The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared that Massachusetts had failed its constitutional duty “to provide education in the public schools for the children there enrolled, whether they be rich or poor and without regard to the fiscal capacity of the community or district in which such children live”.[...] Days later, after a special session of the legislature, the governor signed the Education Reform Act of 1993, which changed the way schools are funded in Massachusetts. During the following 10 years, from 1993 to 2003, state education funding increased by 12 percent a year, with a total price tag of about $30.8 billion. The additional state money was targeted to schools attended by poor students and went for tutoring programs, additional training for teachers, smaller classes, and technology.[...]This year’s results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) demonstrated the effect of such focused efforts. Fourth-graders and eighth-graders in Massachusetts outperformed students in every other state in both reading and math. To give a sense of the improvement, in 1992, just 23 percent of Massachusetts’s fourth-graders were proficient in NAEP’s math standards; in 2005, 49 percent were proficient.