The Romney campaign released its education policy paper last week, which included a number of factual inaccuracies.
One of them, which we are likely to hear more of during the course of the campaign, is that Romney presided over a dramatic improvement in academic achievement in Massachusetts while he was governor. In fact, during his time in office, as Jeb Bush states in the introduction to the Romney plan, Massachusetts’ students were recognized as first in the nation in fourth and eighth grade tests of math and reading.
He refers, of course, to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has been testing state-level performance in those grades since 1992.
Romney’s plan states that no new money is needed to improve education. What is needed, he believes, is school choice: vouchers, charters, online learning, tutoring, in short, a free market of choices.
Mitt Romney had the good fortune to be elected as governor of Massachusetts in 2003. He was in that office until 2007.
Be it noted that the Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) was signed into law by Governor William Weld in 1993. It doubled state funding of education. It established foundation funding for every district in the state, with more funding for those that needed it. It authorized the creation of curriculum frameworks and tests, as well as graduation requirements and tests for incoming teachers. Massachusetts added new funding for early childhood education and professional development.
There are three salient points to be made about the Massachusetts reform:
1. It was successful: Massachusetts is indeed at the top of NAEP in fourth and eighth grades, in reading and math.
2. It was expensive: state funding increased from $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion from 1993 to 2000.
3. Mitt Romney had nothing to do with its success.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Something that’s really important for everyone to understand in test score changes, to the extent they are meaningful, is that they are lagging indicators. For example, if you install a new K-6 curriculum designed to improve algebra readiness, you won’t get your first really true data point until 7 years after it’s implemented… (and by then you’re probably on a new curriculum anyway). Indeed, you expect that the first year or two you might even see scores drop because the transition from one curriculum to the other is never seamless.
In our current environment, we only want to give any “reform” say three years before we throw our hands up. The changes you make for kindergarteners today are reflected in graduation rates 13 years later.
No doubt this means that in California, you’ll see a result from the 2010 decade that shows that scores stayed fairly level during this time of austerity and then apparently plummet when more money is added when the economy recovers. But by the time our economy recovers, you’ll have 5th graders reacting more to 5 years of austerity in their educations than to the 6th year of better funding.