Boston
42 Massachusetts Districts Beat Chronic Absenteeism Back to Pre-COVID. Voc-Tech Schools Led the Way.
In Clinton, a small district west of Worcester, 8.7% of students are chronically absent. Before the pandemic, it was 16.1%. The district didn't just recover from COVID's attendance shock. It halved it...
Massachusetts Attendance Recovery Stalls Below 1 Point
Three years ago, Massachusetts was making real progress on chronic absenteeism. The state cut 5.5 percentage points in a single year, the kind of improvement that made recovery feel inevitable. The ne...
Only 86 Kindergartners for Every 100 Seniors
In 1996, Massachusetts had 152 kindergartners for every 100 seniors. This fall, it has 87.
One in Four Massachusetts Districts at All-Time Enrollment Lows
North Adams peaked at 2,368 students in 1997. This fall, it enrolled 1,064. Hull has lost 55.5% of its students from peak. Sandwich has crossed below half its former size. These are not anomalies. In ...
Hispanic Enrollment Dips for Only the Second Time in 33 Years
For 30 of the past 32 years, Hispanic enrollment in Massachusetts grew. It grew through recessions and recoveries, through three governors and two presidents, through the post-9/11 years and the Great...
After Three Decades of Growth, LEP Enrollment Falls by 6,889 in a Single Year
For 30 years, the trajectory pointed in one direction. Massachusetts public schools enrolled 43,690 students classified as limited English proficient in 1994. By 2025, that number had nearly tripled t...
One in Five Massachusetts Students Now Receives Special Education
For six years, from 2009 to 2015, Massachusetts held its special education rate nearly flat. The share of students receiving services hovered between 17.2% and 17.3%, barely moving from year to year. ...
Black Enrollment Hits All-Time High as Diaspora Reshapes Gateway Cities
Massachusetts public schools enrolled 93,651 Black students in 2025-26, the highest number in the 33 years the state has tracked enrollment by race. The record came in a year when total enrollment fel...
Massachusetts Sits 490 Students Above 900,000
Four years of slow, grinding recovery from the pandemic's enrollment shock. Four years of districts clawing back a few hundred students at a time. Then, in a single school year, all of it gone.
One in 19 Massachusetts Students Now Attends a Charter School
The pandemic was supposed to be the great equalizer: every school in Massachusetts closed, every family improvised, every district lost students. It was not. Between 2019 and 2021, traditional public ...
White Students at 50.8%, One Year from Minority
In 1994, four out of five students in Massachusetts public schools were white. In 2026, the number is barely half. White enrollment stands at 50.8% of the state's 900,490 students, a margin so thin th...
Boston Hits All-Time Low, Down 30% in Three Decades
In 2025, Boston Public Schools gained 352 students. It was the district's first year of growth since 2015, a small green bar in a decade of red. Superintendent Mary Skipper had reason to believe the w...
Four Years of Recovery, Gone in One
Massachusetts spent four years clawing back from the pandemic. The state added 4,467 students between 2021 and 2025, a recovery so slow it barely registered against a loss of 37,363. Then 2025-26 arri...