spoke to said has left Maine without a clear, long-term plan for what its schools should accomplish. Inside the Maine Department of Education, leaders say they are not satisfied but that scores don’t tell the full story of an education.
Still, the trouble has helped drive a broader conversation about a central truth: Maine students used to have access to one of the best public education systems in the country, and that is no longer true.
In the coming months, the BDN will examine the state of Maine’s education system as part of an ongoing effort to cover what it’s like to be a child here.
The state’s decline follows a national fall in student test scores since the mid-2010s, an alarming phenomenon that predates the COVID-19 pandemic and which experts have not attributed to a single reason.
Amy Johnson, co-director of the Maine Education Policy Research Institute, listens during a conference held in Bangor on Maine’s educational priorities in June.Credit: Kim Higgins / BDN
Over the same period that scores dropped, the achievement gap between the highest and lowest-performing students in Maine has also widened, largely along socio-economic lines, according to national test data analyzed by the BDN as well as testing data from Maine’s own standardized tests.
“I do worry that not all of our kids are getting what they need,” said Amy Johnson, the co-director of the Maine Education Policy Research Institute, a nonpartisan research organization funded jointly by the University of Maine System and the Legislature.
The state suffers from a shortage of qualified teachers. Student enrollment has dwindled, stressing district finances and leading to difficult conversations around district consolidation and gutting of budgets, all while the state’s students are demonstrating a need for more intensive and expensive educational services. Maine has been one of the slowest states to rebound from historically high rates of chronic absenteeism that began during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to state data.
“We don’t have hard data on exactly what programs and services are being provided in each school. But given the highly variable spending patterns across the state, we are concerned about gaps in opportunity.”
This is all happening at a time when public school boards have never faced more scrutiny from parents and outside political groups. At the same time, there’s bipartisan consensus that Maine students are struggling. Politicians on both sides of the aisle, including candidates in this year’s race for governor, have drawn attention to how Maine students are falling behind in reading in math.
That’s about where the consensus ends.
Panelists speak during an education conference in Bangor in June. From left to right: Dr. Cathie Fallona, Chair of the PhD in Public Policy program at the University of Southern Maine; RSU 34’s Dr. Jon Doty, assistant superintendent of the Old Town, Bradley and Alton school district; Jesse Hargrove, president of the Maine Education Association and social studies teacher at Hermon High School; and Leslie Smith, director of guidance for Hermon High School. Credit: Kim Higgins / BDN
Not all Maine school districts are using science- or research-based curricula to teach core subjects to students, according to Johnson and MEPRI’s research. The state doesn’t require that by law, nor does it track the curricula districts are using.
Research from Educate Maine, a policy advocacy and research group, suggests Maine is only recently catching up to what national reading research has shown for years, Jason Judd, the organization’s former executive director, said.
Most districts are using evidence-based methods, but Maine is “really early in the transition,” Judd said, noting that many districts have yet to see the outcome data on the other side as new curricula and professional development take hold.
MEPRI has also found that many schools lack high-quality early intervention systems. Without that early foundation, Johnson said, it’s hard to catch kids up once they’ve fallen behind.
“We don’t have hard data on exactly what programs and services are being provided in each school,” Johnson said. “But given the highly variable spending patterns across the state, we are concerned about gaps in opportunity.”
The relationship between school districts and the state needs to be “more of a partnership,” with state leaders setting a clear vision, a plan, and a few clear priorities for schools, Judd said.
In 2007, Gov. John Baldacci sought to shrink Maine’s 290 school districts down to about 80 to save money and improve education. Initially, it reduced the state’s districts to about 160. However, in the years since, the number of school districts has climbed back up to 264.
“There’s no good news here.”
Similarly, the 2025-2026 school year was the first time in Maine that three schools piloted incorporating students with various educational needs into general-education classrooms, meaning a move away from the long-standing practice of separating students with disabilities into their own siloed settings.
And it was only in the most recent session of the Maine Legislature that lawmakers passed substantial changes to the state’s school funding formula that researchers have been flagging as inadequate for years. But even those efforts fell short, with Maine legislators passing two of four recommendations: Adding $39 million to better cover teacher salaries and redistributing $13 million in aid based on community poverty levels.
