Haverhill Public Schools recently won national recognition as one of 192 districts in 38 states whose students have improved significantly faster in math than peer schools.

The award called “Districts on the Rise” is a collaboration of the Harvard University Center for Education Policy Research and the Stanford University Educational Opportunity Project along with faculty at Dartmouth College. Haverhill School Superintendent Margaret Marotta talked recently about the honor on WHAV’s “Win for Breakfast” program. She explained how the Education Scorecard is computed.

“They take every school district across the country, all public school districts, and they look at their test scores, they look at their NAEP, the National Educational Progress Assessment, and they look at your standardized test scores and your attendance scores,” Marotta explained.

The partnership has produced its Education Scorecard for the last four years. The most recent report analyzed national student achievement trends for approximately 35 million students in grades three to eight, from 2022 through 2025. Eleven states were not included due to data limitations.

The Beverly, Braintree, Reading, Scituate and Westfield school systems also received the honor for their students’ progress in math. Other Massachusetts schools honored were Cambridge, for both reading and math progress, and Duxbury, Lexington, Mansfield, Plymouth, Salem, Sharon and Weymouth for reading progress.

Marotta credited both the adoption of a new math curriculum as well as the hard work of teachers in implementing it for the recognition.

“We’ve been changing up the curriculum, trying to improve things over in the last couple of years, and it is paying off. But it was definitely our teachers and their hard work and learning curve,” Marotta said.

Haverhill was also called out by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as a statewide Spotlight District during a recent education conference in Washington, D.C., for its implementation of a new literacy curriculum at the high school. Specifically, DESE said, Haverhill has been effective in providing coaching to high school teachers as they introduce the new reading supports in their classrooms. The coaching has helped the teacher feel more engaged and less overwhelmed, DESE reported.

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