Education in MA is nothing special. We look good on paper because we have a lot of rich people to drag the various averages and medians up. The kids of all those pharma engineers, college professors and tech workers tend to do pretty well regardless of the school system you put them through.

If you compare outcomes relative to inputs (i.e. compare poor kids to poor kids and rich kids to rich kids) the range of differences between states gets a lot smaller and it's IIRC Texas and a couple other states you'd never have expected that do the best. Edit: can't find the citation but it was an article that was on HN awhile back.