Dec 04, 2025
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by First National Wealth Management.
BAR HARBOR—The Nation’s Report Card has selected the Conners-Emerson School in Bar Harbor again as one of the schools where fourth and eighth grade students will be tested to create nation-wide data to show how the country’s students are performing.
“It’s supposed to be randomly selected,” Conners-Emerson Principal Dr. Heather Weir Webster told her school committee during its December 1 meeting.
However, the school has been randomly selected multiple times in the past, she said.
Because of the additional testing, the school is limiting other yearly testing for some students due to worries about over testing. Also, every day spent testing is time when students aren’t learning in ways that don’t involve taking tests.
The Nation’s Report Card is a Congressional mandate and for the country is the largest test meant to represent student learning.
Math and reading assessments occur in two-year cycles with fourth and eighth grade students at schools across the country. Twelfth graders are tested in four-year intervals.
The twelfth graders’ reading scores across the nation have dropped since 2019 and the average score dropped 10 points since 1992.
“The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been assessing what students know and can do since 1969,” according to its website.
What is assessed has changed multiple times since then. Art, U.S. history, civics, writing all used to be assessed. Last year it was just reading and math.
The data from The Nation’s Report Card isn’t available to the school after its students have been tested.
The Conners-Emerson School often tests repeatedly well. It is ranked #1 for Maine middle schools and #12 in Maine elementary schools according to U.S. News and World Report for 2025.
“At Conners-Emerson School, 92% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math, and 98% scored at or above that level for reading,” according to the report released at the end of 2024.
The data used in the report is based on the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. The organization reviews 103,369 pre-K, elementary, and middle schools throughout the country.
“The report includes more than 79,000 public schools that are ranked at the state and district level,” the release states.
While Conners Emerson excels according to U.S. News and World Report’s metrics, the state as a whole does not according to The Nation’s Report Card.
“In 2024, the average score of fourth-grade students in Maine was 233. This was lower than the average score of 237 for students in the nation,” the report writes.
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