At today’s State Board of Education meeting, the Department of Education released data from last spring’s state standardized test results, giving New Jersey the dubious honor of being one of the very last states to release statewide information of student achievement from 2023-2024 in math, reading (more formally, English Language Arts), and science. 

Assistant Commissioner Jordan Schiff offered three takeaways as New Jersey students strive to climb back to their pre-pandemic performance levels:

• Performance continues to improve in English language arts and mathematics while science results remain consistent.
• The achievement gaps between student groups remain significant.
• 2024 continued to show recovery.

Here are the scores from the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments (Explainer here), which were presented during this morning’s meeting from 2016-2024. For our purposes we’ll focus on 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024, i.e., pre- and post-pandemic. (Tests weren’t administered in 2020 and 2021 due to Covid school closures. For larger context, note that news broke today showing American students have lost considerable ground in math and science compared to international peers. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which tested 650,000 students in 64 countries, found that “U.S. fourth graders saw their math scores drop steeply between 2019 and 2023 on a key international test even as more than a dozen other countries saw their scores improve.”)

Statewide reading scores from 2019-2024:

2019: 57.6% students proficient

2022: 48.9% students proficient

2023: 51.3% students proficient

2024: 52.2% students proficient

Statewide math scores from 2019-2024:

2019: 44.7% students proficient

2022: 35.4% students proficient

2023: 36.7% students proficient

2024 39.6% students proficient

Let’s look at grade-specific data. Based on these results from last year to this year, students in grades 3,  6, and  9 showed slight increases in reading proficiency while students in grade 4 were flat at 51%. Students in grades 5, 7, and 8 showed a decrease in reading proficiency. In math, students, except those in grades 4 and 5, increased their proficiency. Algebra 2 was a stand-out with 70% proficiency, although students only take this test if they are in advanced-math tracks. 

New Jersey’s achievement gaps among specific demographics groups (also called “subgroups”) remain very large, a fact confirmed in the Department of Education’s presentation. There is currently a 45.5 point gap in reading proficiency between our highest-performing group (Asian students) and our lowest-performing group (African-American students). In math, the gap between these two groups is 55.8 points with 75% of Asian students meeting grade-level expectations and only 19.3% of African-American students meeting expectations.

DOE staff noted that all students have not yet reached pre–pandemic levels of proficiency.

The public also heard results from the NJGPA, the test all aspiring high school graduates take in 11th grade. The test is aligned with 10th grade learning standards. (Note: in May 2023 the State Board accepted the DOE’s recommendation to lower the “cut score”—the minimum needed to pass— on the NJGPA from 750, which means “meets expectations,” to 725, which means “partially meets expectations.” The Board also agreed to change the meaning of a NJ high school diploma from “college/career-ready” to “high school graduation-ready.”) 

On the NJGPA, 82% of students were designated “graduation-ready in reading,” compared to last year’s 80.5%. (NJGPA is a relatively new test so we don’t have pre-pandemic scores.) The percentage of high school students deemed “graduation-ready” in math was 55.6%, compared to last year’s 55%.

It’s important to note this doesn’t represent the percentage of NJ students who earn a high school diploma; if students fail the NJGPA there are ”second and third  pathways.” Last year 91% of high school seniors received high school diplomas.