Best Middle Schools in Fall River, MA

Fall River, Massachusetts has three middle schools serving grades 6–8 — Morton Middle, Matthew J Kuss Middle, and Talbot Innovation School — with a combined enrollment of 1,979 students. All three are part of the Fall River district, which is ranked 331 of 351 districts statewide, in the 6th percentile with 0 stars. That context matters: these schools are being measured against a district already near the bottom of Massachusetts, and all three score far below the state in every core subject. Free/reduced-lunch figures are blank for all three, so poverty context is unavailable.

Talbot Innovation is the strongest of the three. It posts the highest math (19.81%), science (15.29%), and 8th-grade civics (11.76%) proficiency, the best rank at 401 of 478 (16th percentile, 1 star), and is the only school whose rank trend improved, from the 13th to the 16th percentile. It also made the largest gains in math (+3.18 points) and science (+7.20 points), and is the only school at or above the district in all three core subjects. Morton Middle, the largest school at 751 students, leads in ELA (19.91% all-grade, 22.82% in 8th grade) and 6th-grade math (22.12%), but has the lowest science score at 7.39% — less than half the district's 15.29% — and civics fell 5.68 points to 10.29%. It also has the highest student-teacher ratio (13.0) and lowest spending ($16,556).

Kuss is the lowest-performing overall: lowest ELA (14.24%) and math (9.02%) at every grade, the lowest rank (449 of 478, 6th percentile, 0 stars), and a declining rank trend (14th to 6th percentile), though science and civics improved from a very low base. Notably, Kuss has the smallest classes (10.3 ratio) and higher per-student spending ($16,898) than Morton, yet those advantages do not show up in ELA or math results. Across all three schools, no subject reaches half the state proficiency rate. Talbot's edge in math is concentrated in grades 7 and 8, while 8th-grade civics is uniformly weak but tightly clustered (10.29%–11.76%). Spending data are from 2020–2021, so comparisons are historical.