As we reported Monday, later this morning, Gov. Phil Murphy’s Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan will urge the State Board of Education to lower “cut scores” on high school diploma-qualifying tests. In a Resolution issued yesterday, Board members are to approve a change that will define “proficiency” in reading and math as “partially meets expectations” instead of the current “meets expectations.” The current cut score of 750 from last spring’s test for 11th graders yielded proficiency levels of 39.4% of in reading and 49.4% in math. If the Board agrees to pretend that “partially meets expectations” is good enough for a high school diploma, proficiency levels will spike to 81% in reading and 56.5% in math.

I’ve written about the shady illogic behind this move that has nothing to do with what’s best for students and everything to do with politics and pretense. Yet there is another aspect of the DOE’s disingenuity that is worth noting.

One of Allen-McMillan’s justifications for lowering the cut score so many more students will be rated “proficient” is that when students fail the diploma-qualifying test called the NJGPA, they can graduate anyway by teachers assembling a portfolio with examples of each student’s learning that proves they’re “high school graduation-ready.” It’s a time-consuming slog for our wonderful teachers, no doubt, and I’m sure they’d rather be doing something else.

Yet at the same time as the DOE is claiming the lowering of standards is a way of protecting teachers’ time, it is simultaneously giving them more work. 

How?

By mandating teachers must incorporate climate change issues into reading and math instruction.

Climate change appears numerous times throughout the New Jersey Student Learning Standards: in arts, physical education, science, social studies, world languages, and computer science. That’s great! However, on the agenda for today’s State Board of Education meeting, members will be asked to approve putting those lessons into subjects that are most fundamental to success K-12, in college, and the workplace.

Our students have suffered enormous levels of learning loss. Teachers are working hard to fill in the gaps, but it is math and reading deficiencies that will really get them in trouble. From a report from the Brookings Institute:

Average fall 2021 math test scores in grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviations (SDs) lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, while reading test scores were 0.09-0.18 SDs lower. This is a sizable drop. For context, the math drops are significantly larger than estimated impacts from other large-scale school disruptions, such as after Hurricane Katrina—math scores dropped 0.17 SDs in one year for New Orleans evacuees.

And it’s worse for students from low-income families, disproportionately Black and Hispanic.

Yet according to the “technical revisions” on the agenda for Student Learning Standards in math and ELA, third-grade teachers will now be required to coach students to “write opinion pieces…on when the environment changes, due to climate change, the types of plants and animals in that region change.” Geometry teachers now must create lessons where “students use geometric shapes, their measures, and their properties to describe a technological design solution that reduces the impact of human activities on climate change and other natural systems.” Every teacher of math and reading at every grade level, including kindergarten, will now be distracted by new material—kids will too!—at a time when we’re facing down an educational crisis with long-term implications for whether our children create rewarding and sustainable lives for themselves.

And this is at a time when, according to the National Center for Teacher Quality, “results suggest that many teachers don’t yet have access to the necessary resources to successfully teach students to learn to read.”

It all seems so much stagecraft to me: We’ll pretend our students are adequately learning what they need to know while they’re experiencing an educational crisis akin to Hurricane Katrina, with one of the justifications saving teachers’ time. We’ll force those same teachers to incorporate new material into reading and math lessons, regardless of the extra work this will demand, while students get plenty of instruction about climate change already.

I wish the Murphy Administration would be straight with us. But it’s really hard to trust a leadership that seems more concerned with optics than substance.

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Statement from the DOE on technical revisions to Student Learning Standards:

With the adoption of the 2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards (NJSLS), New Jersey became the first state in the nation to include climate change across content areas. The standards are designed to prepare students to understand how and why climate change happens, the impact it has on our local and global communities and to act in informed and sustainable ways. 

The revisions to the NJSLS – ELA reflect the changing ways in which humans connect through the modes of communication (reading, writing, speaking and listening), leveraging new technologies, media and platforms to engage with and learn from others. Students are using more tools for communication than ever before, creating increasing opportunities for students around the world to share, organize, and problem-solve together, and climate change advocacy is a common thread across the globe. The ability for students to critically understand the arguments, claims and messages shared by others and learning the specific communication skills to take action is paramount. Informed and reasoned discussion about climate change must occur in the public sphere, and New Jersey’s classrooms will support students’ inquiry into new realities, engagement in civilized discussion, and the enactment of change. New Jersey is developing a generation of students that can create alternate discourses to change the present and shape the future. The content area of English Language Arts develops the ability and responsibility to excite, inspire, and empower students to recognize this potential and become involved in the issues of our age, which include climate change and environmental justice.

Throughout the 2023 New Jersey Student Learning Standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics, standards that may be leveraged in support of climate change instruction can been identified through the green icon featured above. This icon encourages educators to utilize the specific standard in interdisciplinary units focused on climate change that include authentic learning experiences, integrate a range of perspectives and are action oriented.

Photo credit: Flickr: Phil Murphy