The city of Boston has been crowing over vastly improved graduation rates in it’s schools, but officials have neglected to mention the district’s recent changes banning teachers from giving failing grades.
Boston Public Schools (BPS) boasted an 81.3% graduation rate in 2025, a more than 20-point increase from the 59.1% in 2006 and an all-time high for the district. Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu at a March press conference insisted the improvements were due to pushing students more, but new reporting paints a different picture.
“When students feel challenged, they stay engaged,” Wu said, according to the Boston Globe. “We didn’t get here by lowering any expectations for students who might be experiencing challenges or moving the goal posts and making it easier for people to get by.”
Despite the improvement to graduation rates, test scores in the district have remained stable, or in some cases, even declined. But several policy changes at BPS since 2020 have made it easier for students to pass by softening requirements and providing multiple opportunities to make up for poor grades, the City Journal discovered.
For instance, the district banned teachers from giving failing grades to students, instead requiring them to hand out “incomplete” marks, allowing students to recover the grades later in often softer settings, such as through online courses.
Massachusetts in 2024 even removed the requirement for high school students to pass state tests in order to receive a diploma, saying it was a “barrier to graduation.”
Certain groups of students are now seeing declining test scores coincide with increased graduation rates, City Journal found. Low-income students saw math scores decline by 5% between 2017 and 2025, yet that grou’s graduation rate rose by 12% in that same time period.
Meanwhile, English language learners saw a 9% decline in reading scores and a 13% decline in math achievement, even as their graduation rate soared by 21%.
Even so, about one-third of BPS students are still not on track to graduate after the district added a requirement to pass the state’s MassCore test. However, BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper is reportedly planning on asking the district’s governing board to exempt some students from that requirement, too, according to the Globe.
Those changes and declining scores have not put a damper on teachers, administrators and officials celebrating the dubious achievement of rising graduation rates.
“It’s a positive development if we’re getting more students to graduate,” Marcus Walker, a humanities teacher at Fenway High School in BPS, told the Globe. “Our students can compete with anyone, and it’s a good thing.”
“It’s great that rates have increased over the last few year,” Will Austin, an education writer and former teacher, told the Globe.
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