“Historically, education agencies have been really invested in separate initiatives,” Beth Lambert, the chief teaching officer at the Maine Department of Education, said. “We have intentionally built this for the last several years, connecting the efforts of literacy, numeracy, leadership, professional learning, family engagement, educator prep and implementation supports so that each message reinforces the others.”
Complicating the state’s problems is that education experts, stakeholders and state officials alike can’t even agree on how to actually measure the declines, which makes it that much harder to have a unified plan to address Maine’s failings.
State Board of Education member Denham Ward, right, speaks to attendees of an education conference in Bangor in June. Credit: Kim Higgins / BDN
The conflicting thoughts were on display at a two-day conference in Bangor last month, around the time most schools broke for summer vacation. The University of Southern Maine’s education policy arm and MEPRI convened a group of 64 Maine residents to learn about these issues and discuss how to move forward. The education department wasn’t a part of the conference but convened something similar last year.
“There’s no good news here,” said Denham Ward, a member of the State Board of Education, referring to the test score data, during a panel overview of Maine’s education system.
Jesse Hargrove, the president of the Maine Education Association and social studies teacher at Hermon High School, challenged how much those test scores matter in contrast to other student experiences.
“There’s not a lot of written direction coming from the state, and we may need to think about that.”
Other experts, like Judd, take a middle view, arguing that scores matter, but mainly as one signal among many. While test results are “an important indicator” because families and employers pay attention to them, Judd said his organization focuses on what they reveal about underlying inequities rather than on rankings alone. Other warning signs include rates of chronic absenteeism, the strength of the teacher workforce and student access to mental health supports, he said.
In another panel, participants debated how much control is too much at the local level and whether the state should consider applying a more heavy-handed approach to governing the state’s schooling system.
“There’s not a lot of written direction coming from the state, and we may need to think about that,” former Education Commissioner Steve Bowen, who served under former Republican Gov. Paul LePage and is now the executive director of the conservative Hoover Education Success Initiative, told delegates at the event.
Steve Bowen (second from left), who served as education commissioner under former Gov. Paul LePage and is now executive director of the conservative Hoover Education Success Initiative, speaks during a June panel at the Maine Citizens’ Assembly on Education Priorities in Bangor. To his left is University of Southern Maine President Jacqueline Edmondson. To his right is former state Rep. Heidi Sampson, a Republican from Alfred; Eric Waddle, the executive director of the Maine School Management Association; and Allen Sarvinas, the state director of Parents’ Rights in Education, a national organization that advocates for parents’ rights and local control. Credit: Kim Higgins / BDN
Bowen pointed to states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama as examples of places where the state government has significantly stepped in to provide educational direction to its schools to boost test scores. But Allen Sarvinas, the state director of the conservative Parents’ Rights in Education, emphasized that local control leads to self-determination.
“It comes down to what the locals want isn’t always what the state wants. And what the state wants isn’t always correct,” he said.
Judd said Maine doesn’t have to choose between state direction and local autonomy. He argued for a model where the state sets research-based expectations — for example, around how reading is taught — while leaving districts room to decide how to meet them.
“To me it’s about a balancing act,” he said. “Local control can be really good when you invest in people who are supporting the local school. But I think there has to be a state vision for education, state priorities for education, and then resources to support best practices that will move the needle in terms of student outcomes.”
State officials say they’re trying to strike that same balance. In a local-control system, any change has to happen with districts, not to them, she said. But that is also part of the reason that there is a great amount of variance in the state’s education system.
That is what the BDN’s series will explore: how a system built on local control produces such different outcomes for different kids, depending on which town they happen to grow up in.
“I think it’s hard to look at the system as a whole, because in some places it can be very healthy,” Geoffrey Beane, a 2026 graduate of Mount Desert Island High School in Bar Harbor, said. “The schools can be in a really good state. Then in other places, maybe more rural and with declining enrollment, it can be a completely different picture.”
