U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) questioned education experts about Maine’s failing schools on Friday during a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, focusing on Maine’s decline from the top five in standardized test scores to the bottom five.
“It is very troubling when you look at the Nation’s Report Card, and also, as some of you have pointed out, to realize that the decline in test scores started before the pandemic and has continued after the pandemic,” said Sen. Collins.
“The reason I emphasize that point is oftentimes we hear that it’s all due to COVID, and clearly, it’s not. It’s far more complex and troubling than that. I’m especially alarmed by the decline in scores in my home state of Maine, despite the very dedicated teachers and other educators that we’re fortunate to have,” she added.
The senator pointed out that Maine was consistently ranked among the top five best preforming states in the nation on standardized tests as recently as 2011. Since then, Maine’s test scores have plummeted, ranking among the bottom five.
Collins did not note that the decline has occurred during a period of time in which state spending on public schools increased massively. Nor did she point out that Democratic lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, a potential challenger in the 2026 U.S. Senate election, was governor during most of the decline.
Sen. Collins pointed to the most recent 2025-2026 U.S. News and World Report, which ranked Maine’s high schools as the worst in the nation.
She further pointed out that the decline in test scores cannot be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which are often blamed for the decline, because test scores began to decline prior to COVID and continued to do so afterward.
She highlighted multiple possible causes mentioned during the hearing, such as cell phones, student disengagement, mental health issues, and absenteeism. She asked the experts if they knew why Maine’s education system was failing and if they had any suggestions about which issues the state should focus on to improve the situation.
Dr. Eric Hanushek, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Dr. Martin West, the Vice Chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, both responded to the senator.
Hanushek pointed to a lack of incentives for teachers to perform better and to achieve improved outcomes for their students.
“We have the example of Dallas, Texas, where they have changed the way they reward teachers. They reward the effective teachers very highly. Yet these examples, which are well known around the nation, are not picked up by other school districts. There are 13,500 school districts, of which a handful have followed these examples. If we don’t reward achievement and incentivize achievement, I think we’re in trouble, and that’s a major change that I think we need to make,” said Hanushek.
Hanushek’s answer addressed education across the country but did not address the specific issues facing Maine.
West pointed to other New England states like Vermont, which have also seen a decline in test scores, and supported Hanushek’s belief that states need to incentivize better teachers.
” I am not an expert on what’s going on in Maine in particular, but elsewhere and in Massachusetts, I think there has been a softening, or a backing away from, the accountability policies that drove improvement in the 1990s and 2000s. And I think that is very much consistent with Dr. Hanushek’s emphasis on incentives,” he said.
Despite their answers, questions remain about why Maine, in particular, has plummeted in education outcomes if the need for better teacher incentives is a nationwide problem.
