Maine’s Low-income Students Have Fallen Further Behind Their Peers Over The Past 4 Years

An achievement gap between Maine’s low-income students and all the rest hasn’t gone away over the past four years and has even widened slightly, an analysis of the latest year of Maine students’ standardized test scores shows. Students from lower-income families are consistently less likely than their peers to perform at or above grade level on the state’s standardized tests, and that trend continued last school year in the fourth year of the state’s current standardized exam, the Maine Educational Assessment. In addition, four years of Maine Educational Assessment results show that a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students in a particular district generally predicts worse results for that district. Some 43 percent of Maine students qualified for free and reduced-price lunches last year and are considered economically disadvantaged. In the 2018-19 school year, nearly 36 percent of all Maine students in grades three through eight and 11 performed at or above grade level in math.