06/15/2026
Boston Public Schools aren’t telling the whole truth about its students: As Mark Twain would have put it, there are three types of lies: Lies, damned lies, and BPS statistics
By David Mancuso, Contrarian Boston
On March 9, Mayor Michelle Wu and Boston Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper announced a record high school graduation rate of over 81 percent for the class of 2025.
Wu credited expanded supports and college pathways, insisting Boston reached the mark without “moving the goalposts and making it easier” for students to get by.
That was up from just under 80 percent a year earlier and just past the district’s previous high.
At best, the announcement is misdirection. At worst, it’s a lie.
Unmentioned? Sure, more BPS students than ever are getting diplomas. But it’s nowhere near as clear how many members of his year’s senior class completed state-mandated coursework key to ensuring success in college and the workforce.
The BPS Class of 2026 was the first in which all students were required to have completed all MassCore coursework to graduate, including four years of math, three years of lab science, and two years of the same foreign language.
Back in 2022, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education imposed a systemic improvement plan on BPS, giving the district several years to ramp up before the new MassCore graduation requirements kicked in.
Yet as recently as December, just 64 percent of BPS seniors had met the MassCore requirement, with a shocking 36 percent in danger of not graduating, The Boston Globe reported.
That’s a pretty big deal when you are talking about students having just five months or so to complete entire courses before graduation.
Then, apparently, a miracle happened. In March, the Globe, in a follow-up story, cited, with a straight face, claims by BPS administrators that 81 percent of seniors had completed their MassCore courses, up from 64 percent previously.
It’s an even more astounding claim given that just a little under 46 percent of the 2025 BPS graduating class completed MassCore — down from a little over 50 percent in 2024 and 47.8 percent in 2023.
So the rate had hovered below half for three straight years, and, coming into 2026, was, if anything, drifting away from, not closer to, meeting the new MassCore standards.
So much for all that happy talk and celebratory framing by BPS and Wu.
The school-by-school picture is even grimmer. At Charlestown High School, MassCore completion fell to 15.4 percent for the class of 2025, down from 23.6 percent a year earlier. Other schools fare far worse: Fenway High School sits at just 2.9 percent, the Margarita Muniz Academy at 6.9 percent, and Greater Egleston High School at an astonishing 0 percent. These are not outliers; they show how far the system is from the standard it adopted.
How a district moves from 45.8 percent completion — or a school like Charlestown from just over 15 percent — to anything near 100 percent MassCore completion by all graduating seniors - all in a single year — is the question officials have not answered.
It cannot be done through ordinary coursework; a year of advanced math or two years of a language cannot be conjured retroactively.
The concern among observers is that the gap is being closed on paper through online “credit recovery” courses — short, self-paced modules that let a student check a box without the instruction the standard was meant to guarantee. Signing up for a credit-recovery class is not the same as sitting through the courses MassCore describes, and treating the two as equivalent would let the district report progress it has not delivered.
At the end of the day, a graduation rate is only as meaningful as what stands behind the diploma.
